Description
How do gender experts – tasked with implementing gender mainstreaming in peace and security contexts – form professional networks? And how do these professional network shape work outcomes? Drawing on fieldwork interviews in Kosovo this paper maps professional networks of gender expertise to develop a framework for thinking about professional networks in peace and conflict studies. The paper resituates analysis of power relations firmly onto the actor and their networks, understanding the power relations of local/international as intersectional. This is important as it allows us to understand how peace and security institutions do their work. In doing so we can begin to understand other powerful relationships that have analytical value to peace and conflict studies. Professional networks are not neutral, and so the article concludes with some deliberations upon the extent to which peace and security institutions leverage to reshape these networks – which might go some way towards addressing EDI concerns of contemporary peace and security institutions.
