It is now commonplace to recognize that we are living in a historical moment characterized by unprecedented intersecting crises. Catastrophic climate disruption, environmental degradation and biodiversity collapse; deepening inequalities both within and between individual countries; a global pandemic that is bound to be one of many proliferating public health crises; the growth of anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes and attacks on human rights, especially on those of women, minorities, Indigenous people and environmental defenders; an increasing lack of faith not just in specific governments but in governance itself and the idea of the public good; the continuing scourge of war and failures to build peace that is sustainable; the continuing physical and structural violence of racism and of patriarchy. And all of these, singly and together, are leading and will increasingly lead to humanitarian crises and displacement at a scale the world is completely unprepared to deal with, and that most people seem unable to cognitively or emotionally apprehend.
Our thinking about the intersecting crises and what can be done to avoid catastrophe at an unimaginable scale has not just come from being awake and alive in the beginning of the 21st century, from reading the news and paying attention; it comes from our long-time work on war, on the repeated failure to build peace that is just and sustainable, and on the repeated failure of peace processes and peace settlements to create freedom from violence and need in the day-to-day lives of most citizens. It emerges from our work on the continued economic, political and social inequalities that plague countries emerging from armed conflict, and on the continued lack of rights and resources that plagues women, Indigenous Peoples, peasants, and other historically racialized and marginalized groups.
Our work on armed conflict has convinced us that sustaining peace requires addressing both the inequalities, marginalizations and exclusions that underlie armed conflicts, and the climate and biodiversity crises that undermine human security. Current peace-making and peacebuilding practices too often leave structural violence, inequalities and crises untouched, or even deepen them. And current economic recovery paradigms which largely rely on extractive, rather than sustainable, forms of development too often have the effect of exacerbating pre-existing inequalities and worsening environmental degradation.
Thus, for peacebuilding to be successful, for it to be sustainable both politically and environmentally, those who are trying to build peace require:
- Forward-looking expert knowledge of transnational political-economic processes and dynamics in countries emerging from armed conflict
- Analysis of ways in which they impact structural inequalities and contribute to the intersecting crises which threaten not only the ability to build peace but the planet altogether
- Approaches and recommendations for how to engage and change those processes to better support the societal transformations critical to building peace, tailored to a full range of actors from multilateral organizations and national governments to civil society organizations and activists.
These are what the Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project aims to provide.
In looking at the forces that have undermined peace, we find they are the same forces that have led to the intersecting crises, including the inequalities crisis and the catastrophic climate and eco-crises, that the world now faces. Similarly, the policy solutions we have been developing to support sustainable peace, through prioritizing human and planetary flourishing, are the same kinds of solutions needed for the inequalities and climate and eco-crises. So in this project, we present new ideas, models and strategies, not only for building peace that is gender-just and sustainable, but also for the wider project of transforming societies to enable them to tackle the root causes of the intersecting crises humanity faces.
The “Feminist” aspect of the Feminist Roadmap is particularly important. We know that paradigm shifts require changing, indeed radically transforming, both dominant power structures and dominant ways of thinking. And further, we know that global action is required. There is no entirely local or national solution to the crises – and that means we need to be able to work with each other across differences, to mobilize political power across borders, and to generate new ways of thinking together. These are huge challenges. But feminist theory and activism have focused powerfully on these very challenges. And feminism’s attention to challenging dominant structures and discourses, and to recouping knowledges and worldviews that have been suppressed by the dominant culture, make it especially well suited to the task.
