Teaching Gender, Conflict & Peace: A Review Essay

Peace studies is a growing academic field that has its scholarly roots in international relations (IR), political science, and history. All three academic disciplines consider the nation state as a primary constitutive element of the international system and central to social stability, security, and peace. This has been heavily critiqued by IR feminists (Still, 1998; Stean 1998, among others) who associate the notion of the nation state with an embedded patriarchal system that entrenches hierarchical social relations across race, class, and gender. The language of national security does not address socially differentiated experiences of insecurity, particularly women's vulnerability to violence within this (Steans, 1998, Cockburn 2008). An academic course on gender, conflict, and peace requires teaching resources that enable a re-conceptualisation of conventional notions of peace and war. Due to its ‘statist' discourse on peace and security and an apparent absence of gender as an analytical category, IR and political science are not best suited to make and challenge conceptual links between gender, conflict and peace. This review paper thus relies on women's organising and activism during ‘war' time and ‘post conflict' reconstruction processes as a guide for the development of teaching resources on gender and peace studies in Africa.