Decolonising gender and peacebuilding: feminist frontiers and border thinking in Africa. (3rd May 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hudson, Heidi
• Is Part Of: Peacebuilding. Volume 4:Number 2(2016)
• Page Start: 194
• Page End: 209
• Publication Date: 2016-05-03
• Subjects: Decoloniality -- gender -- peacebuilding -- Africa -- intersectionality -- feminist; Peace-building -- Periodicals; Peace -- Periodicals; Mediation -- Periodicals; Conflict management -- Periodicals; Nation-building -- Periodicals; 327.172
• DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2016.1192242
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2164-7259

Abstract

Abstract: The article seeks to theorise an integrated decolonised feminist frame for peacebuilding in an African context. Arguing that a decolonial-feminist lens has the potential to change the way we look at peacebuilding practices, I propose the notion of 'feminist frontiers' – an engaged yet stabilising heuristic tool for analysing racialised and gendered relations post-conflict. The argument is structured around three pillars, namely: metageographies as metaphoric mental-space constructions of a colonial peace; masks that constrain the introduction of complicated and intersected human subjecthoods; and mundane matter that elicits ambivalent engagements between human and post-human subjectivities in the areas of everyday political economies and infrastructural rule of peacebuilding. I conclude that such feminist frontiers represent intermediate and mediated spaces or epistemological borderlands from where the undertheorised and empirically understudied discursive and material dimensions of peacebuilding from a gender perspective can be investigated.