The Concepts of Violence and Peace in Feminist Critiques of War

The paper reviews the main concepts and methodological approaches of feminist peace and conflict theory. It reproduces and analyzes the arguments of feminist war critique, and critically relates them to the general theoretical assumptions of the sociology of conflict. The following spheres of feminist war critique are considered in their intersection with sociology of conflict: feminist international relations theory, feminist peace research, peace activism, and peace education. Moreover, the paper shows that there is an intellectual intersection of the feminist prism and R. Collins’ project of micro- and macrosociology. It is argued that the level of awareness of the feminist tradition of conflict in Russian social studies is insufficient at the disciplinary level. The concepts of gender, everyday violence, and positive peace are introduced; their roles are investigated in the feminist war critique. Gender is considered a social and symbolic construct that both creates and is created by the social relations of power. Gender inequality in power, in its turn, produces various forms of violence (physical, sexual, financial, psychological, and social). Other structures of marginalization — race, class, sexuality, physical/mental (dis)abilities — are also taken into consideration. The continuity of the different forms of violence, as posed in the feminist war critique, is problematized: global and regional conflicts are seen as an extension of those diverse forms of violence that flourish during everyday social interactions. Thus, through the problematization of the “continuum of violence”, the paper conceptualizes the trend of feminist research (tracing the connection between everyday social interactions and global conflicts) as a common task of conflict sociology. The essay is intended to highlight the potential of both conceptual and methodological interchange between feminist war critique and conflict sociology.

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