Join us for a dynamic conversation with Dr Jamie J. Hagen and Dr. Niharika Pandit discussing their new books

Professor Marsha Henry in conversation with Dr Niharika Pandit and Dr Jamie J. Hagen about their new books exploring everyday militarisation, peacebuilding, and queer security studies.

Occupying the Everyday: Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir (Oxford University Press) by Niharika Pandit

Occupying the Everyday ethnographically maps India’s military occupation of Kashmir by exploring space, home, time and storytelling/archive as both sites of military-colonial violence but also as spaces where wilful counterpolitics is generatively and continually practiced. The book argues that feminist and queer scholars thinking with/from the Global South must move beyond merely empirically mapping the colonialities of the modern nation-states and their entanglements with colonial control and militarised violence but also understand how people’s everyday realities epistemically shift how we can analyse and resist the violence of modern states and their imperial/colonial entanglements. Crucially, in narrating violence, the book foregrounds the resolute desire of people not to be consumed by overwhelming structures of power, positioning the everyday as a fertile ground for liberatory politics.

Queering Women, Peace and Security: Expanding Feminist Approaches to Gender in Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press) by Jamie J. Hagen

In 2000, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325, which addressed, for the first time, the experience of women and girls during conflict and the need to consider gender in peacebuilding. From this landmark resolution, a groundbreaking Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has evolved, guided by ten total Security Council resolutions. But to this point, the WPS framework and related scholarship has yet to meaningfully include queer and trans women in their programmatic work and conflict interventions. Queering Women, Peace and Security fills this gap by applying queer theory to feminist efforts to ensure a gender perspective is promoted by the WPS agenda. Engaging with WPS documentation, examples of implementation, and interviews with practitioners, the book examines how the needs of LGBTQ people in conflict and peacebuilding are considered within the current architecture and practices. In particular, it identifies the interchangeable use of the words “gender” and “women,” which betrays a larger analytical failure to think outside a binary categorization of gender. Informed by this analysis and interviews with leaders from Northern Ireland and Colombia, the book outlines steps those implementing the WPS agenda can take to work in collaboration with queer and trans communities in their gender, peace, and security work.

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