Description
Through powerful analyses of local agency in on post-conflict gender dynamics, Feminist IR and Feminist Security Studies scholarship has put local experiences of insecurity on both research and political agendas in relation to United Nations peacekeeping and peacebuilding after the end of the Cold War. Connecting to this scholarship, this paper explores the different gendered strategies Palestinian and Bedouin women from various communities in the Gaza Strip employed in their different encounters with soldiers from the multi-national United Nations military forces in what became the UN’s first ‘mission area ’from 1957 to 1967. As the women dealt with their different situations through different verbal and non-verbal embodied (re)actions, the paper will connect how Parpart and Parashar (2019) and Hansen (2019) have conceptualized silence and voice as related but non-binary, grounded and contextualising ways of exploring gendered agency in insecure sites to the incident and interrogation reports from the United Nations archive that make up the empirical foundation of the paper. Connecting Feminist IR and Feminist Security Studies scholarship to peacekeeping history, the aim of the paper is to challenge how the hegemonic narratives of mainstream research have not only sustain the histories of the Cold War operations as non-gendered, uncontroversial and irrelevant, but also actively erases local agency in the negotiation of the international presence and related insecurities in everyday life.
