Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Contextualising Gendered Agency in War & Peace: Gender Justice and Women’s Activism in Historical Perspective.- Chapter 3: Gender Justice in Transition: Gendered Agency in War and Peace.- Chapter 4: “The Triumph of Justice”? Examining Official Discourse on Transitional Justice.- Chapter 5: “Justice Does Not Come”: Gendered Agency and Activism Around Wartime Sexual Violence in BiH.- Chapter 6: ‘I Cannot Extinguish Hope’: Gendered Agency and the Search for Missing Persons in BiH.- Chapter 7: Conclusion .
Maria O’Reilly is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, UK. Her research explores the gender politics of post-conflict peacebuilding interventions, and examines the extent to which these practices provide gender justice and security in the aftermath of violent conflict.
This book examines how gendered agency emerges in peacebuilding contexts. It develops a feminist critique of the international peacebuilding interventions, through a study of transitional justice policies and practices implemented in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and local activists’ responses to official discourses surrounding them. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the book also advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognising women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes, are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialise before, during, and after conflict. This study establishes a new avenue of analysis for understanding responses and resistances to international peacebuilding, by offering a sustained engagement with feminist social and political theory.