Gender at the Intersection between the Armed Conflict and Peace Building in Colombia: A Balance
Gender and the role of women have become central concerns when analyzing armed conflict and peace transitions. Colombia has not been the exception. How has gender research and activism evolved at the intersec-tion of armed conflict and peacebuilding in Colombia?. Based on a detailed review of academic and official literature, complemented by 27 interviews with individuals from academia, the public sector, activism, and civil society, we identify some of the most significant moments, dilemmas, and milestones in this evolution.
First, we show how scholarly production and activism related to gender have been deeply marked by the armed conflict, which has made it possible to draw attention to the specific experiences of women in war but hindered the emergence of topics outside the needs and agendas of the context of war.
We observed that conversation around gender, conflict, and peace reflects and deepens old discussions on the center and the periphery: conversations on gender seem different and distant at the level of capital cities and other regions. Finally, it was possible to observe the impact of international agendas on intellectual production and activism. The panoramic vision offered by this article seeks to contribute to the state-of-the-art on this topic in Colombia and the visibility of a field under cons-truction in which gender, armed conflict, and peacebuilding intersect. Unlike other research on gender studies in Colombia, we not only conducted a documentary and bibliographic analysis but also focused our findings related to the experiences and reflections of people, mainly women, who have worked and led this field, as well as on their biographies.
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