WORKSHOP POSTPONED: Climate Disruption, Gender and Peacebuilding

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?