Decolonising Gender and Peacebuilding: Feminist Frontiers and Border Thinking in Africa

Citation:

Hudson, Heidi. 2016. “Decolonising Gender and Peacebuilding: Feminist Frontiers and Border Thinking in Africa.” Peacebuilding 4 (2): 194–209.

Author: Heidi Hudson

Abstract:

The article seeks to theorise an integrated decolonised feminist frame for peacebuilding in an African context. Arguing that a decolonial-feminist lens has the potential to change the way we look at peacebuilding practices, I propose the notion of ‘feminist frontiers’ – an engaged yet stabilising heuristic tool for analysing racialised and gendered relations post-conflict. The argument is structured around three pillars, namely: metageographies as metaphoric mental-space constructions of a colonial peace; masks that constrain the introduction of complicated and intersected human subjecthoods; and mundane matter that elicits ambivalent engagements between human and post-human subjectivities in the areas of everyday political economies and infrastructural rule of peacebuilding. I conclude that such feminist frontiers represent intermediate and mediated spaces or epistemological borderlands from where the undertheorised and empirically understudied discursive and material dimensions of peacebuilding from a gender perspective can be investigated.

Keywords: decoloniality, gender, peacebuilding, Africa, intersectionality, feminist

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Feminist Political Economy, Gender, Infrastructure, Intersectionality, Political Economies, Post-Conflict, Peacebuilding, Race Regions: Africa

Year: 2016