Description
The Women’s League of Burma (WLB) testifies to how one of the longest armed conflicts in the world is fostering a culture of continued and escalating violence, in which life takes place among predominantly armed men, in a climate where the military continues its crimes with impunity. In this, villagers are forcibly recruited as labourers and rape goes unreported. Meanwhile, existing research on peacebuilding in and around Myanmar either targets the conflict dynamics as such or takes the failures and successes of the official peace process as its point of departure as opposed to scrutinizing their foundational ordering structures. This paper traces the drivers of both conflict and the official peace process to colonial structures that enforce separation by making ‘ethnic division’ their core organising principle. Against this, it explores how ‘affinitive peacebuilding’ in the WLB connects women across these separations. The paper builds on theatrical performance, documentary films and the social movement literature to conceptualize women’s peacebuilding as a product of the affinity ties that these connections produce, apart from structures of coloniality, conflict and the official peace process. It explores the implications of centering these women’s experiences while decentering the official peace process.
