Decolonizing Gender and Peacebuilding

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. In the aftermath of the civil conflict and in the context of the arrival of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, Nepal experienced a significant inflow of foreign gender experts. This led to an expertization of gender work – the increasing presence and authority of gender expertise – in the field of peacebuilding in Nepal. Decolonizing Gender and Peacebuilding explores the implications of this process in a context where foreign gender experts work alongside Nepali gender experts and a longstanding and diverse feminist and women's rights movement. It focuses on the complex ways in which the expertization of gender work reproduces coloniality logics and shapes (transnational) feminist encounters, and it documents moves to decolonize the field and build feminist connections. The analysis draws on more than 100 in-depth conversations with a wide range of actors involved in gender and peacebuilding in Nepal, including foreign and Nepali gender experts; representatives of Nepali (women's) civil society and community organisations; government representatives; Maoist ex-combatants; and Nepali artists, researchers, and writers. This book suggests that the particularly internationalized process of expertization in the context of Nepal has complex implications for the field of gender and peacebuilding: it can render feminist connections more difficult and reinforce intersectional dynamics, yet it also allows for the visibilization, emergence, and cultivation of such connections. More broadly, the analysis highlights that the expertization of gender and peacebuilding is a key site of negotiating modernity/coloniality and feminist dis/connections in relation to building Naya Nepal. Thereby, notions of modernity and modern subjecthood are challenged and alternative forms of subjecthood are proposed and lived. ABOUT THE SERIES: Voices in International Relations, published under the auspices of the European International Studies Association (EISA), furthers the development of research at the frontiers of International Relations (IR). It expands the remit of the field by including innovative scholarship that broadens key debates in the discipline, but it is more interested in reconfiguring such debates by approaching them from inside and outside the conventional core. Thematically, we aim to publish research that pushes the limits of...