ABSTRACT
In international peacebuilding policy, women’s organizations are represented as important partners in the pursuit of peace. However, while existing feminist IR and peace studies literature focuses its critique on frictional encounters between local women’s organizations and international liberal peacebuilding, it has largely overlooked that in many conflict contexts, stability is upheld through illiberal governing practices employed by authoritarian or hybrid regimes. This chapter explores the relationship between state practices of illiberal peacebuilding and the activism of women’s organizations in Myanmar. Successive regimes in Myanmar have employed varying types of illiberal peacebuilding practices, with different effects for the space for civil society peacebuilding. This analysis traces dynamics of resistance, change, and co-optation in the work of women’s organizations in relation to the state as well as to international actors over time, exploring change from the pre-2011 era of direct military rule to the hybrid regime of the decade of political transition from 2011 to 2021. Bringing together feminist scholarship and illiberal peacebuilding literature, the chapter illustrates how illiberal peacebuilding practices generate inadvertent gendered effects, but also strategically mobilize gendered ideas and norms.
