This open access book explores how to build a gender-just peace in which women’s political citizenship is foregrounded through a case study of Northern Ireland. It addresses the role that civil society can play in peacebuilding and in political life in deeply divided transitional societies. It specifically focuses on women’s groups, and, as such, studies what grassroots peacebuilding across an ethnic divide can look like in practice. Further, it analyses what it means to build a gender equal citizenship based on the lived expertise and experiences of women’s activism, political...

Everyday peacebuilding through democratic political education is a necessary but not sufficient condition for limiting negative political emotions such as anger, fear, and resentment, and for cultivating the political virtues needed for an alternative, more democratic orientation towards power: one that values and exercises power with other members of emergent political communities, not power over them. These demotic political virtues include self-restraint, resistance, humility,...