Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries

This book forwards Assam (and Northeast India) as a specific location for studying operations of gendered power in multi-ethnic, conflict-habituated geopolitical peripheries globally. In the shifting and relational margins of such peripheral societies, power and agency are constantly negotiated and in flux. Notions of masculinity are redefined in an interlaced environment of militarization, hyper-masculinization, and gendered violence. These interconnections inform victimhood and agency among the most vulnerable marginalized constituencies - namely, women and migrants. By centering the marginalized in its inquiry, the book analyzes obstacles to achieving positive, organic peace based on cooperation and mutual healing. The tools used to perpetuate an endless cycle of violence that makes conflict a habit - a way of life - are identified in order to enable resistance against them from within the margins. Such resistance must be based on reflexivity and strategic, cautious radicalism. This involves critically interrogating the inherent connections between engendered pasts and feminist futures, local changes and global contexts, as well as between small, incremental changes and big shifts impacting entire societies, nations, and global orders. This book will be of much interest to students of ethnic conflict, conflict resolution, feminist peace, and Asian/South Asian politics.

Uddipana Goswami is a writer, feminist peace researcher, and author of Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam (Routledge, 2014).

Introduction: Engendering Conflict, Reframing Peace 1. Why Assam?: Making Peace in Peripheries of Power 2. Men in the Margins: Masculinity, Marginality, and Ethnic Conflicts 3. Many Violences: Conflict as Habit 4. Women Underground: Marginalized Women of a Troubled Periphery Postscript: Peace Praxis and Reflexivity in Peripheries of Power