The Political Economy of Conflict and Violence against Women shows how political, economic, social and ideological processes intersect to shape conflict-related, gender-based violence against women. Through feminist interrogations of the politics of economies, struggles for political power and the gender order, this collection reveals how sexual orders and regimes are linked to spaces of production. Crucially it argues that these spaces are themselves firmly anchored in overlapping patriarchies that are sustained and reproduced during and after war through violence that is physical as well as structural.
Through an analysis of legal regimes and structures of social arrangements, this book frames militarization as a political-economic dynamic, developing a radical critique of liberal peacebuilding and peacemaking that does not challenge patriarchy or modes of production and accumulation.
This book brings together the work of a group of feminists from the global South. The authors are diverse in their backgrounds, experience, and academic and disciplinary orientations. They work in different political, economic, social and cultural contexts and some have approached writing about the political economies of violence against women in their own countries as much (or more) from lived experience and experiential insights as from formal or scholarly research, which we consider entirely valid and in keeping with feminist epistemology.
Chapters include:
- Introduction: Framing a South Feminist Analysis of War, Conflict and Violence Against Women: the value of a political economy lens by Kumudini Samuel and Vagisha Gunasekara
- The construction of the ‘responsible woman’: Structural Violence in Sri Lanka’s Post-War Development Strategy by Vagisha Gunasekara and Vijay K. Nagaraj
- Ending Violence Against Women in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands Region: The role of the State, Local Civil Society and Extractive Industries by Elizabeth Cox
- Box 6.1 Lessons from the Bougainville experience by Michelle Kopi
- Rural Women in Colombia: From Victims to Actors by Cecilia López Montaño and María-Claudia Holstine
- Contesting Territoriality: patriarchy, accumulation and dispossession. “Entrenched Peripherality”: Women, political economy and the myth of peacebuilding in North East India by Roshmi Goswami
- Re-imagining Subversion: Agency and women’s peace activism in Northern Uganda by Yaliwe Clarke and Constance O’Brien
- The Prism of Marginalisation: Political Economy of Violence Against Women in Sudan and South Sudan by Fahima Hashim
The book is available for purchase at: