Feminist Perspectives on Peace, Security and War

This book provides new insights into global insecurities by centering lived feminist knowledge and epistemically peripheralized voices.

The volume re-thinks and broadens feminist perspectives on peace and (in)security in the present moment of escalating wars and violence by facilitating conversations among feminists across diverse (semi-)peripheral regions and centering situated feminist knowledge. It advances emancipatory epistemologies rooted in lived experiences, challenging epistemic injustices, silences, and geo-epistemic hierarchies that shape knowledge about peace, security and war. The book is organized around four interconnected themes of solidarity, care, agency, and resistance. The authors unsettle established theoretical and methodological assumptions and offer empirically rich studies from Armenia, Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Georgia, Myanmar, Palestine to Ukraine. By centering knowledges from regions often peripheralized or erased in feminist security debates, including Europe’s East, Central Asia, and South America, the collection significantly expands and sharpens contemporary feminist security scholarship. The volume demonstrates how feminist ways of knowing, questioning, and building solidarities can transcend borders while remaining attentive to the specific histories, inequalities, and lived experiences through which war and violence are understood and resisted. The collection’s aim is to contribute to an ongoing feminist practice of thinking with, rather than speaking for, others.

This book will be of much interest to students of gender studies, peace studies, conflict studies, security studies and International Relations.