Connor Clery1
1University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
My research uses critical theory to better understand resistance, peace and security in global politics. I examine human experiences and practices of resistance to illustrate the way that peripheral social groups are, alongside state and global peace-making enterprises, responsible for co-producing political futures. Sociological and anthropological approaches to critical IR theory, in combination with close empirical research, are of particular interest to me.
Abstract:
This paper explores the gendered dynamics of peace through the conduit of a confrontation between female former combatants from the former guerilla organisation Fuerzas Armadas Revolutionaries de Colombia (FARC) and Colombian military soldiers on 10 December 2022 in the Urabá region of Antioquia, Colombia. Through this vignette approach, I argue that micro-social practices of confrontation offer valuable insights for understanding how peace in Colombia and other (post)conflict contexts is gendered. The paper contributes to critical security studies by connecting often-siloed theoretical debates in feminist and decolonial approaches to peace and conflict contexts concerning the role of women in peacebuilding. Using the confrontation, I develop a reading of women’s political activity that incorporates agency alongside the re-emergence of patriarchal expectations concerning women’s social roles. On one hand, such expectations support gender-based based violence, social confinement and political exclusion, thereby restricting access to protection and consolidate the patriarchal social arrangements in peacetime. On the other, female former combatants (los Farianas) themselves saw the same conditions as opportunities for a new and alternative emancipatory politics within the small guarantees of protection and accountability afforded to them through the Colombian state and international institutions peace-making projects. Such vexing experiences point to firstly, the exclusionary and hierarchical conditions of peace in Colombia, and secondly, the way patriarchy mutates, rather than simply (re)emerges, in (post)conflict contexts.