Negotiating Gender Security: The Transnationalisation of Local Activist Discourses in Post-Conflict Burundi and Liberia

Abstract

Purpose

The chapter seeks to examine how local women’s groups in Burundi and Liberia have responded to the opportunities offered by UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and how transnational understandings of gender security have affected the way the locals advocate for gender policies at home.

Design/methodology/approach

Through discussion of data collected during extended fieldwork, the chapter illustrates the internal negotiation process between the international and the local elements of the transnational campaign for the implementation of Resolution 1325. The chapter first looks at the processes of identity creation and learning that enable local activists to adapt to transnational understandings of gender security. Second, it looks at the (re)production and adaptation of those understandings in local campaigns for gender security in post-conflict¹ Burundi and Liberia.

Findings

The chapter demonstrates how a very particular discourse on ‘gender security’ is used and reproduced through power relations between local and transnational activists, thereby enabling certain practices and policies to become natural and the best possible option.

Social implications

This implies that while transnational advocacy networks help grassroots social movements to be heard at international fora, these networks also impose certain discourses and practices, contributing to a depoliticisation of the grassroots activity.

Originality/value

Understanding how transnational advocacy networks negotiate and transform local women’s rights discourses is all the more important since these transnational networks have been considered as moral authorities in the global political arena.

Citation

de Almagro, M.M. (2016), "Negotiating Gender Security: The Transnationalisation of Local Activist Discourses in Post-Conflict Burundi and Liberia", Gender and Race Matter: Global Perspectives on Being a Woman (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 21), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 107-125. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620160000021007