Intelligent Compassion

Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Catia Cecilia Confortini

Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations

Focuses on 1945-1975, a period of women's activism not often studied
Draws upon archival sources of oldest international women's organization
Includes original interviews with women peace activists

Intelligent Compassion

Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Catia Cecilia Confortini

Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations

Description

The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) has a unique role in post-war peace activism. It is the longest-surviving international women's peace organization and one of the oldest peace organizations in the West. Founded in 1915, when a group of women from neutral and belligerent nations in World War I met at The Hague to formulate proposals for ending the war, WILPF sent delegations of women to several countries to plead for peace, and their final resolutions are often credited with influencing Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points. Today, the organization counts several thousand members in 36 countries, on five continents. Since 1948, it has enjoyed consultative status with the UN, and it was instrumental in bringing about recent United Nations Security Council Resolutions on Women, Peace and Security.

Beginning in 1945, WILPF began identifying the limitations of its ideological foundations in relation to the international liberal order. Catia Cecilia Confortini argues that this period ushered in a turn in the organization's policies and activism, one that culminated in the mid-70s and served as an important antecedent to feminist activism that continues today. In Intelligent Compassion, she traces the organization's changing strategies and ideas over a thirty-year period, focusing on three key areas of its work-disarmament, decolonization, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine.

By analyzing the shifting ideas and policies of the longest-living international women's peace organization, Intelligent Compassion finds answers to IR questions about the possibility of emancipatory agency in the theoretical methodology of women peace activists and the extent to which activists can transcend the prevailing practices, rules and relations of their eras.

Intelligent Compassion

Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Catia Cecilia Confortini

Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations

List of Acronyms

Chapter 1 What is Feminist Peace?

Chapter 2 Feminist Critical Methodology, Peace and Social Change

Chapter 3 "Evidence of Things Unseen": WILPF and Disarmament

Chapter 4 What is Violence? WILPF and Decolonization

Chapter 5 Orientalism and Peace: WILPF in the Middle East

Chapter 6 Conclusion: Feminist Ways to Peace

Epilogue

Bibliography

Intelligent Compassion

Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Catia Cecilia Confortini

Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations

Author Information

Catia Cecilia Confortini is Assistant Professor of Peace and Justice Studies at Wellesley College. Her research interests focus on the contribution of women's peace activism to peace studies as an academic field and as a practice. She is the US representative to WILPF's International Board for 2011-2014.

Intelligent Compassion

Feminist Critical Methodology in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Catia Cecilia Confortini

Oxford Studies in Gender and International Relations

Reviews and Awards

"In this superbly sensitive and conceptually innovative book, we see the constitutive nature of women's peace activism and the radically changing international political context of the period from World War II to the mid-1970s in action. This is no small feat, but Confortini goes further, clearly articulating a productive relationship between feminist methodology, constructivism, and international relations theory that should be read by all students of feminism, international relations, and peace studies."--Cecelia Lynch, University of California, Irvine

"Catia Cecilia Confortini has written a critical history of a thinking, political, activist organization. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom survives the devastation of World War II and remains an organization engaged with the world's pressing threats to peace. In this well-researched book, Confortini writes candidly about the challenges of a women's organization that was practically, by definition, marginal to world politics at its founding. She asks how can peace activists transcend the values of their times given that they are in part shaped by those values. Confortini reveals WILPF to be an organization that needs to challenge itself by confronting the relative privilege of its members and identifies the methods by which WILPF does this through disarmament, decolonization and the Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict."--Brooke Ackerly, Vanderbilt University