Description
Peace in critical peace scholarship (CPS) has increasingly become understood as a grounded experience made and sustained by practices and interactions in the everyday. This approach to conceptualizing peace points to something deeper than the absence of war or elite-driven agreements to suspend widespread violence; rather, it suggests that sustainable peace in post-conflict spaces demands an eye towards peaces which transform interpersonal bonds and relations between Self and Other—a positive peace. Building off the work of Confortini (2006), McLeod and O’Reilly (2019), I argue that such research still fails to understand the fundamental role that gender plays in the function and form of peace narratives and experiences in the everyday. By applying a gender lens to everyday discourses of masculinity and the language of positive peace, my research folds crucial lessons from feminist theory about masculinity, patriarchy, and violence into an otherwise gender-blind swath of peace literature. I treat the post-conflict space as a particular moment wherein the militarized, violent masculinities of war remain linked to social life in especially pernicious ways. That is, the post-conflict space and the character of interpersonal relationships in that space are embedded with, shaped, and distorted by the patriarchal scripts that take center stage in spaces of war. I theorize these scripts, which simultaneously celebrate some forms of violence while rendering others invisible, as especially sticky because they become central to understanding Self and Other and demand men (and women) to imagine and create worlds in which violence is thinkable, justifiable, and even championed. Fundamentally, I argue that efforts to understand and build positive peace must examine gender’s centrality to human socialization, interpersonal relationships, and possibilities for living in relation with one another.
