This chapter takes an interest in the construction of gendered knowledge in the digital space. Through an analysis of the digital activism of the epistemic agent Nadia Murad, survivor of the genocide against the Yazidi, the chapter investigates how she departs from her personal, embodied experience of ISIS violence to advocate for justice, recognition and reparation. Through the methodological approach of netnography, the chapter analyses how she uses the social media platform X to gain considerable epistemic power, producing and disseminating knowledge and advocating for the empowerment of survivors, while at the same time navigating patriarchal oppression. The analysis destabilizes gendered assumptions of who holds authoritative knowledge, and how and where it can be exercised. 

This chapter introduces the theme of gendered knowledge production and proposes new understandings of epistemic agency, epistemic power and epistemic violence. These theoretical concepts are employed to critically approach the Women, Peace and Security agenda as a system of knowledge that comes with both possibilities and constraints. The chapter conceptualizes epistemic agency as embodied and narrative. By taking the embodied and narrative epistemic agency of ‘knowers’ seriously, new insights are forwarded about the role women play in producing knowledge about war. To expand and deepen understandings of violence and war, we engage in a feminist mapping of ways, sites and times of knowledge production highlighting women’s experiences, epistemic power and agency.

The Nordic states have played a central role in the production of knowledge within the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Through a strong research tradition in peace and conflict studies, extensive policy development, and significant international engagement, the Nordic region has contributed to both the theoretical and practical advancement of the agenda. In this article, we examine the WPS agenda as a knowledge system – an episteme – that, over the course of a quarter-century, has shaped a partially new field encompassing research, policy, and practice. Our critical analysis highlights what is identified and validated as valuable knowledge within this episteme, and which actors are considered legitimate knowledge holders. Our central argument is that the WPS agenda has gradually evolved through the global circulation of individual women’s lived experiences and perspectives, thereby influencing gendered power structures. At the same time, we find that the agenda also reinforces unequal structures and sustains silences. Finally, we reflect on the importance of interrogating knowledge production and making visible the relationship between epistemic power, epistemic agency, and epistemic violence. This, we argue, helps us to understand the paradox of a system designed to strengthen women’s protection, rights, and participation, while simultaneously producing epistemic violence.

De nordiska staterna har spelat en central roll i kunskapsproduktionen inom KFS-agendan. Genom en stark forskningstradition inom freds- och konfliktfrågor, omfattande policyutveckling och stort internationellt engagemang har Norden bidragit till både teoretisk och praktisk utveckling av agendan. I denna artikel intresserar vi oss för KFS-agendan som ett kunskapssystem – ett episteme – som under ett kvarts sekel har format ett delvis nytt fält omfattande forskning, policy och praktik. Vår kritiska analys lyfter fram vad som i detta episteme identifieras och verifieras som värdefull kunskap och vilka aktörer som anses vara relevanta kunskapsbärare. Vårt centrala argument är att KFS-agendan successivt har vuxit fram genom att enskilda kvinnors levda erfarenheter och perspektiv har kommit i global cirkulation, och därigenom påverkat könade maktstrukturer. Samtidigt finner vi att agendan också befäster ojämställda strukturer och upprätthåller tystnader. Avslutningsvis reflekterar vi över vikten av att undersöka kunskapsproduktion och synliggöra relationen mellan epistemisk makt, epistemisk agens och epistemiskt våld. Det hjälper oss att förstå paradoxen i att ett system som syftar till att stärka kvinnors skydd, rättigheter och inflytande samtidigt kan generera epistemiskt våld.

This edited volume critically investigates women’s knowledge about war and explores the epistemic agency of women in a range of contemporary settings across the globe. Women are deeply affected by war, participate in war and resist war. At the same time, knowledge production often ignores and marginalizes women’s experiences and gendered ways of knowing war. From Colombia to Israel and Palestine, Liberia, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, North America, Northern Iraq and Ukraine, the chapters in this book illuminate gendered knowledge production in and about different conflict-affected sites. By taking the embodied and narrative epistemic agency of local ‘knowers’ seriously, new insights are thereby presented about the role women play in producing knowledge about war. This book proposes new theoretical vantage points in order to understand how epistemic power and epistemic violence are closely related. Bringing the topic of knowledge production into the so-called ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda, it analyses how knowledge of the gendered nature of war and security is produced and circulated, and argues that the WPS agenda is a system of knowledge with its own omissions and silences. By theorizing gendered knowledge production and amplifying the voices of women as epistemic agents, this book advances scholarship on gender and war. This book will be of much interest to students of feminist studies, peace studies, war and conflict studies and International Relations.

This important book provides new understandings of how the politics of memory impacts peace in societies transitioning from a violent past. It does so by developing a theoretical approach focusing on the intersection of sites, agency, narratives, and events in memory-making. Drawing on rich empirical studies of mnemonic formations in Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, South Africa and Cambodia, the book speaks to a broad audience. The in-depth, cross-case analysis shows that inclusivity, pluralism, and dignity in memory politics are key to the construction of a just peace. The book contributes crucial and timely knowledge about societies that grapple with the painful legacies of the past and advances the study of memory and peace.

The relation between gender, silence, place and space is theorised in this article through an analysis of the former rape camp Vilina Vlas in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Combining a spatial perspective with narrative analysis, we dissect spatial practices and narrative silences that shape and reshape a particular place defined by gendered violence. We suggest that ‘places of pain’ and ‘spaces of silence’ are co-constituted through a lack of acknowledgement and spatial erasures, as well as the making and breaking of silences. Our investigation discloses how places of gendered violence are hidden, transformed and forgotten and how women exposing them are silenced and rejected, yet still continue to resist and speak out. The article sheds light on the long-term consequences of gendered violence in war and contributes to the growing research agenda on gendered geographies of violence. 

Bosnian citizens’ response to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine was immediate. In severalcities people came together in spontaneous protests in the streets to condemn the war and show their solidarity. In the capital Sarajevo, protests continued over several weeks. Posters were put up on trees and benches at various locations, still bearing visible scars of the city’s daily shelling during the almost four-year siege, the longest in 20th century European history. Two words were prevalent in these messages: “Sarajevo Understands”.In February 2022, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) was in the midst of one of the most challenging times in its post-war history. Issues ranged from the eruption of the Covid pandemic in 2020 exacerbating the already difcult socio-economic situation, to the infammatory ethno-nationalistic rhetoric and separatist agendas impeding crucial decision-making processes while pushing the country, as seen through the lens of international press, to the verge of breakup.1It was in this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty that citizens woke to the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th. It was as if an icy wind swept through the country. The aggression rekindled the traumatic memory of the outbreak of war in the country in 1992, still narrated as an event occurring practically “overnight”, and ignited fears of interlinked political ramifcations, such as Russia interfering with Bosnian peace and security for the purpose of threatening the regional security order in Europe.

The chapter investigates gender as a central organizing principle in memory work and demonstrates how gender functions as a powerful narrative trope for the constitution of the post-war state. Gendered memory tropes of women as either sexualized bodies or grieving mothers are analyzed and it is argued that by paying attention to how women's experiences are memorialized as part of homogenizing national narratives, we can understand more deeply what roles for women are deemed acceptable, encouraged, or discouraged. The chapter demonstrates that the concept of vertical fragmentation is a useful analytical lens when rethinking memory politics as a site for gendered constitutions of power and helps to identify how gendered memory politics is increasingly (re)negotiated and challenged through contestations below and beyond the nation-state. Civil society activism as well as the arts are two realms that may contribute to a productive fragmentation of monolithic memory and the chapter argues that such contestations of homogenizing, gendered memory tropes open up for gender-just peace.

This chapter examines the role of silence in transitional justice. Silence is more than the absence of speech since silence in human societies can serve numerous purposes in human interaction, social meanings, and political implications. Moreover, silence conveys difficult experiences and sensitive messages more effectively than speech, which also assists in rebuilding trust and restoring relations. The chapter also elaborates on the broad range of possibilities silence offers as a means of communication in war-torn communities. It cites that silence and its semantic and performative potential opens up critical enquiries into the disjunctures between the transitional justice paradigm and the lived experiences of transitions.

Nearly three decades after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, thousands of people are missing and mass graves are regularly found. Relatives still search for knowledge about their loved ones in the midst of secrets, rumors and ethnonationalist denial. As the country struggles to come to terms with this dark legacy of the war, art has emerged as a space for recognition of the lingering presence of absence of the missing.