Speaker: Dr Toni Haastrup
Date: Thursday 1 November 2018
Chair: Dr Gina Heathcote

In the almost 20 years that the Women Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has existed, it has encouraged the centring of gender concerns in the global governance of security. Dominant in the narratives of WPS practice is the impact of the Global North in this area, as we see in the foreign policy priorities of Canada, Sweden and the UK. The dominant narratives tend to exclude the contributions of those outside of the Global North to knowledge about what the WPS is. A reflection on the role of the African women supported by the African Union in particular suggests Africa as a key source towards a WPS agenda that is transformative. By taking into account the initiatives at the regional level and the role of feminists, African practices of WPS can be re-read not as the outcome of received Northern knowledge, but rather as African innovations within the WPS informed global security architecture. 

Toni Haastrup is Senior Lecturer in International Security and a deputy director of the Global Europe Centre(GEC). She joined the University of Kent in 2013. The focus of her current research interests is on the practices of practitioners within regional security institutions as they implement the Women Peace  and Security agenda.

The Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Africa

Speaker/author: Zahra Ali, Sociologist and Assistant Professor at Rutgers University
Date: Thursday 22 November 2018
Chair: Haneen Naamneh (Dpt of Sociology and Middle East Center, LSE)
Guest Speakers: Nadje Al-Ali (Centre for Gender Studies, SOAS); Sami Zubaida (Emeritus, Dpt of Politics, Birkbeck); Charles Tripp (Dpt of Politics and International Studies, SOAS)

Since the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, the challenges of sectarianism and militarism have weighed heavily on Iraqi women. In this book, Zahra Ali foregrounds a wide-range of interviews with a variety of women involved in women’s rights activism, showing how everyday life, political and intellectual lives have development since the US-led invasion. In addition to this, Ali offers detailed historical research of social, economic and political contexts since the formation of the Iraqi state in the 1920s.

Through a transnational and postcolonial feminist approach, this book also considers the ways in which gender norms and practices, Iraqi feminist discourses, and activisms are shaped and developed through state politics, competing nationalisms, religious, tribal and sectarian dynamics, wars, and economic sanctions. The result is a vivid account of the everyday life in today’s Iraq and an exceptional analysis of the future of Iraqi feminisms.

Zahra Ali is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research explores the dynamics of women and gender, social and political movements in relation to Islam(s), the Middle East, and contexts of war and conflict with a focus on contemporary Iraq. Ali is also a Muslim feminist activist involved in anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles.

To order the book online: http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/middle-east-government-politics-and-policy/women-and-gender-iraq-between-nation-building-and-fragmentation?format=PB&isbn=9781316641620

Book Launch: Women and Gender in Iraq: Between Nation-Building and Fragmentation

Speaker: Dr Tania Saeed
Date: Thursday 29 November 2018
Chair: Dr Amina Yaqin

Dr. Tania Saeed spoke about her book "Islamophobia and Securitization. Religion, Ethnicity and the Female Voice" that explores everyday realities of young Muslim women in Britain, who are portrayed as antithetical to the British way of life in media and political discourse. The book captures how geo-political events, and national tragedies continue to implicate individuals and communities at the domestic and local level, communities that have no connection to such tragedies and events, other than being associated with a religio-ethnic identity. Saeed shows how Muslim women are caught within the oxymoronic spectrum of the vulnerable-fanatic, always perceived to be ‘at risk’ of being 'radicalized'. Focusing on educated Muslim females, the book explores experiences of Islamophobia and securitization inside and outside educational institutions, and highlights individual and group acts of resistance through dialogue, with Muslim women challenging the metanarrative of insecurity and suspicion that plagues their everyday existence in Britain.

Dr Tania Saeed is an Assistant Professor in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS)at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, LUMS, Pakistan. She read for a DPhil in Education at the University of Oxford, and an MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the London School of Economics and Political Science.