ABSTRACT: The political crisis unleashed by former President Pedro Castillo's self-coup in December of 2022 triggered a wave of protests in Peru. The response of Peruvian denizens, particularly those of the southern highlands, was deeply connected to a long history of neglect, marginalization, and racism. The hyper-centralist political elites of Peru have historically rejected Indigenous people's rights, producing deep political divisions that fueled social unrest during 2023 and the first half of 2024. To deal with the crisis, the government of the new president, Dina Boluarte, ordered the repression of massive demonstrations and other acts of civil disobedience held nationwide. Police repression produced the death of more than fifty people and wounded hundreds of others. As tensions heightened, Indigenous women's role in the protests caught national attention and has increasingly become a symbol of resistance.
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the intersection of national and feminist liberation in the autobiographies of two Palestinian women who have been actively engaged in the Palestinian anticolonial struggle. The first autobiography, This Side of Peace (1995), is the life narrative of Hanan Ashrawi, an academic and politician who was a leading figure in the first Intifada and a key negotiator in the Oslo Accords. The second, My People Shall Live (1973), is the autobiography of Laila Khaled, a Marxist revolutionary and militant who gained international renown for her role in several military operations, including the hijacking of Israeli airplanes. Confronted by the dual challenges of patriarchal structures within their Indigenous homeland and the eliminative discourse of the settler state, these testimonies emerge as powerful narratives of intersectional resistance. The two works provide a wide-ranging yet cohesive portrayal of female participation in the Palestinian anticolonial movement against the Zionist settler colonial project, encompassing various forms of involvement, from militancy to diplomacy. While the two figures differ in their approaches to anti-colonial resistance, nationalism, and politics, they both articulate the complex interplay of nationalist sentiment and feminist liberation.
ABSTRACT: In 2018, the US initiated direct negotiations with the Taliban to establish a framework for a future peace in Afghanistan. Despite rhetorical commitments to gender inclusion under frameworks like United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), Afghan women's contributions, demands, and peacebuilding strategies were consistently sidelined—rendered symbolic, rather than substantive. This paper interrogates the gendered exclusions embedded within the US–Taliban peace process and situates them within broader critiques of imperialism, securitized diplomacy, and the instrumentalization of feminist rhetoric in international affairs. Grounded in transnational and postcolonial feminist theory, international human rights law, and the concept of epistemic violence, this research foregrounds Afghan women's resistance as a form of counter-knowledge production and epistemic defiance. Through a mixed methodology—including case study analysis (Simons), archival research, and virtual ethnography (Günel; Flick) via WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter (now X)—this study explores how diverse groups of Afghan women were not only excluded from negotiations, but also how their erasure was structured into dominant international peacebuilding discourses that reinscribe imperial governance and symbolic inclusion. By addressing the legal and feminist deficits of the agreement, and by amplifying the diverse epistemic strategies of Afghan women's groups, this work calls for a reimagining of feminist solidarities—grounded not in representation alone, but in justice, mutuality, and structural transformation.
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the interplay between collective trauma, memory, and movement-building in the diasporic response to the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) uprising that began in Iran in September 2022. Drawing from lived experience as both a participant in the US-based support efforts and someone shaped by political repression in post-revolutionary Iran, the author reflects on how unprocessed trauma among organizers surfaced during the first year of the movement, often disrupting collaboration and deepening internal fractures. Anchored in the phenomenological tradition—especially Paul Ricoeur's concepts of narrative identity, memory, and hesitation—the paper shows how the act of writing not only revisits past events but reshapes them, revealing memory as an evolving ethical process. Through two autobiographical vignettes from adolescence, the author examines how trauma stored in the body can be reactivated in political organizing, and how cultural scripts of pride, endurance, and silence can obstruct healing. The paper argues that sustainable liberation movements must attend not only to external systems of oppression but to the internal wounds that participants carry. It concludes by calling for a trauma-informed approach to diasporic organizing, one that centers nervous system regulation, collective care, and joy as critical components of revolutionary praxis.
