Feminist Commitments Towards a Horizontal Women, Peace, and Security Critical Learning Community

Abstract This paper features the process whereby an experimental Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) program fostered a critical learning community around peace and security across 13 countries and with 40 women. It addresses the epistemological questions of doing research in collective ways (with and among activists/scholars), the axiological challenge of recognizing and embracing counter-expertise, and the possibilities for incorporating values and practices of care as well as non-extractivism in producing and disseminating knowledge. By articulating the core ethical principles that emerged from this experience, the paper suggests a critical feminist epistemological commitment in taking seriously grassroots women's knowledge in peace and security processes, rather than what is often done in both policy and academy: prescribing their needs from above, interpreting their knowledge from the outside, and advising what problems to tackle and how to live.