What is the significance of gender and masculinities in understanding conflict? Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2013 and 2016, this book explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented by the state armed forces and the non-state actors in the Kashmir valley. In addition, the book broadens the understanding of women’s agency through its engagement with the construction, performance, and interplay of masculinities in the conflict. Combining existing elements of both feminist research and critical scholarship on men and masculinities, the book highlights the significance of foregrounding the interplay of men’s identities in conflicts to understand agency in a meaningful way. Through the focus on the simultaneous play of multiple masculinities, the book also questions the oversimplified and monolithic usage of masculinity being associated only with violence in conflicts. The empirical data in the book includes interviews and narratives of multiple stakeholders belonging to diverse vantage points in the Kashmir conflict. Some of these include activists, widows, wives of the disappeared, ex-militants, surrendered militants, participants of the stone-pelting movement, mothers of sons killed in the conflict, women representatives of the village Halqa Panchayats, and army personnel. The book also draws from alternative material in the form of graffiti, folk songs, poetry on graves, and slogans. Through anecdotal reminiscence, the author reflects on the challenges of field research in Kashmir that served as an opportunity for self-contemplation.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-SA 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This book examines the role of imagination in initiating, contesting, and changing the pathways of global cooperation. Building on carefully contextualized empirical cases from diverse policy fields, regions, and historical periods, it highlights the agency of a wide range of actors in reflecting on past and present experiences and imagining future ways of collective problem solving.

Providing a refreshing take on transitional justice, this second edition Research Handbook brings together an expanse of scholarly expertise to reconsider how societies deal with gross human rights violations, structural injustices and mass violence. Contextualised by historical developments, it covers a diverse range of concepts, actors and mechanisms of transitional justice, while shedding light on new and emerging areas in the field.

Based on rich empirical data, this book explores the politics of competing and sometimes overlapping masculinities represented in the Kashmir valley. It broadens the understanding of women's agency through its engagement with the construction, performance, and interplay of masculinities in conflict.

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands maps the relationship between gender and borderlands at a global scale and sets the agenda for developing a global composite field of gender and borderlands studies. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to understand the complex nexus at which gender and the borderlands intersect, modelling radical relationality at epistemological, ontological, and activist levels. Going beyond border studies’ frequent site at the U.S.–Mexico Border, this book examines the power relations of borderlands as they play out in, influence, and reflect gender dynamics. Contributors draw on case studies from around the world, and their chapters span diverse fields from anthropology, literature, and history, to political science, religious studies, sociology, and the arts. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands is an indispensable resource for scholars and students engaged in border studies, gender studies, and the wide range of interlocking disciplines that inform and enrich these fields. Chapters 1, 15 and 20.of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective. Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general. Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)

The book examines the representation of women, their agency and subjectivity and gender relations in 18th- and 19th-century India. The chapters in the volume interrogate notions and discourses of ‘women’ and ‘gender’ during the period, historically shaped by multiple and even competing actors, practices and institutions. They highlight the ‘making of the woman’ across a wide spectrum of subject areas, regions and roles and attempt to understand the contradictions and differences in social experiences and identity formations of women. The volume also deals with prevalent notions of masculinity and femininity, normative and non-conformist expressions of gender and sexual identity and epistemological concerns of gender, especially in its intersectional interplay with other axes of caste, class, race, region and empire. Presenting unique understandings of our gendered pasts, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, gender studies and South Asian studies.

This volume of new interdisciplinary essays provides insights into the emerging field of masculinities and the challenges it poses to the Indian male. Masculinities research has evolved considerably and demonstrates that men are not an homogenous group but are instead diverse--there are many "masculinities." Manliness can no longer be studied from just a North American or European perspective but from those of every part of the world. Covering an array of topics such as the construction of identity and the negotiation of power and sexuality, these essays aim to show how masculinities are experienced and embodied within India.

This book explores women’s militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women ‘do’ in wars. In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as ‘politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women’s identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them. The case studies discussed in the book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women’s roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women’s roles and experiences within them. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.