Recentering the Policy Recipient: Self-Decolonizing Practices of Women in Conflict

The UN Security Council’s passage of Resolution 1325 and the follow-on Women, Peace and Security resolutions have been commended for their engagement with issues of peace and security for women; however, the language of the resolutions and the rhetoric surrounding them have reinforced discourses about Africans, gender, and conflict, reproducing sub-Saharan Africa as internally undifferentiated and as the place where women are most at risk. Ideas about women in conflict, on one hand, and conflict in Africa, on the other, tend to reinforce and perpetuate the continued attention to sexualized violence, particularly rape, as opposed to other forms of violence and possibilities of peacebuilding in international policy. While academic critiques of these resolutions’ attention to sexualized violence have begun to proliferate, they do not investigate the source of this focus, nor how it falls predominantly on sub-Saharan African women. This paper examines how local women’s organizations in Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, and Guinea work to counter victimizing, marginalizing discourses through their implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda. I ask if local women’s organized efforts in their own communities can decolonize international peace and security policies targeting them, or if the policies themselves must be rewritten. Through interviews and participant observation, I explore whether local practice can decolonize international policy, or if it is beholden to international policymakers and donors to such an extent that decolonization is all but impossible.