CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Jou Fuster, Paula |
|---|---|
| Title | Intersectionality and Peacebuilding in Bougainville: An Analysis of the United Nations' Policy and Practice and its Impacts on Gender and Peace |
| Summary | Since the end of the 10-year civil conflict in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, in 2001, the territory has been the subject of a number of peacebuilding programs and policies in which the United Nations (UN) has participated extensively. Many of these international gender-based projects have been implemented in collaboration with local women’s Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and focused on notions of “hybrid” peace. Despite its attempt to mediate between local and international norms and interests, this approach has faced much criticism in the field of Critical Peace Studies (CPS). This has led to a stagnation in knowledge production in debates about how to build a sustainable and lasting peace that incorporates local perspectives without essentializing and dichotomizing the ‘local’ and the ‘interna tional’. This thesis aims to contribute to the field of CPS by analyzing the possibilities of using intersectionality as an analytical lens to shed new light on debates about gender and peace. Specifically, it undertakes a Discourse Theoretical Analysis of the UN’s policy and practice in relation to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda in Bougainville, which build on UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000). The thesis argues that the liberal ideal of peace that is behind this international organization reproduces an idea of women that neglects broader local and international structures of power and discrimination. This omission ultimately impacts local women’s capacity for action and the outcome of peace processes. Through showing what is missing when intersectionality is left out of peacebuilding practices, the thesis proposes that using this lens could have helped these projects overcome some of their limitations. In the case of policies, the thesis shows how these projects could have reached a wider range of society, giving more importance to local CSOs and their roles. The thesis also contrasts the idea of agency that informs the UN’s projects with local understandings and experiences of motherhood, matrilineality and religion – concepts that, I argue, have shaped women’s experiences of the conflict and activism for peace. More broadly, the thesis provides a template for rethinking how liberal concepts of empowerment, equality, and emancipation shape liberal peace, how they are deployed by the UN, and how they could be modified to take better account of local experiences and realities. |
| Supervisor | Loney, Hannah; Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/jou-fuster_paula.pdf |
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