MeganMacKenzie and NicoleWegner, eds, Feminist Solutions for Ending WarLondon: Pluto Press, 2021

When completing this book review (October 2022), the war in Ukraine has already been underway for months while peace talks remain without significant results. So, once again, the question of how to effectively end war is not only being discussed by peace and international relations (IR) scholars but also by the wider public. It seems obvious that there is no such thing as the one and only path to end violent conflict, as war and peace remain highly complex phenomena. Nevertheless, feminist scholarship continues to provide starting points for discussion and practice, and it challenges conventional IR approaches which focus on security rather than on the creation of sustainable peace for everybody. Feminist Solutions for Ending War, edited by Megan MacKenzie of Simon Fraser University and Nicole Wegner of the University of Sydney, comprises 14 short contributions which all address from a feminist perspective the question of how to end war. The editors selected a diverse group of authors from around the world (though with a preponderance from Australia and other British Commonwealth nations) who discuss different aspects which they assume to be essential for peace. The contributing authors come from indigenous, postcolonial, queer, ecological and anti-militarist feminist backgrounds, all following an intersectional approach in their analyses. Connections are illustrated, for example, between feminism, the economy, and threats posed by the climate crisis. The contributions further have in common that they recognize neoliberalism, patriarchy and white supremacy as the root causes of war and violent conflict, and the essays work toward dismantling these systems of oppression. All contributions highlight the importance of listening to female and LGBTQI* voices, thus challenging mainstream ideas of knowledge production. Another aspect deemed important by the majority of the contributors is the strength of interpersonal relationships and communities in the fight against war. Besides their feminist analysis, the contributors provide realizable solutions to the problems they address, hence not remaining exclusively theoretical but bridging the gap between academia and practice. This constructive approach leaves the reader with a feeling of hope and not with the often-felt despair when examining issues of war and conflict. The first contribution, “Giyira: Indigenous Women's Knowing, Being and Doing as a Way to End War on Country,” by Jessica Russ-Smith of the University of New South Wales, provides a Wiradyuri Indigenous feminist perspective on war. Russ-Smith challenges the overall Western notions of war and peace and discloses the violence hidden in this way of thinking. Using the climate crisis and the Australian bushfires from 2019 to 2020 as examples, Russ-Smith illustrates how colonial violence has continued until today. Her main argument is that Indigenous women's knowledge about past-present-future relations is highly relevant for the creation of peace and that colonized Western knowledge must be challenged by more wholistic Indigenous forms of knowing, being, and doing. In “One for All, All for One: Taking Collective Responsibility for Ending War and Sustaining Peace,” Heidi Hudson of South Africa's University of the Free State invokes the African concept of Ubuntu, which, as the essay's title implies, highlights the significance of taking collective responsibility for the creation of peace. Hudson describes how means like solidarity, collective care and shared responsibility can contribute to peace, and she proposes the use of group mediation and reconciliation forums to deal with conflict. She promotes, therefore, a combination of traditional Ubuntu values and feminist thought, hence an “Ubuntu-inspired feminism” (33). The addition of feminist ideas and ethics of care to Ubuntu is meant to extend the South African concept in order, for example, to leave binary gender categories behind and to achieve a sustainable version of peace. In “Queer our Vision of Security,” Cai Wilkinson of Australia's Deakin University questions the predominant understanding of war and security as relating to military means. Wilkinson uses the examples of border violence, bathroom discrimination, and the above-average murder rate of trans persons to demonstrate how queer people experience an “everyday war” (93) even in societies which are not officially in a state of violent conflict. Using an intersectional lens, Wilkinson shows that many people face different forms of structural – but also direct – violence on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, Wilkinson calls for an inclusion of queer perspectives into our understanding of war and security, and they demand the abolition of all forms of oppression and of hetero- and cis-normative domination. Building on postcolonial, Black feminist and intersectional theory, Yolande Bouka, of Queen's University in Canada, in “Make Foreign Policies as if Black and Brown Lives Mattered,” draws the reader's attention to the negative impact Responsibility to Protect (R2P) interventions have often had on Black people and People of Color in the past. Following an anti-racist and anti-colonial approach, Bouka explains how military interventions into countries in conflict have disproportionately harmed civilians and especially women and girls, for example, in the case of the United Nations's intervention in Somalia in 1993 or during the United States's war on terror. She persuasively dismantles the colonial and anti-feminist logics deeply ingrained in these missions and reveals the use of narratives and discursive power executed by the interveners to legitimize their actions. Bouka calls on politicians to prioritize the needs and perspectives of those who are the most affected by conflict in decision making and to stop intervening in the name of human rights. For her, the solution to ending war lies in the radical abolition of all forms of oppression and in the equal treatment of all humans independent of their skin color. In “Change How Civilian Casualties are ‘Counted,’” Thomas Gregory of the University of Auckland argues, as one part of a feminist response to war, for a change in the way civilian casualties are measured and referred to. He draws attention, first, to the importance of actually counting casualties in war. At the same time, Gregory warns of the danger of perceiving these figures as mere statistics and not as the deaths of actual human beings. Thus, he argues secondly for a feminist way of dealing with casualties in order to remember the dead but also to challenge global militarist approaches that regard killed civilians as collateral damage of warfare and hence unfortunate necessities. Feminist thought is relevant for this topic as it rejects masculinist and militarist ideas of violence and war and focuses on individuals and their emotions, thus making the pain, the distress, and the suffering of violent conflicts visible. Two contributions which appear to contradict each other in their solutions for ending war are “Learn from Kurdish Women's Liberation Movements to Imagine the Dissolution of the Nation-state System,” by Eda Gunaydin, and “Create Just, Inclusive Feminist Economies to Foster Sustainable Peace,” by Carol Cohn and Claire Duncanson. While Gunaydin promotes the abolition of the state, Cohn and Duncanson argue for “a strong, effective, accountable state” (191). Interestingly enough, these two essays share the identification of capitalism and patriarchy as the root causes of war and violence, but the Kurdish feminist approach sees the nation state as a reproduction of exactly these root causes, thus standing in clear contrast to Cohn's and Duncanson's viewpoint. Although their economic analysis gives a coherent impression focusing on care and the environment while dismantling the oppressive logics of capitalism, Cohn and Duncanson could be more precise when describing the transformation process of the post-conflict society. Also, their emphasis on the significant role of the state runs the risk of reproducing problematic state-building practices in post-conflict societies. The Kurdish solution to end war based on democratic confederalism and self-organization seems to be more promising, not least because Gunaydin demonstrates that these concepts are indeed working in practice in Rojava, an autonomous, multi-ethnic enclave in northeastern Syria. Although Rojava has come into existence in the context of the war in Syria, it can be seen as an example of successful self-organization detached from state-centric ideas, building on Kurdish feminist thought and self-sustainability. While currently being confronted with the Turkish invasion in Northern Syria and the consequent need for self-defense, it is still a practical example of how visions of positive peace could be approached. To conclude, Feminist Solutions for Ending War is an elaborate volume with stimulating contributions which provide innovative ideas on how to achieve a vision of positive peace, bringing to the fore important issues which still gain far too little attention in mainstream academia and politics. Building on baseline works by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Cynthia Enloe, and many others, each contribution gives a well-reasoned impression. Though each essay is rather short and hence only focuses on one or a few specific points, the book as a whole conveys hope and inspiration for imagining and working actively toward a world in peace. The book does not, of course, provide a one-size-fits-all solution to war, and it cannot, therefore, propose immediate solutions, for example, for the war in Ukraine. However, when thinking on a more sustainable, long-term level, Feminist Solutions for Ending War provides substantial ideas that offer alternatives to militarist and masculinist responses to violent conflict. That the latter are not able to lead to a world in peace is obvious.

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