What does peace mean in today’s world of endless wars? Why has the project of ‘universal peace’, so ardently hoped for by the drafters of the UN Charter in 1945, failed so profoundly? I reflect on these questions through three stories of peace. The first is told by a series of four stained-glass windows in the Peace Palace in The Hague; the second is of the world’s demilitarised zones; and the third of a peace community in Colombia. These stories provide (...) a springboard to reflect on how we might rethink peace in the context of today’s world, drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial analyses. My discussion exposes the limits of the UN Charter’s approach to peace, and the impossibility of its methods ever achieving ‘universal peace’. The Charter’s reliance on militarism and collective enforcement, as well as its commitment to peace as an evolutionary process, maintain rather than dismantle global hierarchies of domination. I also question the dualism of war and peace, which obscures much of the violence of what we call peace. The task of rethinking peace is urgent. To do so we need to go beyond the worlds we know, beyond the confines of law and the inevitability of quotidian hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race, to invent new methods of peace-making, outside the ‘frames of war’. (shrink)

Radical innovations and practices frequentlyfind themselves in an inhospitable environment,struggling against the gravitational force ofdominant norms, practices and relations. Thispaper explores the problems radical changeconfronts in its attempts to become sustainable.Against the postmodern valorisation of thetransient and ephemeral, the paper argues forthe importance of routinisation and repetitionin the process of creating and sustainingchange. A metaphor of social pathways isdeveloped to explore how new routines arecreated through de jure (governance) andde facto (usage) means. The paper arguesthat, in contrast to governance, the (...) emergentdurability generated by usage enables routinesto outlive their conditions of existence.At the same time, routines at odds with theirsocial and institutional environment tend overtime to disappear. The second half of the paperdraws on four British attempts to introduce newpathways: lesbian and gay local governmentinitiatives, Conservative education reforms,Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp and LocalExchange Trading Systems (LETS). Through theseexamples, the paper reflects on attempts tocreate more conducive environments, and some ofthe difficulties this generates. (shrink)

This article presents a conceptual approach to feminist history that focuses on the strategies activists use in different temporal and spatial locations. The argument builds on recent insights within feminist theory and historiography that reveal an intimate relationship between historiography and epistemology in knowledge politics. This article, however, probes the limitations of this relationship by focusing on how current historiographical methods exclude or dilute the actions and events of history through representation and citation. By examining the work of Jamaican theatre (...) collective Sistren, and Bristol agit-prop group Sistershow, the article presents two ways to rethink temporality that makes those histories resistant to representation. This article argues for a more careful historiography that can do justice to the action of different historical temporalities. In the process, it opens emergent spaces and temporal challenges for feminist knowledge politics. (shrink)

By the 1990s the dynamic array of creative direct action tactics used against militarised technologies that emerged from women’s anti-nuclear protest camps in the 1980s became largely eclipsed by cyberfeminism’s focus on digital and online technologies. Yet recently, as robots and algorithms are put forward as the vanguards of new drone execution regimes, some are wondering if now is the time for another Greenham Common. In this article I return to cyborg feminism and anti-nuclear activisms of the 1980s to explore (...) what drone feminism might look like today. I examine how anti-nuclear protesters infused affect and techné, creating innovative images of, and tactics for, material resistance. I argue that Greenham women’s cyborg feminisms arose from their material entanglements with the military base. In their efforts to reveal and undermine the national and imperial myths upon which warfare is based, protesters re-imagined technological possibilities based upon a global accountability for ‘earthly survival’. (shrink)