Claire Duncanson - Negotiating and Building Peace: What are the Consequences of Gendered Exclusions?

Given the ways in which war is gendered - in its impacts and its drivers - it is unsurprising that the challenge of building peace also has many gendered aspects. Peace talks almost uniformly exclude the meaningful participation of women. And post-conflict reconstruction tends to be based on a set of economic prescriptions which are assumed to be gender-neutral but are anything but. Does it matter? This lecture will explore the causes and consequences of these gendered exclusions, examining their detrimental effects on both gender equality and sustainable peace. Claire Duncanson has been a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh since 2009. Prior to her academic career, she worked for a variety of human rights and international development NGOs, including Amnesty International, Jubilee 2000 and Global Perspective. Duncanson's research interests lie at the intersection of international security, IR theory and gender politics. Her work applies new theoretical insights about feminism, gender, and, in particular, masculinities, to current international issues, such as military interventions, military transformations, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and nuclear proliferation. Her first book, Forces for Good? Military Masculinities and Peacebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013, and her second, Gender and Peacebuilding, is forthcoming in early 2016 with Polity Press. She has also published widely in academic journals, including, most recently, on feminist debates over women's military participation (with Rachel Woodward) in Security Dialogue. This event was part of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Speaker Series, at the University of Massachusetts Boston. For additional events in the Consortium's Speaker Series, visit www.genderandsecurity.org. Event Date: March 23, 2016