This book develops a feminist political economy approach to identify the linkages between different forms of violence against women and macro structural processes in strategic local and global sites - from the household to the transnational level.It seeks to account for the globally increasing scale and brutality of violence against women. These sites include economic restructuring and men's reaction to the loss of secure employment, the abusive exploitation associated with the transnational migration of women workers, the growth of a sex trade around the creation of free trade zones, the spike in violence against women in financial liberalization and crises, the scourge of sexual violence in armed conflict and post-crisis peacebuilding or reconstruction efforts and the deleterious gendered impacts of natural disasters. Examples are drawn from South Africa, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, the Pacific Islands, Argentina, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Iceland.
The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is one of the oldest peace organizations in the West. Founded in 1915, when a group of women from neutral 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. Beginning in 1945, WILPF began identifying the limitations of its ideological foundations in relation to the international liberal order. 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 this book 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.