New VoP-affiliated research project

Varieties of Peace members Elisabeth Olivius and Malin Åkebo have been awarded a three-year grant from the Swedish Research Council for the project “Between liberal norms and authoritarian governance: women’s organizations as peacebuilders in illiberal post-war states”.

The project will cover three cases in Asia, and explore how women’s organizations negotiate their position between international peacebuilding agendas and authoritarian state governance, and how this shapes their peacebuilding practices. Bringing together scholarship on feminist peacebuilding and illiberal peacebuilding enables a sophisticated analysis of how women’s organizations experience and respond to frictional encounters, and how their role as peacebuilders is conditioned by the combined impact of international peacebuilding norms and practices, and domestic authoritarian governance. As authoritarianism is the most common regime type in post-war societies, the knowledge generated will have far-reaching implications for peacebuilding research, policy and practice, and generate insights into the changing conditions for civil society in a global political era where illiberalism is on the rise.

For more information, see our Ongoing projects section.