Feminism in Cyprus: women’s agency, gender, and peace in the shadow of nationalism

Abstract

This article explores the ways through which feminist and women's agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, where complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women's groups' representatives, it examines how nationalism and women's approaches to gender, politics, peace and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women's agency. It finds that a strategic essentialism approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women's agency and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities of feminist and women's agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses.

Building Peace in the Shadow of War: Women-to-Women Diplomacy as Alternative Peacebuilding Practice in Myanmar

“…The seminal work of Cynthia Cockburn (2007Cockburn ( , 2014 analyses the experience of women's organizations and networks in a range of contexts, for example, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Israel-Palestine, and demonstrates how women's peace activism create spaces for peaceful transformation of relationships and conflict narratives. Numerous studies of women's peacebuilding practices in cases such as Rwanda, Turkey, and Northern Ireland point to similar dynamics (Gizelis 2011;Donahoe 2017;Berry 2018, Kamenou 2020Dinçer 2020). Notably, this literature shows that women's bottom-up peacebuilding is practiced not only in the aftermath of war, but also in the midst of it, as well as in contexts of frozen conflict (Cárdenas 2019a).…”

An Assessment of Women’s Participation in South Africa’s Foreign Policy Decision-Making and Execution

“…However, women in political participation in South Africa have received little concern, as a limited number of women serve as key decisionmakers in different political structures. When women are shut out, Haastrup (2020) and Kamenou (2020) emphasize that this not only implies discrimination but also undermines judgment since the reasons for such judgments have not been addressed. Perhaps, the question of patriarchal society and toxic masculinity in South African foreign policy application indicates that this approach is not adequately equitable in involving women in decision-making (Haastrup, 2020) have found social inequality essential to their foreign policy.…”

Cultura y movilización social contra la violencia sexual a través de Twitter: el caso del fallo judicial "#LaManada" en España

“…En el mundo actual, el éxito de cualquier movimiento global, incluido el feminismo, debe entenderse como una interacción entre lo global y lo local, entre redes sociales virtuales y procesos de interacción individual y grupal (Cole, 2015;Baer, 2016;Caldevilla, Rodríguez y Barrientos, 2019;Caldevilla y García, 2020). Los movimientos feministas vienen mapeando su trayectoria activista en un contexto general de transformación de las formas de protesta pública y esfuerzos de diferentes grupos y colectivos para lograr una mayor visibilidad (Bernárdez & Serrano, 2018;Cooke, 2019;Hatch, 2019;Kamenou, 2019;Savory, 2019;Soysa y Zipp, 2019).…”