Feminism and Peace Studies

Abstract

This article selectively surveys the feminist literature to identify ideas and practices that have had an impact on the relatively young discipline of peace studies, taking the last 25 years as the main reference period. Feminism has deconstructed some of the dominant discourses in peace studies, opened up new frontiers of enquiry, provided new meanings to concepts like peace, security, development and power, and helped generate a number of useful hypotheses. Feminist contributions to peace studies can be discerned in seven areas. Each of these areas is discussed in the article with suitable illustrations from the South Asian context.