Centrering women’s epistemology in the global resistance studies scholarship: Resistances against global peacebuilding architecture

The ongoing genocide in Palestine, withdrawal of United States funds overnight that left communities far across the world in a limbo and the decline of the United Nations as a multilateral organization in its capacity to foster world peace signal a shift in the “liberal” peacebuilding order, or more critically reveal a rupture that the “liberal” order never was fundamentally oriented towards peacebuilding. Resistance studies provides a theoretical, methodological, and epistemological framework for decolonising peacebuilding, foregrounding the multiplicity of resistance practices that converge within the field. Grounded in the experiences of Sri Lankan Tamil women who were actively engaged with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, this paper argues that resistance operates at multiple levels: active, silemt and epistemic (discursive) in opposition to Western donor projects that embed women within exploitative capitalist market systems by reinforcing gendered divisions of labour. The current liberal peacebuilding projects exert pressure on women from liberation movements to denounce their political activism through counter terrorism measures, and push them to become flagbearers of donor driven peacebuilding projects. However, the abrupt withdrawal of funding, which has forced these projects to downsize, questions the core values of “liberal” peacebuilding. What does liberation mean in a post-war context for women who were formerly involved in a liberation movement? Rather than reading silence as the absence of voice, this paper draws on resistance studies grounded in James C. Scott’s concept of everyday resistance, postcolonial feminist scholarship, and critical terrorism studies to identify the voices of resistance embedded within silence. The current criminalizing label attached to them as women ex-combatants in policy, academic and state discourses undermine their political agency. The re-articulation of prevention of terrorism act by the successive postcolonial regimes in Sri Lanka to silence their dissenting women subjects from minority communities reinforce the colonial systems of domination, suppression and control. While they live under state’s bio and disciplinary capillaries of power, they continue to resist in post-war Sri Lanka through embodiment of mnemonic practices, rituals and silence. Even though a local ownership debate was emphasized in the “liberal” peacebuilding approach, these approaches often undermined women’s potential. Empirical evidence of this study demonstrated that women were often provided with cattle as development aid in a post-war context determined by land dispossession. Rather than complying with these interventions, women repurposed the aid by rearing chickens to suit their material constraints. The resulting which I call the “chicken and cattle” metaphor in development aid, illustrates a form of everyday resistance where women resisted the colonial logic of subject formation of how they were only seen as aid recipients, not as the owners of defining the peacebuilding agenda. Using a postcolonial feminist framework, this research is grounded in 42 qualitative interviews conducted in Jaffna, Mannar and Kilinochchi, and archival research conducted in three national libraries in Sri Lanka. It establishes that women’s knowledge systems should be placed in the heart of resistance studies scholarship to understand the resistances that emerge against decolonizing the global peacebuilding architecture.