Between liberal norms and authoritarian governance: women’s organizations as peacebuilders in illiberal post-war states

In international peacebuilding policy, women’s organizations are represented as especially important civil society partners in the pursuit of peace.

However, while existing literature focuses its critique on frictional encounters between local women’s organizations and international liberal peacebuilding, it has largely overlooked that the majority of post-war settings are authoritarian states.

This project explores how women’s organizations negotiate their position between international peacebuilding agendas and authoritarian state governance, and how this shapes their peacebuilding practices.

This is studied through institutional ethnography, focusing on the everyday experiences of women peace activists in Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Nepal using qualitative interviews, participant observation, and document reviews. .

Bringing together scholarship on feminist peacebuilding and illiberal peacebuilding enables a sophisticated analysis of how women’s organizations experience and respond to frictional encounters, and how their role as peacebuilders is conditioned by the combined impact of international peacebuilding norms and practices, and domestic authoritarian governance.

As authoritarianism is the most common regime type in post-war societies, the knowledge generated will have far-reaching implications for peacebuilding research, policy and practice, and generate insights into the changing conditions for civil society in a global political era where illiberalism is on the rise.