Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy

Download or read book Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy written by Melissa Johnston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Men and women do not experience war, violence, and peace in the same ways. Accordingly, peacebuilding interventions now incorporate "gender mainstreaming" and stand-alone "gender-and-development". These gender interventions should make peacebuilding more effective and sustainable, facilitating stable societies and efficient economies. But success has been mixed. The case of in Timor-Leste is instructive. Interventions on gender responsive budgeting, domestic violence, and microfinance have uneven results. Whereas the level of women's participation in national politics in Timor-Leste is high by international standards, overall deep inequalities remain, inequality between rural and urban areas is growing, and violence against women is endemic across the country. Feminists have found fault with gender interventions, saying they don't go far enough, and scholars of the local turn have suggested a focus on gender encourages backlash against interventions. Instead of focusing on a clash of "local" and "international", Rebuilding Patriarchy uses gender and class to explain the uneven outcomes. It argues that peacebuilders made concessions to elites and violent men in order to keep the peace, a tendency amplified by "local turn" approaches to peacebuilding. It has reinforced the valorisation of armed masculinity, associated most strongly with the dominant class, which have in turn justified the unequal distribution of state petroleum resources. As well, gender, class and domestic violence are connected through brideprice, rendering legal and political reforms ineffective. Lastly, microfinance was supposed to empower women and grow the economy, but its main beneficiaries were elites, repeating patterns of accumulation and rule-through-debt established during era Indonesian-era"--