Women Strike for Peace is the only historical account of this ground-breaking women's movement. Amy Swerdlow, a founding member of WSP, restores to the historical record a significant chapter on American politics and women's studies. Weaving together narrative and analysis, she traces WSP's triumphs, problems, and legacy for the women's movement and American society. Women Strike for Peace began on November 1, 1961, when thousands of white, middle-class women walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs in a one-day protest against Soviet and American nuclear policies. The protest led to a national organization of women who fought against nuclear arms and U.S. intervention in Vietnam. While maintaining traditional maternal and feminine roles, members of WSP effectively challenged national policies—defeating a proposal for a NATO nuclear fleet, withstanding an investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and sending one of its leaders to Congress as a peace candidate. As a study of a dissident group grounded in prescribed female culture, and the struggle of its members to avoid being trapped within that culture, this book adds a crucial new dimension to women's studies. In addition, this account of WSP's success as a grass roots, nonhierarchical movement will be of great interest to historians, political scientists, and anyone interested in peace studies or conflict resolution. "Swerdlow has re-created a unique piece of American political history, a chapter of the international peace movement, and an origin of the modern feminist movement. No historian, activist, or self-respecting woman should be without Women Strike for Peace. It shows not only how one group of women created change, but also how they inevitably changed themselves."—Gloria Steinem

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.

During a television broadcast in 1959, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower remarked that "people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days our governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." At that very moment international peace organizations were bypassing national governments to create alternative institutions for the promotion of world peace and mounting the first serious challenge to the state-centered conduct of international relations. This study explores the emerging politics of peace, both as an ideal and as a pragmatic aspect of international relations, during the early cold war. It traces the myriad ways in which a broad spectrum of people involved in and affected by the cold war used, altered, and fought over a seemingly universal concept. These dynamic interactions involved three sets of global actors: cold war states, peace advocacy groups, and anti-colonial liberationists. These transnational networks challenged and eventually undermined the cold war order. They did so not just with reference to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe, but also by addressing the violence of national liberation movements in the Third World. As Petra Goedde shows in this work, deterritorializing the cold war reveals the fractures that emerged within each cold war camp, as activists both challenged their own governments over the right path toward global peace and challenged each other over the best strategy to achieve it. The Politics of Peace demonstrates that the scientists, journalists, publishers, feminists, and religious leaders who drove the international discourse on peace after World War II laid the groundwork for the eventual political transformation of the Cold War.

This book provides a critical assessment of the impact of UN Resolution 1325 by examining the effect of peacebuilding missions on increasing gender equality within conflict-affected countries. UN Resolution 1325 was adopted in October 2000, and was the first time that the security concerns of women in situations of armed conflict and their role in peacebuilding was placed on the agenda of the UN Security Council. It was an important step forward in terms of bringing women’s rights and gender equality to bear in the UN’s peace and security agenda. More than a decade after the adoption of this Resolution, its practical reality is yet to be substantially felt on the ground in the very societies and regions where women remain disproportionately affected by armed conflict and grossly under-represented in peace processes. This realization, in part, led to the adoption in 2008 and 2009 of three other Security Council Resolutions, on sexual violence in conflict, violence against women, and for the development of indicators to measure progress in addressing women, peace and security issues. The book draws together the findings from eight countries and four regional contexts to provide guidance on how the impact of Resolution 1325 can be measured, and how peacekeeping operations could improve their capacity to effectively engender security. This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, gender studies, the United Nations, international security and IR in general.

Gender is increasingly recognized as central to the study and analysis of the traditionally male domains of war and international relations. The book explores the key role of gender in peace research, conflict resolution and international politics. Rather than simply add gender and stir the aim is to transcend different disciplinary boundaries and conceptual approaches to provide a more integrated basis for research and study. To this end Gender, Peace & Conflict uniquely combines theoretical chapters alongside empirical case studies, to demonstrate the importance of a gender perspective to both theory and practice in conflict resolution and peace research.

This book explores the trajectory of gender equality in institutions' engagement with the Women, Peace, and Security agenda at the intersection of global, regional, and national governance, shedding light on opportunities and challenges for a meaningful change in peace and security.

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.

This edited volume explores the everyday struggles and challenges of women living in the South Caucasus. The primary aim of the collection is to shift the pre-occupation with geopolitical analysis in the region and to share new empirical research on women and social change. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics, each relating to women’s everyday challenges during periods (past and present) of turbulent transformation and conflict, thus helping make sense of these transformations as well as adding new empirical insights to larger questions on life in the South Caucasus. Part I begins the discussion of women and social change in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan by examining the contradictions between traditional gender roles and emancipation and how they continue to dictate women’s lives. Part II focuses on women’s experiences of war and conflict in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Nagorny Karabakh, as well as displacement from Abkhazia and Azerbaijan. Part III examines the challenges faced by sexual minorities in Georgia and feminist activism in Azerbaijan. Women's Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, gender studies and history.

Sex and World Peace is a groundbreaking demonstration that the security of women is a vital factor in the occurrence of conflict and war, unsettling a wide range of assumptions in political and security discourse. Harnessing an immense amount of data, it relates microlevel violence against women and macrolevel state peacefulness across global settings. The authors find that the treatment of women informs human interaction at all levels of society. They call attention to the adverse effects on state security of sex-based inequities such as sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and lax enforcement of national laws protecting women. Their research challenges conventional definitions of security and democracy and common understandings of the causes of world events. The book considers a range of ways to remedy these injustices, including top-down and bottom-up approaches to redressing violence against women and the lack of sex parity in decision-making. Advocating a state responsibility to protect women, the authors campaign against women’s systemic insecurity, which threatens the security of all. Sex and World Peace has been a go-to book for instructors, advocates, and policy makers since its publication in 2012. Since then, there have been major changes in world affairs, including the #MeToo movement, as well as advances in both theoretical and empirical literature surrounding the subject. This second edition, which adds coauthors Rose McDermott and Donna Lee Bowen alongside Valerie M. Hudson and Mary Caprioli, revises and updates the book for a new generation. The book retains its foundational overview of the relationship between women’s oppression and war, enhanced by fresh data and new material covering recent developments for global women’s rights and analysis of additional examples of gender and conflict throughout the world.