The possibilities of studying affect to illuminate women’s contributions to peace

Abstract

It has become widely acknowledged by scholars and practitioners that women’s participation in peace-building is essential to building sustainable, inclusive peace. The question remains, however, what is ‘women’s participation’ in practical terms? What does it look like? What does it feel like? Following feminist scholarship that has argued for attention to the politics of emotion in International Relations, I call for an emotion-aware approach to thinking about women’s participation in peace-building and the recognition that emotion has real, material effects on how women participate and the impact of their participation. Drawing on fieldwork experience in Burma and on the Thailand-Burma border I reflect on the process of asking such questions and the possibilities of taking affect seriously in the study of peace. What emerges from this reflection is a methodological consideration that centres emotion and recognises it as simultaneously politically meaningful and gendered. Exploration of the challenges of such an approach grounds this contribution in the realities of data collection and interpretation in the field, while also demonstrating the richness that emerges from such inquiry.

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