Feminist Perspectives on Peace Building: Gendered Approaches

When peace negotiations make the news, the faces around the table are almost always men in suits-generals, diplomats, and political leaders. Yet the people who often hold communities together during war, negotiate the release of detained sons, and rebuild shattered neighbourhoods afterwards are frequently women. The feminist approach to peace building takes this contradiction seriously. It argues that you cannot achieve lasting peace while ignoring half the population’s experiences, insights, and labour. This perspective has reshaped how scholars and policymakers think about conflict, security, and what “peace” actually means.

What the feminist approach to peace building actually claims 🔗

At its core, the feminist approach makes a simple but radical argument: conflict and peace are not gender-neutral. Men and women experience war differently, and the structures that cause violence are deeply connected to gendered power relations. Feminist scholars argue that patriarchal gender relations are not merely a consequence of war but actually drive militarization and armed conflict in the first place.

This is a departure from traditional peace and security studies, which focused mainly on states, armies, and treaties. The feminist lens shifts attention to ordinary people-especially women and marginalized groups-and asks how violence shapes their daily lives. It also insists that real peace requires more than a ceasefire. It requires dismantling the inequalities and power imbalances that made conflict possible.

Negative peace versus positive peace 🔗

A key idea here borrows from peace studies more broadly: the difference between negative and positive peace. Negative peace is simply the absence of direct, physical violence-the guns fall silent. Positive peace goes further, addressing the underlying structural and social injustices that breed conflict. Feminist thinkers argue that signing an agreement to stop fighting is not enough. As activists in Nagaland have put it, peace cannot be defined merely as the absence of war; it involves eradicating not only direct violence but also personal and structural forms of violence. This is why feminist conceptions of peace tend to be more comprehensive and transformative than conventional ones.

How conflict affects women differently 🔗

One of the strongest contributions of this approach is its insistence that violence is not experienced equally. Women, children, and marginalized groups frequently bear a disproportionate share of suffering during armed conflict.

The gendered impact of war 🔗

During conflict, women face specific harms that male-dominated security frameworks often overlook. These include conflict-related sexual violence such as rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and forced marriage, which has been used as a deliberate weapon of war in conflicts ranging from Bosnia to Rwanda. Beyond direct violence, women often lose spouses and family members, become heads of households overnight, lose their livelihoods, and are forced into displacement.

Crucially, the feminist approach rejects the idea that women are only passive victims. Women are simultaneously survivors and active agents. In South Asia, scholar Rita Manchanda has documented how women navigate conflict by becoming citizens, combatants, heads of household, war resisters, and political leaders. Seeing women only as victims strips them of this agency and weakens any peace process that follows.

Why traditional peace processes leave women out 🔗

If women are so central to surviving and ending conflict, why are they so rarely at the negotiating table? The feminist critique points to the male-dominated nature of formal peace processes. Global leaders have long approached conflict by focusing on the warring parties and traditional power brokers-both groups that remain dominated by men even today.

The marginalisation of informal peace work 🔗

Women tend to lead peace efforts at the grassroots and community level-exactly the kind of work that formal politics undervalues. Research shows that women’s activism in managing survival and community-level agency is predictably devalued as “accidental activism” and pushed aside once politics becomes more structured and hierarchical. As peace talks formalise, the women who held communities together during the fighting are quietly excluded from shaping the settlement.

This creates a damaging gap between rhetoric and reality. Even where women’s participation is officially encouraged, women can still be sidelined if they lack the formal education and training that negotiation processes assume. The result is that women remain largely absent from formal peace talks despite doing much of the actual peace work.

Why exclusion undermines peace 🔗

This is not just unfair-it makes peace less durable. Peace negotiations with high levels of grassroots and civil society involvement have been shown to reduce the chances of a country sliding back into war. When women’s organisations working at the local level are shut out, the legitimacy of the entire process is weakened. With equal and meaningful participation, peace processes become more inclusive, and therefore more legitimate and more durable. Excluding half the population means excluding their needs, knowledge, and stake in keeping the peace.

Women as peace builders: the evidence from the ground 🔗

The feminist approach is grounded in real examples of women driving peace, often in the absence of any official mandate. Some of the most powerful illustrations come from Northeast India, a region that has experienced decades of insurgency.

The Naga Mothers’ Association 🔗

The Naga Mothers’ Association was established by women in 1984 in Kohima at a time when insurgency, alcoholism, and substance abuse were tearing the community apart. Using their moral authority as mothers, these women mediated between armed groups, pushed for peace, and even ran detoxification and counselling services to address the social wounds of conflict. They embodied the feminist idea that peace building means tackling structural problems, not just stopping bullets.

Meira Paibi and women’s collectives 🔗

Similarly, organisations such as the Meira Paibi (the “torchbearer women”) in Manipur and the Bodo Women’s Justice Forum have acted as active peace activists during prolonged insurgency movements. These groups show that women’s peace work is not occasional or accidental-it is sustained, organised, and politically significant, even when official processes refuse to recognise it.

Theoretical models: how feminists understand women’s role 🔗

Feminist scholarship offers different lenses for understanding why and how women engage in peace building. Three models are often discussed: the maternal role, where women draw on their identity as mothers to demand an end to violence; the feminist role, which frames peace as inseparable from gender equality and justice; and the eco-feminist role, which links peace, care, and environmental sustainability. Of these, the maternal role is historically the most common, as seen in the Naga Mothers’ Association.

However, feminist scholars also caution against assuming women are “naturally” peaceful. Treating peacefulness as an inherent female trait can trap women in narrow roles and ignore the many women who participate in violence. The stronger feminist argument is structural: it is the unequal distribution of power, not biology, that shapes who fights and who builds peace.

UNSCR 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security agenda 🔗

The feminist approach moved from academic theory into global policy with a landmark moment in 2000. On 31 October that year, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. It was the first resolution to recognise that conflict affects people differently depending on gender, and that women are essential agents of peace, not just victims needing protection.

The four pillars 🔗

The Women, Peace and Security agenda now rests on four pillars that summarise the feminist vision in policy form:

Participation: ensuring women take part fully and meaningfully in all decisions about peace and security, from local councils to international negotiations. Protection: safeguarding the rights and safety of women and girls, particularly from sexual and gender-based violence. Prevention: stopping conflict and all forms of violence before they occur, including by supporting local women’s peace initiatives. Relief and recovery: meeting women’s specific needs when rebuilding societies after conflict. The UN frames these pillars as aligning gender equality and peace as shared goals and responsibilities.

From global resolution to national action 🔗

Because the Security Council wanted these principles applied within countries, it encouraged member states to develop National Action Plans that localise the four pillars of the agenda. These plans are meant to translate lofty international commitments into concrete domestic policy and collaboration with local women’s networks.

The gap between promise and practice 🔗

Despite the symbolic power of UNSCR 1325, feminist scholars are clear-eyed about its limits. Cynthia Enloe, a leading feminist thinker, has argued that the international peace building community never fully grasped the genuinely radical feminist analysis underlying the resolution-namely, that patriarchy itself is a principal cause of violent conflict and of the international community’s repeated failure to resolve it.

The Indian experience illustrates this gap. The WPS agenda has struggled to reach from New Delhi into the marginalized Northeast, where both direct and structural violence persist and where some conflicts go legally unacknowledged. Scholars studying women’s peace building in Manipur argue that the agenda has, in places, failed to reach the region’s longstanding women’s peace initiatives, suggesting that activists may need to look beyond official frameworks. The lesson is that adopting feminist language is not the same as transforming the power structures that exclude women.

Why this approach matters for lasting peace 🔗

Ultimately, the feminist approach reframes what peace building is for. It argues that returning to the pre-war “status quo” is not real peace if that status quo was built on inequality and oppression. True peace building must be transformative, addressing the power asymmetries between groups and ensuring justice rather than just quiet.

Integrating a gender perspective, in this view, is not an optional extra but a key driver of sustainable and lasting peace. By centring the experiences of women and marginalized communities, challenging militarism, and valuing grassroots peace work, the feminist approach offers a fuller, more honest account of how societies can move from war to genuine reconciliation.

What do you think? Should women’s participation in peace negotiations be made mandatory through law, or does meaningful inclusion require deeper social change first? And in conflicts close to home, such as those in Northeast India, why do you think the contributions of grassroots women’s organisations remain so undervalued in formal politics?

References

1. https://academic.oup.com/isagsq/article/5/1/ksaf008/8008823
2. https://feminisminindia.com/2022/04/05/naga-mothers-association-the-role-of-the-mothers-of-nagaland-in-peace-keeping/
3. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/stories/news/2023/10/the-women-peace-and-security-agenda-in-myanmar
4. https://www.academia.edu/37905573/The_Journey_of_Women_from_Victim_to_Peace_Maker_Women_Insurgency_and_Northeast_India
5. https://www.unwomen.org/en/articles/explainer/what-is-the-women-peace-and-security-agenda
6. https://www.e-ir.info/2013/02/11/a-gendered-approach-to-peacebuilding-and-conflict-resolution/
7. https://www.usip.org/gender_peacebuilding/about_UNSCR_1325
8. http://1325naps.peacewomen.org/
9. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616742.2022.2049449
10. https://www.ipinst.org/2025/09/how-feminist-approaches-to-foreign-policy-can-advance-peacekeeping-and-peacebuilding