Feminist Review 126 (1):19-38 (2020)
Abstract |
What does peace mean in today’s world of endless wars? Why has the project of ‘universal peace’, so ardently hoped for by the drafters of the UN Charter in 1945, failed so profoundly? I reflect on these questions through three stories of peace. The first is told by a series of four stained-glass windows in the Peace Palace in The Hague; the second is of the world’s demilitarised zones; and the third of a peace community in Colombia. These stories provide a springboard to reflect on how we might rethink peace in the context of today’s world, drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial analyses. My discussion exposes the limits of the UN Charter’s approach to peace, and the impossibility of its methods ever achieving ‘universal peace’. The Charter’s reliance on militarism and collective enforcement, as well as its commitment to peace as an evolutionary process, maintain rather than dismantle global hierarchies of domination. I also question the dualism of war and peace, which obscures much of the violence of what we call peace. The task of rethinking peace is urgent. To do so we need to go beyond the worlds we know, beyond the confines of law and the inevitability of quotidian hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race, to invent new methods of peace-making, outside the ‘frames of war’.
|
Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) |
Categories |
No categories specified (categorize this paper) |
ISBN(s) | |
DOI | 10.1177/0141778920948081 |
Options |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Download options
References found in this work BETA
On Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl.Ratna Kapur - 2019 - Feminist Review 122 (1):167-171.
War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present.Hans Joas & Wolfgang Knöbl - 2012 - Princeton University Press.
Common Women, Uncommon Practices the Queer Feminisms of Greenham.Sasha Roseneil - 2000 - Burns & Oates.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
Peace, Peace to the Far and the Near: Who Comes First?Jean-Francois Rey - 2017 - Philosophy Study 7 (5).
Continuums of Violence and Peace: A Feminist Perspective.Jacqui True - 2020 - Ethics and International Affairs 34 (1):85-95.
The Way to Peace the Great Peacemakers, Philosophers of Peace and Efforts Toward World Peace.Sanderson Beck - 1986
The Ideal of Peace and the Morality of War.Jeppe von Platz - 2015 - Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 62 (145).
Toward a Social-Democratic Peace?Nils Petter Gleditsch - 2020 - Ethics and International Affairs 34 (1):67-75.
Democracy, Peace and the War System: The Democratic Peace Project.Andrew Blom - 2013 - Journal for Peace and Justice Studies 23 (2):3-20.
Measuring International Ethics: A Moral Scale of War, Peace, Justice, and Global Care.Pierre Allan - 2006 - In What is a Just Peace? Oxford University Press.
Gender at the Crossroad of Conflict: Tsunami and Peace in Post-2005 Aceh.Katrina Lee-Koo - 2012 - Feminist Review 101 (1):59-77.
Analytics
Added to PP index
2020-11-24
Total views
4 ( #1,282,334 of 2,517,922 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
2 ( #272,378 of 2,517,922 )
2020-11-24
Total views
4 ( #1,282,334 of 2,517,922 )
Recent downloads (6 months)
2 ( #272,378 of 2,517,922 )
How can I increase my downloads?
Downloads