Rethinking “participation” in Women, Peace and Security discourses: engaging with “non-participant” women's movements in the Eastern borderlands of India

Abstract

The contributions and experiences of women in conflict at the grassroots level in India are not well recognized by the Indian state. In this article, I examine women's engagement with conflict in the Darjeeling Hills and Nagaland in the Eastern regions of India, highlighting both the varied forms of conflict and women's experiences of them. I use these case studies to engage with the question of "participation" as envisioned by the Women, Peace and Security agenda, which has often been understood only in terms of the representation of women at the "high table" of peace negotiations. Restricting the idea of participation to representation alone not only constrains women's agency but also reproduces a binary of "participants" and "non-participants," obscuring the different ways in which women actually participate in peace activism and conflict prevention. By examining women's experiences and engagement in these "hidden" conflicts, I provide a more nuanced account of women's agency and open up space for different conceptualizations of participation in the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

Conclusion. Seeing Patterns, Finding Diversity: Researching and Engaging with Gender and Peacebuilding in Indonesia and Nigeria

“…The resulting research contributes to the growing feminist literature on gender and peacebuilding, and to an understanding of its complexities, paradoxes, silences and possibilities. Our research perspective explicitly highlighted the local level, whilst also showing how closely and inextricably 'the local' is tied to national and global dynamics (Rigual, 2018;Shepherd, 2020;Tamang, 2020). Twenty years after the passing of the landmark United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in 2000, and after many more decades of women's peace activism and feminist peace research,1 the need to include gender perspectives in peacebuilding has been firmly established, at least on paper.…”

Mapping Grassroot Women’s Representations in Academic Research on the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the Global South

“…This interpretation is supported by the idea that the WPS agenda, the UNSCR 1325 resolution and each localized NAP create a normative framework that legitimizes a type of agreement on necessary conditions to allow women's participation in peace processes (Martin de Almagro, 2018). When this framework is localized in conflict and post-conflict contexts via international interventions or local peace actions (Tamang, 2020), it creates an indirect, but at the same time direct, exclusion of women participants. Those who are left out of participating are often identified as grassroots women, and the characteristics assigned to them but also appropriated by them are usually related to sites of contestation, dissidence, and alternative appropriation of peace significance, as well as how participatory processes should be (Martin de Almagro, 2018).…”

“…Taking a step back from participation in peacebuilding processes, Tamang (2020), focuses on analyzing how the WPS agenda also produces certain women who can be recognized and participate in conflict scenarios and negotiations. For her, the ideological framework of the UN as the institution that defines the concerns that give legitimacy to the WPS agenda (Cohn, 2008) also produces a legitimate understanding of what counts as conflict, leaving other "hidden" conflicts in the dark of WPS, and as well as multiple experiences and engagement that women have in those hidden conflicts.…”

“…Tamang explains that women's participation and support of these ethnic movements distance East Indian women advocates from the traditional role that WPS has assigned to the ideal women subject in peace-negotiation settings, understood only as inclusion and representation of women in the "high table" of institutions, complying with established quotas. Therefore, multiple and diversified forms of engagement that women have during peace negotiations, such as women's roles in sustaining political movements, ensuring mass participation, engaging in peace negotiation campaigns, and even contesting gender equality within the ethnic movements, are left behind by the globalized policy framework (Tamang, 2020) and are not being counted as relevant representation or even potential to generate policy changes.…”

Introduction: Local Peacebuilding through a Gender Lens

“…Feminist scholarship also informs our methodology. Thus, studies of the local effects of the UN's women, peace and security agenda, remind us that the local cannot be thought of as a pristine site unaffected by politics (Firchow and Urwin, 2020;George and Soaki, 2020;Shepherd, 2020;Tamang, 2020). Understood as everyday social relations (rather than geography), the local is saturated with power relations, including political and economic processes originating on national and international scales (Mac Ginty, 2015;Massey, 1994).…”