See the press release in the UMass Boston Daily News.
Purchase the book at an indepedent bookstore.
This three-day, invitation-only workshop, organized with support from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, will be centered on climate. It will ask, how is it possible to build gender-just sustainable peace in a world facing growing climate and ecological disruption? And why, in face of the urgent need to focus efforts directly on stemming the tide of climate catastrophe, might it be productive to focus our thoughts around gender-just peacebuilding?
We note that many feminists working on climate change and biodiversity loss outline the sorts of radical solutions that the crises demand, proposing fundamental shifts in the dominant global economic model in order to arrest and address climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse. But very few are thinking about these things in relation to post-war peacebuilding, and the specific challenges and opportunities characterizing war-affected countries as they strive to create sustainable peace. While post-war needs for repair and rebuilding – and thus some kind of economic growth – are great, the economic recovery prescriptions imposed by international financial actors are based in the same extractive economic development model that has long fostered inequalities and environmental destruction. However, the post-war moment, while brief, is also a time of greater fluidity, greater opportunity for the restructuring of political, economic and social life than is otherwise feasible in countries that have not been at war. The workshop will ask if it is possible to take advantage of this window of opportunity to build peace that is gender-just and politically and environmentally sustainable? Can the transformative feminist solutions to the climate and biodiversity emergencies be made applicable to post-war settings, and become a key part of that gender-just peacebuilding? And might the opportunity to apply them in post-war settings contribute to their wider uptake?
Check out a new article, "Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar Recovery," written by CGSHR Director, Dr. Carol Cohn, and senior research fellow, Dr. Claire Duncanson and published in a Special Issue on Feminist International Political Economy (IPE) and Post-Conflict of the Review of International Political Economy.
This article outlines the disjunction between a country’s economic recovery from war and the IFIs’ focus on the recovery of the economic system. Cohn and Duncanson locate the conceptual underpinnings of this chasm in the profoundly gendered assumptions of neoclassical economics. Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, as the IMF, World Bank and other IFIs are rolling out emergency financing, the implications of - and feminist alternatives to - investing in an economic system rather than in human security are more important to examine than ever.
The rest of the Special Issue deals with international financial institutions and gendered circuits of violence in post-conflict, ranging from gender budgeting to austerity measures to the role of microfinance.
Concept: In general, the versions of "gender" that make their way into policy discourse and practice look, to many feminist academics, quite impoverished. All too often, gender becomes a substitute for women, or sometimes gender equality, and, increasingly for "men too." This may be understandable, in part because the more complex insights and understandings of gender from feminist theory can see difficult to translate into policy terms. This workshop bring together feminist academics who wish to try to tackle this problem, to figure out what it would mean to concretize in policy some more complex ideas – including those that take us beyond gender.
Participants: Elin Bjarnegård, Carol Cohn (organizer), Claire Duncanson (organizer), Roberta Guerrina (tbc), Toni Haastrup, Annica Kronsell, Swati Parashar, Caitlyn Ryan, Georgian Waylen, Annick Wibben (organizer), Hannah Wright
On April 3rd, Consortium Director Carol Cohn presented "WPS and the Climate Crisis – Inextricable Links" at the Nordic Africa Institute's workshop on Gendering Peace and Security – African Perspectives on the 20th Anniversary of UNSCR 1325.
"WPS and the Climate Crisis – Inextricable Links" argues that if the goals of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda are understood as ensuring women’s human security, ending and preventing wars, and building gender-just, sustainable peace, confronting the climate crisis must be understood as both practically and conceptually integral to the realization of the WPS agenda.
Read a written version of the talk here: "The Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the Climate Crisis: Inextricable Links"
In the debut episode of Ploughshares Fund's new podcast, Press the Button, host Joe Cirincione sits down for an in-depth conversation with Dr. Carol Cohn, founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. Dr. Cohn explores the distinction between gendered ideas and gendered people – and discusses how vulnerability is an inevitable part of the human condition. Our “In The Silo” segment takes you behind the scenes of the annual setting of the Doomsday Clock and shows how Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists brief leading members of congress on Capitol Hill. Plus: Early Warning – nuclear news analysis from Ploughshares Fund Program Director Michelle Dover and Roger L. Hale Fellow Catherine Killough.
An engaging and dynamic look at one of the most critical issues of our time, Press the Button offers the latest news, insider interviews and in-depth perspectives on nuclear policy and national security. Hosted by Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione, Press the Button will feature exclusive interviews with grantees, experts, former and current elected officials, and influential voices working to build a safer, more secure world.
Read the event summary here: Linking Feminist Peace, Sustainable Development, and Postwar Infrastructure Reconstruction.
Linking Feminist Peace, Sustainable Development, and Postwar Infrastructure Reconstruction is a parallel event cosponsored by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights (CGSHR) and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) at the sixty-third session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63) which will take place at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 11 to 22 March 2019.
CSW63 Themes:
Event:
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