Description
Recent literature has identified a new avenue for approaching peace in the post-conflict sphere: agonistic peace. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s vision of radical democratic theory, scholars have identified an emerging alternative to liberal peacebuilding practices (Strömbom, Murphy and Walsh). While much of the nascent scholarship on agonistic peace includes mentions of gender, the link between agonistic peace and gender has yet to be clarified. This paper fills this gap in the literature in three critical ways. First, it clarifies the points of theoretical overlap between certain strands of feminist theory and agonistic theory and explores the goals shared by proponents of each tradition. Second, it explores the justification of the application of agonistic theory to the post-conflict sphere and argues that this same logic justifies the inclusion of gender as a focus for agonistic peacebuilding praxis. Finally, it demonstrates the ways in which a post-conflict examination of gender can serve as a tool for identifying agonistic peace practices in empirical cases.
