Overview

"Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as well as building more stable societies and efficient economies. This goal has been manifested in a wide range of programs and projects-or ""gender interventions""--including economic empowerment measures, gender quotas, gender-responsive budgeting, and legal reforms. Yet, the results have been uneven, provoking a sizable debate among scholars and practitioners seeking to explain the shortcomings and improve the outcomes. In Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy, Melissa Johnston explains why gender interventions often fail to help those who most need them, using the case of Timor-Leste, a country subjected to high levels of peacebuilding and gender interventions between 1999 and 2017. Looking at three types of gender interventions--gender-responsive budgeting, the law against domestic violence, and microfinance initiatives--Johnston argues that these reforms have produced mixed results because they reinscribe entrenched class and gender hierarchies in their implementation. Focusing on the connection between politics, economics, and gender, Johnston identifies the emergence of an elite class coalition, built on kinship and gender order in Timor-Leste as the root of the problem. Peacebuilders have made concessions to elites and violent men to keep the peace, a tendency amplified by ""local turn"" approaches to peacebuilding. As a result, deep inequalities remain and violence against women is endemic across the country. Compelling and insightful, Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy makes the case that as peacebuilders seek to rebuild war-torn societies, understanding the intersection of social and gender order is more important than ever."

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9780197637999

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Reviews

Melissa Johnston has penned what will surely be an instant classic in the fields of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction. Through careful fieldwork, Johnston shows that international peacebuilders in Timor-Leste, in some cases knowingly and in other cases ignorantly, carefully rebuilt and strengthened the systems of patriarchy. As a result, not only women, but the nation of Timor-Leste itself, are in a worse situation because of the international community's peacebuilding intervention. The 'local turn' in peacebuilding is revealed by Johnston as a deal with the devil of women's subordination, with all the negative consequences thereof for the whole society. It's time to ask who really gets what from international peacebuilding efforts. Highly recommended. * Valerie M. Hudson, University Distinguished Professor, Texas A&M University * Melissa Johnston's tour de force study of post-conflict Timor-Leste explains why peacebuilding interventions frequently fail to achieve their intended outcomes-especially their aspirations for gender justice. While liberal rights-based reforms are well intended and the local peacebuilding turn provides hybrid alternatives, structural feminist political economy analysis illuminates how unjust gendered divisions of labor and power are perpetuated by both cultural traditions and neoliberal mechanisms of aid and finance. Fundamentally, Johnston exposes the material relations that reinforce patriarchal power in a post-conflict society and the gendered violence that cements it. Her analysis is of major relevance to myriad post-conflict interventions, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Ukraine and Myanmar, and should therefore be read widely! * Jacqui True, Director of the Gender, Peace and Security Centre, Monash University * Drawing from extensive fieldwork, Johnston sheds light on the dynamics of post-conflict reforms in Timor-Leste. This rich, humane, and compelling account describes how the post-conflict period has been dominated by a coalition of militarized and patriarchal elites, to whom peacebuilders have made numerous concessions at women's expense. Furthermore, she deftly weaves together the connections between gender relations, class, and kinship in the country. This book is a compelling contribution to a growing literature. * Hilary A. Matfess, Assistant Professor of International Studies, University of Denver *

Author Information

"Melissa Johnston is a Lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. Her work applies a gender lens to examine the links between security and the political economy of development to better understand women's and men's experiences in conflict-affected environments. Her work on conflict, international financial institutions, and violent extremism in Southeast Asia has been published in journals such as Review of International Political Economy, Globalizations, and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. Her article, ""Frontier Finance"", won the 2021 Australian International Political Economy Network Prize. She is the recipient of the 2019 Australian Political Studies Association PhD Thesis Prize and the Prime Minister's Endeavour Award."

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