The Social Imaginaries of Women's Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

The metanarrative of global feminism is often constructed as a progressive and emancipatory movement emanating from the West and fostering radical politics elsewhere in the world. Such a view is not only ethnocentric but, critically, it fails to engage with the complex ways in which feminist politics travel and are evinced in specific localities. In this article, I seek to understand how marginalized women in the “Global South” – particularly in Africa – interpret, experience and negotiate feminist ideas to wield political power within the context of their social and moral worlds. I focus on women's organized resistance to violence and armed conflict, known as “women's peace activism.” Using a case study of a women's peace movement in Uganda mediated by an international feminist organization called Isis Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a wide range of activists in the organization and in its network in postconflict areas in Northern Uganda. I argue that the feminist peace discourse is most meaningful when its universal values of equity and securing the dignity of women are appropriated and re-signified through the cultural institutions and the collective memory of activists in their local settings.     

Establishing a feminist culture: the experience of Zimbabwe Women's Resource Centre and Network

The Zimbabwe Women's Resource Center and Network (ZWRCN) was established in 1990 to strengthen interorganizational networking activities for the exchange of experience and information on gender and development issues. ZWRCN has collected over 4000 documents on gender issues and operates a rural libraries program. Its efforts to create a feminist organizational culture fostering staff empowerment, lack of hierarchy, and participatory leadership have been more problematic, however. Most of the 15 staff recruited since ZWRCN's inception previously worked in male-dominated government agencies and are ambivalent about feminism. Struggles over power and control emerged between these employees, who regarded themselves as professionals in a bureaucratic sense, and junior staff with less expertise but a strong commitment to feminism. Also controversial were expectations that staff members would socialize outside of work and stay at work as long as needed to complete a task. In 1994, ZWRCN was forced to adopt a staff code of conduct and regulations in order to qualify for donor support. ZWRCN has been forced to abandon its original goal of creating a feminist culture and aim for a culture of participation less threatening to gender relations in the wider society. More awareness at the time of inception on the part of ZWRCN founders about ways feminist management styles would conflict with the socialization of future staff members might have averted some of this tension.