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Gender inequalities have persisted across macro-political changes in Myanmar. The decade of reforms provided more opportunities for women, but the 2021 military coup reinstated an almost exclusively male-dominated decision-making structure in the country. While Myanmar is home to numerous ethnic groups with diverse cultures, norms and traditions, the work of women activists and scholars has revealed widespread patterns of discrimination against women. Notably, this reality contrasts sharply with a popular official rhetoric about Burmese women’s ‘inherent equality’ with men – a narrative that has arguably done more to bolster the legitimacy of Myanmar’s governments than to improve women’s lives. This chapter provides an analysis of change and continuity in terms of both opportunities and challenges for realising women’s equality in Myanmar. Taking the situation of women during military rule before 2011 as a starting point, the analysis next moves on to exploring women’s experiences of the transition and their attempts at leveraging political openings for gender equality under the NLD government. We then explore the effects of the 2021 military coup on women, before concluding with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities for women’s rights in Myanmar.

What strategies can be employed to conceptualize peace? In recent years, scholars have introduced an impressive array of “peace with adjectives” in order to make sense of some of the normative and empirical underpinnings of peace. Negative, positive, everyday, virtual, illiberal, partial, insecure, relational, emancipatory, agonistic, and feminist are some of the qualifiers that have been associated with the concept. While the growing attention to conceptualization is a welcomed development, we argue that the proliferation of new terms has led to increased fragmentation in the field of peace studies. Conceptual fragmentation impedes cumulative knowledge production and generates missed opportunities for fruitful discussions across theoretical and conceptual divides. In this article, we aim to provide more clarity to our field by mapping existing peace conceptualizations and identifying the strategies employed by scholars to construct innovative new terms. In our review, we identify 61 concepts and suggest that these conceptual innovations in peace research belong to one of three analytical strategies: developing diminished subtypes, conceptual narrowing, and conceptual expansion. Building on this categorization, we make recommendations for how peace researchers can enhance clarity and deepen constructive discussions between different conceptual approaches., ¿Qué estrategias se pueden utilizar para conceptualizar la paz? En los últimos años, los académicos han presentado una impresionante variedad de «paz acompañada de adjetivos» con el fin de dar sentido a algunos de los fundamentos normativos y empíricos de la paz. Algunos de los calificativos que se han asociado al concepto han sido: negativa, positiva, cotidiana, virtual, iliberal, parcial, insegura, relacional, emancipatoria, agonística y feminista. Si bien la creciente atención que se está prestando a la conceptualización es un desarrollo bienvenido, argumentamos que la proliferación de nuevos términos ha provocado una mayor fragmentación en el campo de los estudios de la paz. La fragmentación conceptual impide la producción acumulativa de conocimiento y provoca que se pierdan oportunidades para generar debates fructíferos a través de las divisiones teóricas y conceptuales. En este artículo pretendemos aportar más claridad a nuestro campo mediante el mapeo de las conceptualizaciones de paz existentes y la identificación de las estrategias que utilizan los académicos para construir nuevos términos innovadores. En nuestra revisión, identificamos 61 conceptos y sugerimos que estas innovaciones conceptuales dentro de la investigación en materia de la paz pertenecen a una de entre tres posibles estrategias analíticas: desarrollo de subtipos disminuidos, contracción conceptual y expansión conceptual. Partiendo de esta categorización, hacemos recomendaciones sobre cómo los investigadores en el campo de la paz pueden lograr una mejora con relación a la claridad y profundizar en los debates constructivos que se generan entre los diferentes enfoques conceptuales., Quelles stratégies employer pour conceptualiser la paix ? Ces dernières années, les chercheurs ont introduit un éventail impressionnant de « paix avec adjectifs » afin de faire sens de certains fondements normatifs et empiriques de la paix. Négative, positive, quotidienne, virtuelle, illibérale, partielle, précaire, relationnelle, émancipatrice, agnostique, féministe… Tous ces mots ont été employés pour qualifier ce concept. Bien que l'attention croissante à la conceptualisation soit une évolution bienvenue, nous affirmons que la prolifération de nouveaux termes a engendré une fragmentation croissante du domaine des études sur la paix. La fragmentation conceptuelle entrave la production de connaissances cumulatives et crée des occasions manquées de discussions productives par delà les divisions théoriques et conceptuelles. Dans cet article, nous cherchons à contribuer à plus de clarté dans notre domaine en retraçant les conceptualisations existantes de la paix et en identifiant les stratégies employées par les chercheurs pour créer de nouveaux termes innovants. Notre revue de la littérature identifie 61 concepts et suggère que ces innovations conceptuelles dans la recherche sur la paix appartiennent à l'une des trois stratégies analytiques suivantes : le développement de sous-types 'diminués', le rétrécissement conceptuel et l'expansion conceptuelle. En nous appuyant sur cette catégorisation, nous émettons des recommandations pour aider les chercheurs à être plus clairs et à approfondir les discussions constructives entre différentes approches conceptuelles.

This policy brief summarizes key findings from a research project which examined the politics and effects of international gender expertise in Myanmar. The findings demonstrate that international gender expertise inadvertently shaped peacebuilding processes in ways that frequently reinforced existing inequalities. To reverse this pattern, international actors need to identify local partners beyond the "usual suspects"; simplify funding processes and provide flexible funding; better analyze and understand context and conflict dynamics; and challenge the state-centrism of international peacebuilding support.

This article explores the political space of the border through the experiences of Myanmar women activists, for whom the borderlands in Thailand have provided refuge as well as a conducive environment for political mobilization. At the same time, the border renders refugee activists insecure and precarious. Drawing on life history interviews, our analysis expands conceptualizations of the border as a dynamic political space by illustrating its dual capacity to both facilitate and constrain the political agency of refugee women from Myanmar. In particular, the spatial and temporal fluidity and in-betweenness of the border is shown to foster both repression and resistance. Exploring the character and salience of the border as a space for activism over time, we demonstrate how the political space of the border is relational, constituted in interaction with other political spaces, such as politics and governance in Myanmar, transnational activist networks, and the politics of international aid.

This article explores the encounter between the Women, Peace and Security agenda and rebel institutions in Mindanao. The analysis highlights that activities aiming to support women’s participation in peacebuilding often exist in parallel with and fail to fully recognise women’s existing forms of mobilisation within Non-State Armed Groups. This gap is bridged by civil society brokers who are associated with armed groups but speak the language of international peacebuilding frameworks. The findings point to the important role of such intermediaries in translating international norms, and to rebel groups and institutions as arenas for women’s political mobilisation and empowerment.

In recent decades, gender equality goals have been adopted widely in global policymaking, creating a demand for specialized knowledge and evidence to support the design and implementation of gender equality policies. Bridging feminist scholarship on gender expertise and practice-theoretical literature on knowledge production, this article examines a knowledge production initiative of the World Bank, the Gender Innovation Laboratories (GILs). While research has examined the position of gender experts and the content of gender expertise in global governance, it has overlooked how knowledge about gender is produced. In this paper, we use a practice-theoretical approach - assemblage thinking - to study the practical work mobilized in the GILs to produce, maintain, and disseminate knowledge about gender inequality. Drawing on interviews with lab researchers, documents, and online materials, and focusing on the epistemic practice of impact evaluations, our analysis demonstrates the work invested in assembling them, such as forging alignments with and securing support among stakeholders, activating repertoires of expertise, and translating results into material objects. These practices produce gender inequality as a governance object, which is amenable to technical policy interventions, which facilitates certain forms of action to address it. Yet, they simultaneously silence more political solutions to gender inequalities., Durante las últimas décadas, se han ido adoptado, en gran medida, objetivos para la igualdad de género en la formulación de políticas mundiales, lo cual ha creado una demanda de conocimientos especializados, así como de pruebas que apoyen el diseño y la implementación de políticas de igualdad de género. Este artículo estudia, mediante la unión de los estudios feministas sobre el conocimiento en materia de género y de la literatura teórico-práctica de la creación de conocimiento, una iniciativa de creación de conocimiento del Banco Mundial: los Laboratorios de Innovación de Género (GIL, por sus siglas en inglés). Si bien la investigación ha estudiado el posicionamiento de los expertos en materia de género y el contenido de la experiencia a nivel de género en la gobernanza global, la investigación ha pasado por alto cómo se produce el conocimiento sobre el género. En este artículo, utilizamos un enfoque teórico-práctico (pensamiento de agenciamiento, assemblage thinking) con el fin de estudiar el trabajo práctico realizado en los GIL para producir, mantener y difundir conocimiento sobre la desigualdad de género. Nuestro análisis demuestra, mediante entrevistas con investigadores de laboratorio, documentos y materiales en línea, y centrándonos en la práctica epistémica de las evaluaciones de impacto, el trabajo invertido en unirlas que incluye forjar alineamientos y asegurar el apoyo entre las partes interesadas, activar repertorios de experiencia y convertir los resultados en objetos materiales. Estas prácticas dan lugar a la desigualdad de género como si fuera un objeto de gobernanza susceptible de intervenciones de política técnica, lo cual puede facilitar algunos métodos de acción para abordarla. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, estas prácticas silencian más soluciones políticas a las desigualdades de género., Ces dernières décennies, les objectifs d’égalité femmes-hommes ont été largement intégrés dans les politiques du monde entier. Cette tendance requiert des connaissances spécialisées, mais aussi des preuves pour appuyer la conception et la mise en œuvre de politiques d’égalité femmes-hommes. En mettant en relation les travaux de recherche féministes sur l'expertise en genre et la littérature théorique et pratique sur la production de connaissances, cet article s'intéresse à cette dernière par le biais d'une initiative de la Banque mondiale, les laboratoires d'innovation sur le genre (GIL). Bien que la recherche ait analysé la position des experts du genre et le contenu de cette expertise dans la gouvernance mondiale, elle a négligé la production des connaissances sur le genre. Dans cet article, nous utilisons une approche théorique et pratique, le concept d'agencement, pour étudier les travaux pratiques mobilisés dans les GIL afin de produire, conserver et transmettre le savoir sur les inégalités femmes-hommes. En nous fondant sur des entretiens avec des chercheurs en laboratoire, des documents et des contenus en ligne, et en nous concentrant sur la pratique épistémique des évaluations des conséquences, notre analyse met en valeur le travail induit par leur agencement, comme former des alliances avec d'autres parties prenantes et obtenir leur soutien, activer des répertoires d'expertise ou encore traduire des résultats en objets physiques. Ces pratiques transforment les inégalités entre femmes et hommes en objet de gouvernance qui se prête aux interventions politiques techniques et facilite la mise en place de certaines mesures pour y répondre. Toutefois, elles passent aussi sous silence des solutions plus politiques à ces inégalités.

Between 2011 and 2021, political reforms and renewed peace efforts significantly reduced violence in many of Myanmar’s conflict-affected regions. Despite this, people living in these areas did not agree that they enjoyed peace; rather, this period is described as a continuation of the war’s many injustices, marked by discrimination, marginalization, and fear. This chapter argues that a relational analysis of peace can enable us to make sense of this gap between drastically different assessments of peace and conflict. The analysis draws on focus group discussions, interviews, and participant observation with local civilians, civil society activists, and members of non-state armed groups conducted in 2019 in two regions, Kayah and Mon States. A relational perspective uncovers the fact that the fundamental logics of key conflict relationships, between the Myanmar state and ethnic minority groups and communities, have not been transformed by the peace process but instead manifest themselves in new ways, whereby armed violence has been replaced by other forms of domination, underpinned by inequality, non-recognition, and distrust. Exploring these relational dynamics enables us to pinpoint areas and issues that prevent the emergence of a sustainable and legitimate peace, and demonstrate the importance of relational aspects for people’s experiences of everyday peace.

This is the first comprehensive account of the multifaceted processes of gendered transformation that took place in Myanmar between 2011 and 2021, and which continues to shape events today. The period began with the end of direct military rule and the transition to a hybrid, semi-democratic regime, precipitating far-reaching political, economic and social changes across Myanmar. To date, the gendered dynamics and effects of this transition have not yet received sustained scholarly attention. Remedying this gap, this book provides a much-needed historical corrective through a careful, nuanced analysis of the gendered dynamics of transitional politics, institutions and policymaking; feminist resistance, mobilization, and movement building; and their effects on labor, land, and everyday lives. Although the February 2021 military coup brought an end to this decade of experimentation and transition, in the richness of its analysis and detail, the book offers a deeper understanding of the current political situation in Myanmar. The gendered changes that the transition brought about have shaped both the current configuration of masculinized, military dictatorship, as well as the unprecedented role played by women in resistance to military rule after the 2021 coup. This analysis of the gendered dynamics and effects of the recent decade of political transition in Myanmar is therefore critical for understanding current events, as well as the ways in which Myanmar’s political landscape might continue to be reshaped.

This is the first comprehensive account of the multifaceted processes of gendered transformation that took place in Myanmar between 2011 and 2021, and which continues to shape events today. The period began with the end of direct military rule and the transition to a hybrid, semi-democratic regime, precipitating far-reaching political, economic and social changes across Myanmar. To date, the gendered dynamics and effects of this transition have not yet received sustained scholarly attention. Remedying this gap, this book provides a much-needed historical corrective through a careful, nuanced analysis of the gendered dynamics of transitional politics, institutions and policymaking; feminist resistance, mobilization, and movement building; and their effects on labor, land, and everyday lives. Although the February 2021 military coup brought an end to this decade of experimentation and transition, in the richness of its analysis and detail, the book offers a deeper understanding of the current political situation in Myanmar. The gendered changes that the transition brought about have shaped both the current configuration of masculinized, military dictatorship, as well as the unprecedented role played by women in resistance to military rule after the 2021 coup. This analysis of the gendered dynamics and effects of the recent decade of political transition in Myanmar is therefore critical for understanding current events, as well as the ways in which Myanmar’s political landscape might continue to be reshaped., Alternative title from book cover and publisher's web.

This article adds to the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in peace studies by addressing methodological questions about how temporality can be captured and explored in empirical studies. Developing our methodological tools for exploring time and temporality, we argue, is critical to move beyond the supposed linear temporality of peace processes, and make visible alternative temporal frameworks that shape everyday experiences and contestations around peace in conflict-affected contexts. Drawing on a study of two conflict-affected areas in Myanmar, we contribute towards this aim through a discussion of how life history diagrams helped us trace temporal conflicts between overarching narratives of political transition and everyday experiences of insecurity. This facilitated a deeper understanding of how relationships between war and peace, and between past, present and future, were manifested and made sense of in people’s everyday lives. Our use of life history diagrams revealed temporal conflicts between the dominant, linear temporality of the Myanmar transition, and more complex and cyclical temporal frameworks people used to describe their realities. Life history diagrams also facilitated narratives that troubled an events-based temporality focused on macro-political shifts such as ceasefire agreements and elections, and instead foregrounded everyday experiences of continuous insecurity and struggle.

This article engages with emerging debates about feminist peace and uses this concept to assess the ability of the Women, Peace and Security agenda to achieve gender-just change. We advance a conception of feminist peace as political conditions that allow women affected by conflict to articulate their visions of change and influence the construction of post-war order. Applying this to a case study of Women, Peace and Security practice in Myanmar, we demonstrate that features of how international aid is organised, combined with the Myanmar government’s interest in excluding critical voices, limit the ability of Women, Peace and Security practices to contribute to feminist peace. This highlights the potential for illiberal post-war states to obstruct and co-opt the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and shows how the women most directly affected by armed conflict are often the least able to participate in, benefit from and inform Women, Peace and Security practices.

This policy brief presents recommendations for how international development and peacebuilding organizations can redirect their work with women, peace and security issues in Myanmar in the wake of the 2021 military coup. In response to urgent needs, it is now critical to provide appropriate and flexible support to women’s organizations; identify and work with local structures for humanitarian response and service delivery; and support new and existing forms of cross-border aid.

Scholarly debates about how we conceptualise, theorise and measure peace have recently intensified, yet exactly how peace scholars translate these theoretical innovations into concrete methodological tools and practices is less clear. We argue that pluralism, temporality and the role of affect are three recent focal points in current scholarly debates that aim to further our conceptual understanding of peace. Taking these theoretical developments seriously requires us to consider our methodological tools to approach each one, but these concepts also point to methodological issues on their own. This special issue aims to investigate our assumptions about peace, and how these in turn shape the way we approach the study of peace, in terms of both research design and data collection as well as in the process of writing up and disseminating findings, all departing from these three specific challenges. As such, this special issue contributes to efforts of making peace beyond the absence of war more researchable.

Motståndsrörelsen i Myanmar har inte gett upp kampen efter militärkuppen i februari 2021 och den har ett starkt folkligt stöd. Målet är att bilda en demokratisk federal stat och att ta över makten senast våren 2023. För att nå dit sätter den inte minst sitt hopp till omvärlden. Intensiva försök görs för att länder ska erkänna den regering som motståndsrörelsen bildat vid sidan av militärstyret med främst företrädare från NLD, den tidigare demokratikämpen och numera åter fängslade Aung San Suu Kyis parti. Partiet segrade stort i valet 2020, strax innan militären grep makten. Samtidigt fortsätter strejker och mindre protester i landet även om massdemonstrationerna mattats av. I gränsområdena strider demokratiaktivister tillsammans med etniska väpnade grupper mot militären.

This article explores processes of place-making and space-making around the erection of the Aung San statue in Kayah state in Myanmar and draws out the competing visions of peace that are articulated through them. The raising of the statue unleashed widespread public protest, which was largely met by repression by the Myanmar authorities. Drawing on interviews, focus groups, and documentary sources, we argue that the statue constitutes an attempt to establish a post-war political order centred on the reassertion of government authority in ethnic minority areas and the creation of unity through the imposition of one national identity. However, the statue has also been appropriated as a key site for the articulation of alternative visions of peace and development. The conflict around the statue thereby makes visible ongoing struggles over the meaning of peace and shows how these post-war struggles are fought on and through space and place.

This chapter examines how the status of women has evolved against a background of absolute exclusion during military rule to a semi-civilian government with a female de-facto head of state. Despite this shift, gender inequality persists across the country at all levels. Why is this, and how are women organising themselves to confront the inequalities that they face? This chapter provides an analysis of change and continuity in terms of both opportunities and challenges for realising gender equality in Myanmar. Taking the situation of women during military rule as a starting point the analysis moves on to explore women’s experiences of the transition and their attempts at leveraging political openings for gender equality under the current government, before concluding with a discussion of future challenges and opportunities for women’s equality in Myanmar. Honing in on women’s political activism, past and present, this chapter allows close examination of what has changed and what has remained the same for women in Myanmar.

This article draws on feminist perspectives on the everyday to explore women’s everyday experiences of peace in Kayah state in Myanmar. We locate the daily practices women engage in to maintain life and minimise violence, making visible women’s contributions to everyday peace. In addition, we examine the ways in which women are disproportionally affected by war and prevented from benefitting from post-war changes. Our findings demonstrate that practices of care and silence are key avenues for women’s everyday peacebuilding, through which women sustain peace, ensure survival, and minimise violence in their families and wider communities. At the same time, however, these practices are conditioned by and may contribute to gendered insecurity and marginalisation for women. Through this focus, our analysis shows how women’s positioning in gendered relations of power may both enable their agency in peacebuilding and reinforce their gendered inequality and marginalisation in the post-war period. We conclude that while everyday peace practices may hold the potential for positive change, these can also contribute to the reproduction of inequality, oppression and structural violence.

Conventional assumptions locating peacebuilding temporally after violence have largely prevented exploration of how peacebuilding is practiced amidst conditions of ongoing violence. This article addresses this gap by analysing how Myanmar women's activists have devised strategies in pursuit of peace, amidst ongoing armed conflict, from the 1990s and onwards. The findings demonstrate that women's inter-ethnic cooperation contributed to transform conflict divides long before the initiation of formal national peace negotiations in 2011. Further, theorizing these peacebuilding practices, the article provides new insights into the dynamics of women's peace activism of relevance beyond the case of Myanmar.

Published 2021-05-24

Within peace and conflict research, the study of peace has received far less scholarly attention than the study of war and violence (Gleditsch et al., 2014). Moreover, among the studies that pay particular attention to peace, a negative peace conception, which equates peace with the absence of direct violence between formerly warring parties, has generally dominated. Consequently, peace itself is underconceptualised. Existing conceptions of peace do not provide analytical tools that can systematically describe, compare, and explain how peace varies across contexts. By way of illustration, the peace in Sri Lanka is evidently different from the peace in South Africa or the peace in Cambodia, and peace in all of these contexts has also evolved in different ways over time. Postwar processes of peacebuilding and development are complex and messy, and the outcomes are both unpredictable and highly diverse. This situation has prompted recent calls for the development of new theoretical frameworks, analytical tools, and methodologies that can enable nuanced empirical analyses and assessments of peace across empirical cases (e.g., Davenport et al., 2018; Diehl, 2016; Höglund & Söderberg Kovac, 2010; Jarstad et al., 2019). This special issue, titled Exploring Varieties of Peace, responds to these calls and seeks to advance conceptual understandings as well as empirical analyses of peace that provide new insights into the ways in which peace is manifested, experienced, and understood. The special issue originates from the Varieties of Peace research programme and network, which was launched in 2017 at Umeå University, Sweden, with support from the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.1 Several of the contributions were discussed at the Varieties of Peace Asia Conference, which was organised in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 22–24, 2019, in cooperation with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Conflict-related sexual violence has been the focus of significant international activism and policy attention. International legal norms and frameworks have evolved to recognize it as a war crime, and a representation of sexual violence as a “weapon of war” is now widely endorsed. This article examines how international norms about conflict-related sexual violence are adopted and utilized in multiple ways in the armed conflict in Kachin state in northern Myanmar. Throughout decades of civil war, international norms on sexual violence have constituted key resources for international advocacy and awareness raising by local women’s rights activists. Further, activists have drawn on international norms to effect changes in gendered relations of power within their own communities. However, international norms on sexual violence in conflict have also been effectively used as tools for ethno-nationalist identity politics, rallying support behind the armed insurgency and mobilizing women’s unpaid labor in the service of war. Thus, international norms on conflict-related sexual violence have simultaneously opened up space for women’s empowerment and political agency and reproduced gendered forms of insecurity and marginalization. Exploring these contradictions and complexities, this analysis generates novel insights into the politics of international norms in contexts of armed conflict.

This article explores the gendered dynamics of Myanmar’s post-war economic reforms through an analysis of women’s experiences of development in Kayah (Karenni) state. In Myanmar, ceasefires and a reduction of armed violence combined with state-driven economic liberalization reforms are conditioned by, but also contribute to remake, gendered relations of power, privilege and marginalization. While new land legislation and development projects have contributed to loss of land and livelihoods among rural populations in general, our study demonstrates that women living in conflict-affected border areas are disproportionally affected. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, we show how this is directly related to an overarching gendered political economy defined by legacies of conflict, discrimination and uneven processes of development, which positions women as particularly vulnerable to new forms of insecurity, dispossession and depletion generated by post-war economic transformations. We argue that the political and economic legacies of war in the state has produced a gendered division of labor that positions women as responsible for unpaid and underpaid informal and social reproductive labor, weakens women’s access to land, and results in physical, material, and emotional depletion. Through this focus, our study adds to research on development and economic restructuring in post-war contexts in general, and to emergent scholarship on Myanmar’s economic reforms in particular.

Multiple armed conflicts in Myanmar have resulted in long-term, large-scale forced displacement, humanitarian crises, and immense human suffering. However, the borderlands of Myanmar’s neighboring countries have also provided political space for the mobilization of diverse forms of oppositional politics, ranging from armed resistance to human rights documentation, alternative news reporting on the situation in Myanmar, and international networking and lobbying. In particular, since the 1990s these borderlands, most notably the Thai-Myanmar border areas, have seen the emergence of a vibrant and outspoken multi-ethnic women’s movement. In this chapter, we explore how young women activists from Myanmar have been able to carve out new spaces and forms of leadership while in exile in Thailand. From its inception, the border-based women’s movement made leadership training - specifically targeting young women - a key feature. We examine the impact of these training programs in the lives of women activists, and trace how graduates of these programs have moved on to lead in ways that have created social and political change within exiled oppositional politics and diaspora communities in Thailand. We analyze how the recent return of exiled activists and oppositional groups to Myanmar reshapes the conditions for young women’s leadership, presenting formerly exiled activists with new challenges as well as new avenues for leadership. Our analysis illustrates the political potential of border-crossing in several senses. In a spatial sense, we demonstrate how the diasporic, transnational political space in Thailand enabled young women to challenge age and gender norms and hierarchies to a degree previously unimagined, making young women leaders a significant force in Burmese diasporic politics. We note the importance of international advocacy and transnational networking to the growing recognition of young women as effective leaders, understanding this as another form of border-cr

Gender-equality work in Sweden is increasingly carried out by private consultancy firms. In this article, we explore the rationalities that govern Swedish market-based gender-equality policy through an analysis of the subject positions that are made available to gender-equality consultants. The article is an adapted version of our published work in Swedish. We analyse what types of agency these positions enable and preclude, as well as how they shape the meaning of gender equality and the content of gender-equality work. While market logics constrain the space for critical analysis and cause gender equality to be subordinated to other goals, consultants nevertheless find ways to resist these tendencies in pursuit of transformative change.

Feminist scholars have convincingly demonstrated how militarism and nationalism rely on the (re)production of gendered hierarchies. As a result, feminism is often assumed to be at odds with these political projects. In this article, we demonstrate that this is not always and not necessarily the case: in contrast, militarized nationalism may even constitute fertile ground for the mobilization of feminist organization and activism. We make this argument drawing on an in-depth case study of the emergence and evolution of an exiled Burmese women's movement from within armed ethno-nationalist struggles in the borderlands of Myanmar. Drawing on interviews with women activists, we examine when and how militarized nationalism can provide a space from which feminist agendas can be articulated and successfully pursued. This case demonstrates that militarized nationalism does not only have the potential to mobilize women's participation, but can provide a platform for feminist organization and activism that transcends, challenges, and eventually reshapes militarized nationalist projects in ways that advance women's rights and equality. These findings call into question generalized assumptions about the conflictual relationship between feminism, militarism and nationalism, and contributes to advance feminist debates about women's mobilization in contexts of armed conflicts and nationalist struggles.

This paper examines insurgent citizenship practices employed by activists in the exiled Burmese women's movement from the 1990s and onwards. Consisting of political exiles, refugees and ethnic insurgents, this movement has successfully used the transnational, transitory space of the borderlands to constitute its participants as political subjects with legitimate claims to rights, citizenship and leadership. Drawing on interviews, this analysis interrogates women's activism through the lens of insurgent citizenship practices. Thus, how have Burmese women's activists claimed rights and lived citizenship in exile? Three main strategies are examined: firstly, women activists have positioned themselves as political actors and authorities through involvement in governance and humanitarian aid delivery in refugee camps. Secondly, they have claimed rights and political subjectivity through engagement with international norms, networks and arenas. Thirdly, they have claimed citizenship and political influence in oppositional nation-making projects through engaging with and negotiating ethno-nationalist armed struggles. The analysis highlights the multifaceted nature of women's insurgent citizenship practices, showing how they navigate multiple marginalized subject positions, direct their rights claims towards multiple governing authorities, and enact multiple political communities.

The initiation of political reforms and a peace process in Myanmar has fundamentally altered the conditions for Burmese diasporic politics, and diaspora groups that have mobilized in Myanmar’s neighbouring countries are beginning to return. This article explores how return to Myanmar is debated within the Burmese women’s movement, a significant and internationally renowned segment of the Burmese diaspora. Does return represent the fulfilment of diasporic dreams; a pragmatic choice in response to less than ideal circumstances; or a threat to the very identity and the feminist politics of the women’s movement? Contrasting these competing perspectives, the analysis offers insights into the ongoing negotiations and difficult choices involved in return, and reveals the process of return as highly conflictual and contentious. In particular, the analysis sheds light on the gendered dimensions of diaspora activism and return, demonstrating how opportunities for women's activism are challenged, debated and reshaped in relation to return.

Millions of people in Asia live in refugee camps. Given this, what are the opportunities for political participation for refugees living in camps? This chapter addresses this question through an analysis of two refugee camp situations in Asia, in Thailand and Bangladesh. It examines how government policies, humanitarian aid practices, and forms of refugee mobilization and organization shape refugees' opportunities for political participation in these two contexts. The analysis of the cases demonstrates that while refugee camps are sites for repression and control, they can also become sites of resistance and political mobilization.

Sverige betraktas ofta, av andra liksom av sig själv, som ett av världens mest jämställda länder och hamnar också alltid i toppen av FN:s och OECD:s jämställdhetsrankingar. Sedan mitten av nittiotalet har jämställdhetsintegrering varit den officiella strategin för det svenska jämställdhetsarbetet, men trots detta startas det fortfarande projekt för att komma igång med detta arbete. I denna artikel problematiseras det svenska jämställdhetsarbetet mot bakgrund av politikens förändrade styrformer där marknadsstyrning i hög utsträckning kommit att dominera det offentliga och där «den rätta kunskapen» allt mer har kommit att ersätta politiska intressemotsättningar. Syftet är att utforska vad som händer med jämställdhetspolitikens innehåll när den inordnas i marknadsbaserade former för styrning och detta görs genom att studera jämställdhetskonsulters arbete. Det empiriska materialet består av elva telefonintervjuer med jämställdhetskonsulter, samt en genomgång av ett tjugotal konsultföretags hemsidor. Intervjuerna fokuserar hur intervjupersonerna upplevde arbetet som konsult; deras drivkrafter, motiv och argument; samt hur de såg på arbetets effekter, möjligheter och begränsningar. Materialet har analyserats med inspiration av governmentalityanalys och med ett särskilt fokus på hur jämställdhetskonsultens position samt jämställdhetsbegreppets betydelse konstrueras.

This chapter explores how violence against women is represented and approached in humanitarian aid to refugees. Drawing on an analysis of key humanitarian policy texts and case studies of efforts to address violence in refugee camps in Thailand and Bangladesh, the analysis demonstrates that a representation of violence against women as an expression of the 'underdevelopment' of refugee communities has gained prominence in humanitarian policy and practice. Consequently, changing the cultural norms and practices of refugees as to 'develop' them is seen as the main solution. However, this chapter shows that this approach has generated conflicts and resistance, and sometimes obstructed rather than advanced struggles for refugee women's rights.

This entry focuses on women's situation in refugee camps for Rohingya refugees located in Eastern Bangladesh. It describes the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and their situation as refugees in Bangladesh. In particular, the entry interrogates how humanitarian aid agencies work to address gender inequality and gender violence in the refugee camps. In humanitarian aid practice, violence against Rohingya women is primarily represented and approached as a symptom of religious and cultural backwardness that needs to be addressed through the modernization of refugee subjectivities, attitudes and beliefs. As this entry demonstrates, such approaches have generated conflicts and resistance from refugees, and sometimes obstructed rather than advanced struggles for refugee women's rights.

Refugee camps are frequently perceived as spaces of emergency and exception. However, they are also spaces where millions of people live their everyday lives, sometimes for extended periods of time. As such, refugee camps are political spaces where struggles over the right to influence life in the camps and shape how they are governed are continuously ongoing. In this context, what are the opportunities for political participation for refugees living in camps? How and to what extent are refugees able to carve out political space where they can engage with and affect their lives and their situations? This paper addresses these questions through an analysis of refugee camps in Thailand. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics, the analysis demonstrates how key strategies employed to govern refugees, namely spatial confinement and development interventions are also creatively subverted by refugees and appropriated as bases for resistance and political mobilization. The article provides new insights into the relationship between power and resistance, demonstrating how specific technologies of governance create opportunities for subversion, reinterpretation, and appropriation.

The importance of including men and boys in order to successfully promote gender equality has been increasingly emphasized in international policymaking and governance. This article examines emerging discourses on men, masculinities and gender equality in the field of humanitarian aid to refugees. Through an analysis of key policy texts as well as interviews with humanitarian workers, three main representations of the role of refugee men in relation to the promotion of gender equality are identified. Refugee men are represented as perpetrators of violence and discrimination; as powerful gatekeepers and potential allies; and as emasculated troublemakers. These ways of conceptualizing men and masculinity are problematic in ways which significantly limit their potential for the transformation of unequal gender relations: gendered power relations are obscured; refugee men's masculinity is pathologized as “primitive”; and attempts to take the needs of men into account are often turned into an argument against the empowerment of refugee women.

Contributing to ongoing debates about what happens when feminism is institutionalized in global governance, this article examines how gender equality is given meaning and applied in humanitarian aid to refugees, and what the implications are with regard to the production of subjectivities and their positioning in relations of power. Drawing on Foucauldian and postcolonial feminist perspectives, the analysis identifies two main representations of what it means to promote gender equality in refugee situations. Gender equality is represented as a means to aid effectiveness through the strategic mobilization of refugee women’s participation, and as a project of development, involving the transformation of “traditional” or “backward” refugee cultures into modern societies. The subject positions that are produced categorically cast refugees as either passive or problematic subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions, while humanitarian workers are positioned as rational administrators and progressive agents of social transformation. In effect, gender equality is used to sustain power asymmetries in refugee situations and to reproduce global hierarchies., Originally included in thesis in manuscript form

In the 1990s, a number of protracted armed conflicts were finally ended. This period can be described as a paradigmatic shift with regards to how armed conflicts are brought to an end. When the logic of the Cold War no longer hindered the United Nations (UN) to intervene, the number of UN peace operations rose dramatically and became more comprehensive. In addition, conflicts increasingly ended through negotiated settlements rather than military victory. The peace processes of the 1990s gave rise to great optimism that negotiations and peacebuilding efforts, often with considerable international involvement, would bring sustainable peace to war-affected countries. The outcomes of these peace processes, however, appears to be far from unanimously positive. Today, 20 years after the war endings of the 1990s, it is therefore imperative to critically analyze and evaluate these peace processes and their long-term results. What is the situation like today in countries where conflicts ended in the 1990s? What has become of the peace? In this paper, the long-term outcomes of peace processes that took place in the 1990s are evaluated through brief analyses of a number of cases,demonstrating that the nature and quality of peace today show great diversity. The paper also includes a conceptualization of the ”peace triangle” aimed at distinguishing between different forms of peace, as well as a study of the relationship between peacebuilding and democracy in UN peace operations in the 1990s, concluding that outcomes with regards to democratic development in the intervened countries are generally poor.

In humanitarian aid policy and practice, the importance of women’s participation is strongly emphasised. However, this article argues that women’s participation has become an instrument for optimising the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian operations rather than a tool for the promotion of gender equality. Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, the article examines how women’s participation is represented and employed as a means to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian aid in two refugee camp contexts, in Bangladesh and in Thailand, and asks how such strategies affect the gendered relations of power that shape women’s lives in the camps. Based on interviews with humanitarian workers, the analysis shows that programmes that promote women’s participation as a means for the achievement of other goals can reinforce existing gender inequalities, but also, despite their constraining effects, contribute to open up new opportunities for women. However, equality is treated as a side effect, not a goal in its own right. In conclusion, the article suggests that renewed engagement with the political project of feminism is needed to counter the de-politisation and instrumentalisation of gender in humanitarian aid, and bring the goals of equality and justice back in.