Ambiguous Agency : Care and Silence in Women’s Everyday Peacebuilding in Myanmar

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of everyday peace through analysing women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah (Karenni) state in Myanmar. I argue that everyday peace cannot be detached from rigid gender hierarchies and persistent power dynamics and that analytic attention needs to be paid to women’s, often neglected, contribution to everyday peacebuilding. Drawing on a theoretical framework of everyday peace and its feminist critique and by using Björkdahl’s concept of gendered peace gaps I illustrate how women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah state are shaped by dynamics of care and silence. Both are used as arenas for women’s peacebuilding agencies but simultaneously contributes to, are coupled with or amplify gendered peace gaps. Hence, the results unveil an interesting tension between women’s peacebuilding agency and the peace being built as the peacebuilding limits the grounds in which women can operate consequently contributing to a future gender-discriminatory peace in Myanmar. Through this focus, this thesis adds to the rich and longstanding feminist literature exploring the everyday by illustrating the importance of understanding peace based on everyday experiences shaped by gendered power relations. By exposing the relationship between power and agency I illustrate how women’s ambiguous peace agencies are incused by gendered power relations and might run the risk of reproducing or maintaining existing structures of power.