‘Too naïve for politics’: Women and deliberative peacemaking

This chapter examines the exclusion of women from deliberative peacemaking despite UN Security Council Resolution 1325 by arguing that women’s mere presence without agenda-setting power constitutes an exclusion. Working with a model of feminist democratic deliberation—corporeal, contextual, affective, and emotionally literate—it contends that dominant norms of abstraction, neutrality, rationality, and balancing render women’s participation simply participatory. Using the island of Ireland, the chapter troubles claims of when conflict “ends” by foregrounding women’s experiences of gendered and structural violence and adopting a feminist theory of harm to reframe what counts as conflict, peace, and political violence. The chapter combines temporalities (the “living present” and allochronic time) and constituent power (creation, destruction, and legitimisation of legal/political orders), arguing for women’s rights to reject, to set agendas, and to occupy the public sphere. Mixing theoretical prefiguration with pragmatic, transversal praxis, the chapter proposes actionable iterations of feminist deliberative peacemaking to move feminist norms from the margins.