Edinburgh Feminist Studies on Peace, Violence and Justice – serie

This volume advances a vision of what Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) might look like if critical feminist theories moved to the centre of our analyses. Critical feminist literatures hold promise for enriching our understanding of everyday dynamics of conflict and potential pathways for building peace with justice. The book charts a course from the critique of the patriarchal, colonial, and liberal power structures that exacerbate violence, to presenting a vision of feminist alternatives to the status quo, and finally, to a discussion of the application of feminist insights for research, pedagogy, and praxis. Empirical and theoretical contributions explore topics including religious women's activism, colonial power dynamics within elementary schools, critical views on women's empowerment, grassroots pro-migrant movements, embodied and affective practices of peace, Indigenous and migrant views on citizenship and solidarity, critical feminist research ethics, and intersectional, queer and posthumanist peace pedagogies.

This volume advances a vision of what Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) might look like if critical feminist theories moved to the centre of our analyses.This book charts a course from the critique of the patriarchal, colonial, and liberal power structures that exacerbate violence, to presenting a vision of feminist alternatives and the application of feminist insights for research, pedagogy and praxis. The chapters draw from critical feminist theories to illuminate actors, sites of struggle, forms of violence and pathways to peace that have previously been neglected in Peace and Conflict Studies literature.Empirical and theoretical contributions explore topics including religious women's activism, critical views on 'women’s empowerment', sexual and gender-based violence, grassroots pro-migrant movements, embodied and affective practices of peace, research ethics, and intersectional, queer and anti-imperialist pedagogies. The book enriches our understanding of everyday dynamics of conflict and gives us new ways for building peace with justice.

This book applies a critical-feminist perspective to the question of how security sector reform (SSR) interacts with militarisation and gender relations. Based on an in-depth empirical analysis of SSR in Uganda, the book argues that in a militarising context, SSR is likely to reinforce militarisation and the corresponding essentialised gender relations. Centring qualitative interview material, the book shows that in Uganda, SSR benefits political and social elites, while women, minorities and the political opposition, rather than benefiting from improvements in the justice and security sectors, remain marginalised and oppressed. External actors must accept partial yet significant responsibility for these developments as they supported, financed and legitimised many of the reforms. Based on these insights, the book pushes for and positions itself as part of a new generation of SSR practice and research.

Hungry for Peace invites readers into the remarkable world of food as an active agent of conflict and connection. From community kitchens to food festivals and shared meals around tables, Elaine Mei Lien Pratley shows how food shapes tensions, sparks understanding and produces everyday peace. Through participatory fieldwork with young people in Melbourne, Australia, ordinary acts – eating consciously, sampling unfamiliar cuisines and reducing food waste – emerge as powerful, agentic gestures that negotiate conflict, build trust and nurture connection.Blending feminist peace studies, food research and posthumanist theory, the book reveals how more-than-human actors – smells, ingredients, tables and atmospheres – participate directly in peace and conflict. It shows food practices not as background, but as lively collaborators in peacebuilding, offering new ways to understand, navigate, and shape conflict in our interconnected, entangled world.

Hungry for Peace invites readers into the remarkable world of food as an active agent of conflict and connection. From community kitchens to food festivals and shared meals around tables, Elaine Mei Lien Pratley shows how food shapes tensions, sparks understanding and produces everyday peace. Through participatory fieldwork with young people in Melbourne, Australia, ordinary acts – eating consciously, sampling unfamiliar cuisines and reducing food waste – emerge as powerful, agentic gestures that negotiate conflict, build trust and nurture connection.Blending feminist peace studies, food research and posthumanist theory, the book reveals how more-than-human actors – smells, ingredients, tables and atmospheres – participate directly in peace and conflict. It shows food practices not as background, but as lively collaborators in peacebuilding, offering new ways to understand, navigate, and shape conflict in our interconnected, entangled world.

Hungry for Peace invites readers into the remarkable world of food as an active agent of conflict and connection. From community kitchens to food festivals and shared meals around tables, Elaine Mei Lien Pratley shows how food shapes tensions, sparks understanding and produces everyday peace. Through participatory fieldwork with young people in Melbourne, Australia, ordinary acts – eating consciously, sampling unfamiliar cuisines and reducing food waste – emerge as powerful, agentic gestures that negotiate conflict, build trust and nurture connection.Blending feminist peace studies, food research and posthumanist theory, the book reveals how more-than-human actors – smells, ingredients, tables and atmospheres – participate directly in peace and conflict. It shows food practices not as background, but as lively collaborators in peacebuilding, offering new ways to understand, navigate, and shape conflict in our interconnected, entangled world.

This book takes the emerging practice of Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) as a case study of nonviolence to interrogate the roles of violence and nonviolence in conflict knowledge production. By focusing on nonviolent actors using UCP, it decentres violence, which is often so prominent in peace research. This approach creates space to fundamentally reimagine how the world might be when imagined and enacted through nonviolence.Drawing together feminist theorising from critical military studies, peace and conflict studies and international relations, Nonviolent Encounters argues that decentring violence in conflict knowledge production upsets the simple binaries of protector/protected and war/peace, underpinned by the ‘one-world’ onto-epistemology of much Western conflict knowledge. Instead, space is created to reconsider nonviolence, not as the binary opposite of violence, but as a way of knowing, doing and being – as a way of producing alternative ontological worlds.