Mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices tend to re-entrench gendered hierarchies by ignoring women or circumscribing their presence to passive victims in need of protection. As a consequence we have limited knowledge about the multifaceted ways women do justice and build peace. To address this lacuna we conceptualize and unpack the meaning of gendered agency, by identifying its critical elements and by locating it in space and in time. The conceptual work that we undertake is underpinned by empirical mapping of the transitional justice spaces in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we point out instances of critical, creative, and transformative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination. We collect women’s oral narratives and explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research enables us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice processes directly and in their own spaces. This article thus renders women’s agency visible and attempts to grasp its contributions and consequences for transformations from war to peace.

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This article offers new theoretical insights into the relationship between silence, gender and agency. Bridging feminist research and critical peace research, the article considers the gendered practices of making and breaking silence in the aftermath of war and armed conflict. A typology is proposed along the axes of (a) disabling and enabling silences, and (b) social remembering and forgetting. Drawing on a number of illustrative cases, the typology is used to identify and categorise modes and functions of gendered silence, and show how oxymoronic fluctuations between silence and speech play out in the everyday. Silence can be employed for subordination and erasure, but can also be a strategy for coping with a precarious everyday, a form of tacit communication of ambiguity as well as a claim-making strategy. Unpacking the gendered dimensions of silence reveals power dynamics with deep implications for societies transitioning from war. ARTICLE HISTORY

How do we identify and understand transformative agency in the quotidian that is not contained in formal, or even informal structures? This article investigates the ordinary agency of Palestinian inhabitants in the violent context of the divided city of Jerusalem. Through a close reading of three ethnographic moments I identify creative micropractices of negotiating the separation barrier that slices through the city. To conduct this analytical work I propose a conceptual grid of place, body and story through which the everyday can be grasped, accessed and understood. ‘Place’ encompasses the understanding that the everyday is always located and grounded in materiality; ‘body’ takes into account the embodied experience of subjects moving through this place; and ‘story’ refers to the narrative work conducted by human beings in order to make sense of our place in the world. I argue that people can engage in actions that function both as coping mechanisms (and may even support the upholding of status quo), and as moments of formulating and enacting agential projects with a more or less intentional transformative purpose. This insight is key to understanding the generative capacity of everyday agency and its importance for the macropolitics of peace and conflict.

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