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International peacebuilding paradigms represent women’s organizations as important peacebuilding partners. However, most conflict-affected states are authoritarian or hybrid regimes, where women’s peacebuilding work may be associated with both difficulties and danger. While feminist peacebuilding scholarship has focused its critique on the frictional encounters between local women’s organizations and international liberal peacebuilding, it has not sufficiently explored how women’s peacebuilding practices are shaped by authoritarian state policies. Bringing together feminist work on friction in global-local encounters and work on civil society-state relations in non-democratic settings, we argue that friction is manifested as tensions and conflicts in several relationships. Drawing on interviews with women activists in and from Sri Lanka and Myanmar, this article examines how women’s organizations negotiate the constraints and pressures emerging from their relationships with international peacebuilding partners and donors, as well as with state authorities. Women’s organizations engage in a delicate balancing act to navigate state tactics of repression, co-optation and legitimation, and this precarious position is often further complicated by the practices and norms of international peacebuilders. Exploring these multidimensional frictional dynamics, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the political conditions that shape the peacebuilding practices of women’s organizations and the ways in which they mobilize to navigate these conditions.

What would we learn about rebel governance and civil wars if we includedwomen and took their labour, participation and experience of wars seriously?Much literature in this field is implicitly as well as explicitly gendered, privilegingmale experiences and knowledge. This Special Issue therefore aims to broadenour theoretical, conceptual and empirical discussion by exploring the role ofwomen’s labour and participation in underwriting, restricting or legitimisingrebel governance and civil wars. It will do so by tracing women’s gendered workin and experience of rebel groups across different civil war settings, and in post-war settlements and processes.

Women’s everyday work is critical to revolutionary projects yet is often written out of war stories. This article draws on a participatory photography project with rural women in Myanmar to show how, in the face of extensive violence, women’s productive and social reproductive labour sustains both individual households and revolutionary projects writ-large. We highlight the everyday acts of love and labour that generate affective and productive ties to rural landscapes, enabling people to endure violence and imagine a better future. Our work shows how making meaningful life has become both more difficult and more urgent during the Myanmar Spring Revolution.

This chapter asks “feminist questions” (Enloe 2004) about the Myanmar Spring Revolution. Following the coup d’état in February 2021, the Myanmar military violently cracked down on protestors and activists opposing its rule. Taking the form of a conversation between an ethnic minority activist and feminist (Stella Naw) who recently fled Myanmar and a feminist researcher of Myanmar (Jenny Hedström) based in Sweden, the authors reflect on what obligations a commitment to feminist struggles and equality imposes on activism and how, and in what ways, continuities of oppression and insecurity affect feminist activism in the midst of war. We ask: What do we see when we shift our focus from the 2021 coup toward other forms of oppression and war? What does it mean to live through revolutions and upheaval as a feminist committed to ethnic equality and justice? What are the opportunities for feminist activism from within military and/or patriarchal organizations, and what do we risk by working from inside? What are the sources of joy and hope within the current protest movement, and what do we need for a true, transformative change to occur in Myanmar?

For decades, women in and from Myanmar have engaged in documentation of human rights abuses by the Myanmar military, report writing and international advocacy campaigns as key strategies in pursuit of political change. Approaching these practices of knowledge production as expressions of narrative agency, this chapter examines how bearing witness has allowed women from marginalized ethnic minority communities to gain significant influence. It traces the evolution of human rights documentation targeting international audiences as a key strategy for the Burmese women’s movement in exile, and explores the politics of how narratives about violence and human right abuses are produced, circulated, silenced and heard. The chapter notes that constraints regarding which narratives can be heard and amplified in an international political context have led to an emphasis on conflict-related sexual violence at the expense of more complex narratives of structural gendered violence and insecurity. Further, after the onset of a political reform period in Myanmar in 2011, the interest of international actors shifted towards collaboration with government, which made them less receptive to oppositional narratives of still ongoing, state-sponsored human rights abuses. This demonstrates the sensitivity of women’s narrative agency to geopolitical shifts and changes in the international politics of aid.

In the image below, Mi Mi ties together her experiences of seeing the Myanmar military burn homes, cooking by candlelight, and struggling to grow crops and make ends meet during a period of climate and economic crisis, all with her baby on her back. Her story raises broader questions about how we understand the intersections of gender, land and revolution in Myanmar and other militarized landscapes. In this paper, we employ collaborative and mixed methodologies to map violence and resistance on the land and in the body, starting from Mi Mi’s story to advance a feminist counter-topography of war. We borrow the notion of counter-topography from geographer Cindy Katz, who poses counter-topography as an analytical and political project that examines the intersecting effects and material consequences of large-scale processes in a particular place. Our analysis brings together diverse datasets to illustrate how Myanmar’s contemporary conflict is shaped by spatial patterns and intergenerational histories of violence and endured through embodied relations to land and kin.