Women, Peace, and Security in Post-Conflict explores how women activists, policy-makers, and scholars emerging (or hoping to emerge) from silent/prolonged or post-conflict situations are negotiating between national, cultural, and legal perceptions of the rights that govern their regional spaces, and international discourses that guide standard universal approaches to human rights. We are interested in exploring how women articulate on their own terms what peace means to them in their local contexts; what kinds of restitution, or reparation, is meaningful to them; and what meanings they ascribe to the often outwardly imposed norms/processes of reconciliation and cohabitation.

This Collection will include perspectives from women activists, policy-makers, and scholars dedicated to micro-level research in a variety of fields including agriculture, anthropology, the arts, economy, law (more specifically, the field of transitional justice), medicine and rehabilitation, political science, and sociology. We focus on silent/prolonged conflict and post-conflict situations, and women's role in, and perception of, these to highlight how and why their agency is vital to articulations of peace at local/national levels, and as well as how their views of peace may impact approaches to formulations of security in international human rights policy. We believe this interdisciplinary Collection will complement and extend your publishing interests.

Briefly, Women, Peace, and Security in Post-Conflict will prioritize pieces produced by women activists, policy-makers, and scholars emerging (or hoping to emerge) from silent/prolonged or post-conflict situations to see how they envision and articulate ideologies of peace in practical and sustainable terms that are meaningful to women in their local spaces. We are interested in exploring, among others, the following issues:

• The language and signs women activists in situations of silent/prolonged conflict or post-conflict situations employ to define and convey their understandings of peace in their local spaces;

• How women activists perceive of regional and international human rights (including UNSC 1325) as vital for, problematic to, or insufficient to realizing security in their local spaces;

• How women activists negotiate the socio-political visibility of women in post-conflict governments and judiciary bodies to advocate for their understandings of peace;

• How women are engaging in solidarity with women across national borders also impacted by war within and outside of their own regions to establish peace transnationally;

• How women of minority communities may use international human rights documents in their own spaces to legitimize their agency within their nations and even to surface stronger solidarity with women in other communities in their local spaces to address common understandings or misunderstandings of peace among women of different socio-economic experiences within their nation-state;

• How women approach national notions of cultural relevance that posit women's rights and their perceptions of peace as a Western phenomenon and, therefore, irrelevant to their security as members of their particular community and/or as citizens of their nation-state;

• How women in nations that have not signed and/or ratified major human rights conventions impacting how women may participate in nation-building after conflict situations (such as UNSC 1325) nevertheless continue to articulate and negotiate their rights through legal systems in their local spaces or pressure their governments to sign those documents; and

• How women use international documents to negotiate tensions between secular and religious ideologies on what constitutes security and peace.

Papers will be due January 2014.

Please send CV and 500-word abstracts by
September 1, 2013, to:

Julie Rajan (vgjulie@rci.rutgers.edu) and Sanja Bahun-Radunovic (sbahun@essex.ac.uk )