From Peace Talks to Pandemics: The Continuum of Feminist Peace Activism

Abstract

Feminist scholarship has convincingly shown that violence is more accurately conceptualized as a continuum rather than a war/peace binary. While recent scholarship has elucidated women's peace activism during armed conflict, peace negotiations, and post-peace agreement transitions, we know little about the work of self-identified women peace activists beyond those highly visible moments. We examine the activities of a Burundian women's peace organization in exile, Mouvement Inamahoro, during COVID-19. Our data are derived from thirty-six semi-structured interviews with individual members of the organization and reviewing hundreds of primary-source documents. We find that from Inamahoro's standpoint, the intersection of COVID-19 and exile constituted security threats, relevant to its mandate to build peace. Accordingly, it responded with humanitarian assistance, advocacy, and awareness-raising among its own members as well as with Burundians both inside and outside the country. Inamahoro also continued its regular activities to promote longer-term peace and security in Burundi through media programming, training women and girls for political leadership, and liaising with Burundian civil society and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). Based on the continuum of violence concept and building inductively from the Inamahoro case, we propose a multidimensional continuum of activism that occurs before, during, and following conflict (dimension 1, time); is conducted in multiple arenas (dimension 2, space); deals with issues of insecurity at multiple levels (dimension 3, scale); and is concerned with threats that are structural, direct, and cultural/symbolic (dimension 4, type). In so doing, we offer a preliminary framework with which to examine the everyday activities of women peace activists, which constitute often overlooked interventions in global politics.