Charting the development of an approach to peace and security governance she identifies as “international conflict feminism” (ICF), Nesiah chronicles a familiar history of gender mainstreaming in global governance institutions, with reference to events such as the UN World Conferences on Women (notably Beijing in 1995) and actors such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Nesiah situates her analysis as being “premised on a reading of the emergence and momentum of ICF as having a kinship with two other historical processes of the post-Cold War period: one is a development that is about global feminisms, namely, the concerted focus on Violence Against Women, and the other is a story about global governance, namely, the discursive construction of a ‘conflict zone’ that warrants intervention” (pp. 6–7). These processes, and the concomitant tropes of the “Woman-in-need-of-protection” and the international community that is endowed with the role of protector, both produce and are produced by ICF; Nesiah’s wide-ranging and conceptually precise intervention offers a vocabulary to describe the nexus of violence prevention and conflict governance and its effects.
Beyond the introductory chapter, Chapter 2 addresses the increasing intensity of gender mainstreaming efforts across institutions of global governance since its articulation in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (pp. 34–40), with a particular focus on women’s inclusion in peacebuilding. In Chapter 3, Nesiah examines the prosecution of sexual violence crimes in the aftermath of conflict in Rwanda and the Balkans, while Chapter 4 situates ICF in relation to counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism. In Chapter 5, Nesiah explores truth commissions and transitional justice, which is a field of practice that is much overlooked by security studies scholars, even feminist security studies scholars, despite the overlaps between transitional justice and post-conflict reconstruction. Nesiah extends her coverage to include grassroots forms of justice and reparations, such as community-based tribunals (pp. 110–115), juxtaposing ICF with alternative feminist or women-led movements. Chapter 6 pivots again to explore women’s economic empowerment in conflict- and conflict-affected settings, with a sharp empirical focus on Sri Lanka. The empirical analysis of the administration of owner-driven housing assistance programs in Sri Lanka is detailed and convincing. The final chapter tackles “Feminist Internationalisms,” returning to the dual projects of “neoliberal feminism and carceral feminism” (p. 164) to show how these have shaped the emergence and (re)formation of ICF. This chapter was the most exciting for me, as Nesiah shows how “we might see ICF as a form of imperial feminism whose force has been constituted by and in turn contributes to racial-capitalist power relations” (citing Zillah Eisenstein, 170). Nesiah’s conclusion is stark but resonates deeply: “the challenge is not that there aren’t enough feminists within institutions of global governance but rather that institutionalized feminism can filter and interpolate voice in ways that render certain forms of resistance inaudible” (p. 173).
Ironically, as can be the case with projects of such magnitude, some voices are inaudible in Nesiah’s account, largely because of the scale of the undertaking presented here. For example, in the context of a discussion of Iraqi women’s engagement with post-conflict reconstruction under the auspices of SCR 1325, Nesiah claims that “the recognition and inclusion of women’s agency in arenas determined to be conflict zones is restricted to political parameters determined by SCR 1325 and its NAPs” (p. 51). This account overlooks the various ways in which Iraqi women have resisted, subverted, and directly challenged peace and security governance in the wake of the US American invasion in 2003 (see, for example, Yasmin Chilmeran, “Women, Peace and Security Across Scales: Exclusions and opportunities in Iraq’s WPS engagements,” International Affairs, 98(2), 2022). There is also perhaps a missed opportunity here to engage with the work of other scholars who have highlighted these dynamics of resistance and subversion and shown how Iraqi women have forged feminist coalitions to avoid co-optation by various forms of ICF; though Zahra Ali’s excellent work is cited (pp. 52–53), works by Sheri Gibbings (“No Angry Women at the United Nations.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13(4), 2011) and Nicola Pratt (“Reconceptualizing Gender, Reinscribing Racial-Sexual Boundaries in International Security” International Studies Quarterly 57(4), 2013) are also relevant. This is especially so because Nesiah explains in the introduction to the book that “The alternative feminisms that appear in the shadows of the ICF story challenge the normative common sense regarding the representation of women and their interests, the agendas of feminism, and the knowledge that is assumed and constituted by feminist knowledge-making practices in the domain of international law and policy” (p. 20). These “alternative feminisms” are present in the final chapter as examples of future feminist internationalisms, and I understand that difficult decisions must be made about what to include and what to exclude in a book of this complexity, but I still would like to have seen more engagement with anti-imperialist, anti-racist, grassroots feminist organizing.
Relatedly, this book is, and is not, about UN Security Council resolution 1325 and the “Women, Peace, and Security” (WPS) agenda it founded. Though Nesiah attributes great significance to the adoption of the resolution, arguing that “For ICF it is SCR 1325 that provides a normative framework rendering gender mainstreaming a central dimension of all peacebuilding and nation-building initiatives undertaken by, or funded by, international agencies” (pp. 35–36), she largely does not engage with the vast literature on WPS (too vast to begin to capture here). I am interested to know how Nesiah would integrate the excellent critiques of coloniality and imperialism in/of the WPS agenda that revolve around many of the same discussion points presented in the book, notably essays by Soumita Basu (“The Global South Writes 1325 (Too).” International Political Science Review 37(3), 2016), Swati Parashar (“The WPS Agenda: A Postcolonial Critique.” in Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, 2019) and Marsha Henry (“On the Necessity of Critical Race Feminism for Women, Peace and Security,” Critical Studies on Security, 9(1), 2021). Nesiah makes the point that “ICF operates in a political, legal, and normative ecosystem, and we need to study that ecosystem in order to understand how certain kinds of codependencies and convergences between different global governance projects become thinkable, sustainable, and, from some vantage points, inevitable” (p. 81); this is the endeavour that Paul Kirby and I undertook in our 2024 book Governing the Feminist Peace, in which we conceptualise WPS as a policy ecosystem and attempt to trace its continuities, disconnections, and borderlands. This is not an indictment of International Conflict Feminism, but as an indication that there is much to be gained from working on these topics in intentionally multi-disciplinary ways, given the extensive resonance between research in political science and security studies and the field of international law in which Nesiah is situated.
The final aspect of Nesiah’s valuable contribution to which I wish to draw attention is her reflexive awareness of her own role in the ICF infrastructure. She acknowledges: “I was both a participant in and an observer of what I now term International Conflict Feminism, so I too am entangled in the projects that are interrogated in these pages” (p. 21). Similarly, in the required disclosure of conflicts of interest in my recent reckoning with White feminism in the governance of violent extremism, I noted, “The author has worked on gender and the governance of peace and security for the past two decades and has been complicit in exercising many of the integrative moves and perpetuating many of the exclusions critiqued in the article” (p. 744 in “White feminism and the governance of violent extremism.” Critical Studies on Terrorism, 15(3) 2022). Just as Janey Halley insists that feminism “‘must find itself occasionally looking down at its own bloody hands” (p. 33 in Split Decisions, 2006), those of us who work on these issues must be open to our own critiques. That is the tremendous value of Nesiah’s book, and why it should be widely read by academics and practitioners alike: it demands that we look inward as well as outward; that we make and hold space for forms of feminist engagements with peace and security that exist in parallel to, below, or outside of contemporary systems of global governance; and that we recognize the unevenly distributed and often violent effects of even the most well-intentioned interventions of feminist governance.
