Along with all its horrors and devastation, sometimes war generates opportunities to rebuild, recover and reconstruct society. The period after a peace agreement, whilst no tabula rasa, can, to some degree, offer a window of opportunity to structure economies and societies differently, to respond to the inequalities and injustices that led to war and to foster the conditions of sustainable peace. The United Nations has long talked about this opportunity to “build back better” but what does it look like in practice? More importantly, what could it look like, if we were to dream big and think about feminist visions of peace, based on economies oriented towards human and planetary flourishing?

About the speaker

Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace and security, with a particular focus on and gender and peacebuilding. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace. She is the author of Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press, 2016), and a range of publications on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Claire works with Carol Cohn at the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights on the Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet Project, co-authoring Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States in Review of International Political Economy (2019), Women, Peace and Security in a Changing Climate in the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2020), and Critical Feminist Engagements with Green New Deals in Feminist Economics (2023). Recently, Claire has been working with the Scottish Government on the development of a feminist approach to Foreign Policy.