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In this chapter, we problematise the common association of women and peace by engaging instead with the varied feminist scholarship on peace. We anchor this discussion in Shampa Biswas’ postcolonial feminist account of nuclear power to highlight how feminist peace scholars and activists shift our attention from the potential future uses of nuclear weapons to the harm they cause right now. From production, to testing, to deployment, nuclear weapons (along with nuclear power for so-called peaceful purposes) often negatively affect communities already marginalised in the global political and economic order. This discussion of everyday nuclear politics allows us to highlight the feminist concept of a continuum of violence that spans peace- and wartime, drawing attention also to how the personal is political – and international. We expand on this through a discussion of feminist anti-nuclear activism and its practices of care. Alternative feminist futures, where security and peace are envisioned as processes to sustain and nurture life, depend not on the pursuit of power in hierarchical social orders, but instead on practices and ethics of mutual care and relationality.

Feminist scholars and activists have historically been written out of peace research, despite their strong presence in the early stages of the field. In this article, we develop the concept of “wifesization” to illustrate the process through which feminist and feminized interventions have been reduced to appendages of the field, their contributions appropriated for its development but unworthy of mention as independent producers of knowledge. Wifesization has trickle-down effects, not just for knowledge production, but also for peacebuilding practice. We propose new feminist genealogies for peace research that challenge and redefine the narrow boundaries of the field, in the form of a patchwork quilt including early theorists, utopian writing, oral history, and indigenous knowledge production. Reflections draw on the authors’ engagements with several archives rich in cultures and languages of peace, not reducible to a “single story.” Recovering wifesized feminist contributions to peace research, our article offers a new way of constructing peace research canons that gives weight to long-standing, powerful, and plural feminist voices, in order to make peace scholarship more inclusive and ultimately richer.

This article returns to the original forum question “What is Global Security Studies?,” looking at it in relation to the theme of inclusion and exclusion to point out that security studies scholars exclude feminist scholarship on (everyday) security at their own peril. Showcasing the increasing body of feminist security studies scholarship, the article then highlights not only what scholarship might be included in a truly global security studies, but also the important insights (e.g., about the continuum of violence that spans peace- and wartime) that are missed without it. The article ends with a reflection on the need to also include a wider range of approaches as eminently valuable to global security studies.