Sharp Elbows and Open Hearts: Practicing Feminist Peace in a Transactional World

“How sharp are your elbows?” I was asked after joining the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD)’s Gender and Inclusion team. This question captures the daily struggle of promoting feminist peace within the constraints of realpolitik. This tension lies at the heart of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, whose 25th anniversary we mark this year.

This landmark resolution emerged from the tireless advocacy of feminist activists but today faces unprecedented challenges. Gender equality and inclusion concepts are criticised as “Western impositions” or dismissed as “woke” identity politics. This contestation translates into funding cuts, increased polarisation, and diminished levels of state-led advocacy.

Meanwhile, the peace sector faces its own challenges. Mediation is becoming more transactional and less normative, with comprehensive peace agreements growing increasingly rare. We are witnessing a proliferation of actors wanting to mediate, alongside a return to big-power deal-making, creating a false dichotomy between “pragmatic” peacemakers – self-described realists attuned to power politics – and supposedly “naïve” peacebuilders marked as idealistic and out of touch.

For those of us working on peace, gender and inclusion, these challenges can feel overwhelming. The greatest risk we face is moving from overwhelm to apathy and limiting our own imagination of what is still possible – seeing feminist peace as a utopia, rather than a concrete practice.

How does feminist peace fit into the mediation space?

I work for the HD Centre, which is a private diplomacy organisation that prevents, mitigates, and resolves armed conflict through mediation and dialogue. HD engages with actors others will not, because we believe in the power of negotiated solutions. For these solutions to be effective, those responsible for the violence must take ownership of them.

Private diplomacy organisations like HD do not have hard power. We exist within the bounds of trust and consent from powerful armed and political figures, which can entail a status quo bias. We try to stop the fighting but often cannot address root causes like exclusion or inequality. As such, the best we can often achieve is negative peace – the absence of open armed conflict.

Feminist peace aims higher. It is a dynamic process of creating conditions for justice, mutual understanding and equity, enabling community members to thrive, regardless of gender, background, or socioeconomic position.

This vision is aspirational: it is work in progress even in “peaceful” countries. But in a context of increasing conflict and brutality, feminist peace serves as the North Star in my daily work, prompting crucial questions: Who are we creating peace for? What type of peace? Who are we excluding from the peace we are building?

How can men contribute to feminist peace?

Feminist peace is not just about women – it is about transforming gender roles and power relations for everyone. Yet men are rarely seen as gendered in peace processes. While an average of 21% of peace agreements include gender references,^[1] only 6.37% of peace agreements since 2000 explicitly mention men and boys.^[2]

These strategies can help bring men on board:

• Recognise diverse masculinities: Not all men share the same experience of power and privilege. For every warlord benefitting from conflict, thousands are sent to fight and are imprisoned, violated, dispossessed and traumatised, caught between societal expectations to protect and provide and the contextual impossibility of meeting them. Most men are deeply harmed by militarised patriarchy.

• Build cross-cutting alliances: If we can identify the grievances, needs, and vulnerabilities of diverse groups of men, we can address issues they face in conflict, such as expropriation, forced recruitment, sexual violence, and arbitrary detention, ensuring our vision of feminist peace benefits them too.

• Engage men in power: This involves collaborating with those benefitting from the current status quo and with male allies in positions of influence. It can raise questions about complicity, but it is indispensable. In Afghanistan, for example, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) mobilised male religious scholars to spread interpretations of sharia law consistent with including women in Taliban negotiations.^[3]

How to practice feminist peace?

For me, to be a feminist in peacemaking is to accept discomfort. It is easy to feel like an imposter, caught between feeling naïve, on the one hand, and as a sell-out, on the other.

I’ve come to see this discomfort as a sign that I’m doing something right – asking the difficult questions of myself and others. Being a feminist in peacemaking means trying to challenge existing power structures while sitting comfortably within them, or as Audre Lorde famously noted, attempting to “dismantle the master’s house” with “the master’s tools.” This raises daily dilemmas about integrity and compromise.

Reality is much more complex than a binary choice between cynical power politics and naïve idealism. Working towards feminist peace within the constraints of reality requires:

• Redefining power: Slowly expanding what “power” means to include diverse forms of influence and leadership.

• Celebrating incremental progress: Recognising that each small step builds towards more significant change.

• Maintaining resilience: Finding communities of practice that sustain our energy and commitment.

• Practising reflection: Regularly assessing our work for unintended consequences and blind spots.

When working towards feminist peace, we are tackling systems of conflict, militarisation, and patriarchy. We have little control over outcomes. All we control is the process: the efforts we put in, the seeds we plant. New ideas, new connections, and new networks may seem like small steps, but they can bear unexpected fruits down the line. In this context, the means ARE the end – we are demonstrating a different paradigm of relationship-building, collaboration, problem-solving.

Feminist peace as an outcome can feel overwhelmingly distant when we consider the structures underpinning present-day conflicts. But feminist peace as a process is an everyday choice. Every action driven by feminist principles counts: showing up with care and compassion, reaching sceptics through empathy, using privilege to amplify marginalised voices.

In times of deepening polarisation, when it seems easier than ever to retreat into our corners and demonise those who disagree with us, we can choose a harder but more powerful path: reaching across divides, leading with compassion while holding firm to our principles, and striving to bring others along – even, perhaps especially, those who don’t yet agree with us.

As we mark 25 years since UN Security Council Resolution 1325, combining sharp elbows and an open heart is more important than ever. It is a daunting but essential task, through which we can retain our sense of agency and self-efficacy amidst deeply destabilizing times.

This blogpost is adapted from a presentation given during the Geneva Peace Week 2024, in a panel on A Feminist Peace Built By All: Pathways to Inclusive Visions of Peace. A recording of the event is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuovEv8tekw

Footnotes:

[1] Over a period ranging from 1990 to 2023. From Wise, L. (2024). Gender, peace agreements, and fragmentation. PeaceRep. https://peacerep.org/2024/10/01/gender-peace-agreements-and-fragmentation/

[2] PA-X Peace Agreement Database. (2024). Version 8. https://pax.peaceagreements.org/

[3] Yousaf, F. (2022). Making visible the Afghan men who are working for women’s rights and a gender-just society. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). https://www.wilpf.org/making-visible-the-afghan-men-who-are-working-for-womens-rights-and-a-gender-just-society/

About the author:

Ingrid Münch is a gender, peace and security practitioner with over seven years of experience working at the intersection of gender equality and the peace continuum – spanning security sector governance and reform, mediation and peacemaking, and post-conflict peacebuilding. She currently serves as a Mediation Support Officer in the gender-responsive and inclusive peacemaking portfolio at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD) in Geneva.