In recent decades, the states in the northeast of India have been home to a number of protracted violent conflicts. And while the role of women's movements in responding to conflict and violence tend to be marginalized both by the media and by scholarship, they have played a crucial role in attempts to strengthen civil society and bring peace to the region. This collection offers a close look at the successes and failures of those efforts, adding important insight into ongoing debates on gender and political change in societies affected by conflict. At the same time, the book takes a fresh, critical look at universalist feminist and interventionist biases that have tended to see peace processes as windows of opportunity for women's empowerment while ignoring the complexity of gender relations during conflict.

This book analyses the impact that prolonged socio-political conflict in India has had on political and social spaces for women. Focusing in particular on Assam in the North East of India, it looks at how the conflict can be restricting, and yet can also have the potential to expand these spaces for women owing to the collapsing of boundaries of gender roles, thereby creating niche areas that may be leveraged for socio-political transformation. Based on empirical material collected from in-depth interviews with individuals on both sides of the conflict, the book locates the analysis in both a legal and political context. It examines the causes, dynamics and impact of the ethno-political conflicts in Assam, as well as the efficacy and outcomes of ‘capacity building’ programmes aimed at rehabilitating the surrendered militants as well as assisting affected women. The book goes on to look at the role played by civil society, especially the Mahila Shanti Sena (Women Peace Corp), towards conflict transformation. It highlights the preventive, mitigative and adaptive measures taken by the women and their role as agents of peace in the volatile zones of North East India. Analysing the changing role of women in conflict situations, as well as the legal measures and regulatory mechanisms in place for women in vulnerable pockets of India, this book is a useful contribution to Gender Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and South Asian Politics.

What does gender equality mean for peace, justice, and security? At the turn of the 21st century, feminist advocates persuaded the United Nations Security Council to adopt a resolution that drew attention to this question at the highest levels of international policy deliberations. Today the Women, Peace and Security agenda is a complex field, relevant to every conceivable dimension of war and peace. This groundbreaking book engages vexed and vexing questions about the future of the agenda, from the legacies of coloniality to the prospects of international law, and from the implications of the global arms trade to the impact of climate change. It balances analysis of emerging trends with specially commissioned reflections from those at the forefront of policy and practice.

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda is comprised of the policies, protocols and practices enacted by a wide range of actors inspired by, or under the auspices, of the UN Security Council resolutions adopted under the title of ‘women and peace and security’. Since the adoption of the first resolution in 2000, resolution 1325, there have been nine others, each of which elaborates or extends aspects of the original resolution. This book provides a forward-looking collection of scholarship on the WPS agenda in two halves. The first half of the book presents a series of essays that each provide a glimpse of the rich and insightful research on WPS being undertaken in and about different contexts, to demonstrate the importance of centring the "local" as a site of knowledge production in the WPS agenda. The essays presented in the second half of the book also engage questions of knowledge production, documenting the exploratory methods in use in WPS scholarship, and highlighting those topics engaged at the hinterlands of what is a broad field – topics that gesture at the future of research in this area. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

This book maps the evolution of India′s North East into a constituent region of the republic and analyses the perpetual crisis in the region since Independence. It highlights how land, language and leadership issues have been the seed of contention in the North East and how factors like ethnicity, ideology and religion have shaped the conflicts. It also throws light on the major insurgencies, internal displacements, protest movements and the regional drug and weapons trade in the region. It examines ′the crisis of development′ and the evolution of the polity before offering a policy framework to combat the crises. The book includes a large body of original data, documentation and field interviews with major players as well as stakeholders. It is an important reference resource for students of politics and international relations, especially for those involved in South Asian studies and conflict studies. It is also an informative read for decision-makers, bureaucrats dealing with the North East and those involved in counter-insurgency operations in the area.

This book discusses the experiences of women negotiating conflict and post-conflict situations to deliver transformative peace. Inspired by the vision and values of women of the South Asian Peace Network, this volume fills a critical gap in the global Women, Peace and Security (WPS) discourse. The chapters focus on the region's multifaceted experiences and feminist expertise on women negotiating post-war/post-conflict situations structured around interlinked themes - women, participation and peacebuilding; militarization and violent peace; and justice, impunity, and accountability. This volume looks at the efforts of women trying to deliver a transformative peace that questions gendered power relations while confronting the socio-cultural barriers that prevent them from participating in rebuilding conflict-affected societies to bring about just peace.