Open Lecture: Professor Swati Parashar
The Gender, Peace & Security Working Group at the Swedish Defence University hosts an open lecture with Professor Swati Parashar at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg.
The topic of the lecture is Inverting the Gaze: What Wars Know About IR.
What happens when the ‘international’ as a distinct social space is approached from the perspective of war rather than war from the perspective of the ‘international’? Tarak Barkawi’s question (Millennium, 39:3, 2011, 701 –706) is best answered by attempts to understand war not as part of inter/intra-state relations but as a socio-cultural, trans-historical activity that impacts on the ‘everyday’ lives of men, women and children. War produces its own 'gendered' warring bodies who define the ‘self’, community and the ‘other.’
Drawing upon her research on wars in South Asia, Swati Parashar reflect on how war shapes the banal and the fervent and how cultural and political narratives of ‘war bodies’ perform the ‘international’ in a variety of ways. I draw attention to the international space and international relations in particular, how they are shaped and transformed by war's many protagonists.
More about the lecturer
Swati Parashar is Professor in peace and development at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University.
Her research engages with the intersections between feminism and post colonialism, focused on conflict, peace and development issues in South Asia and Africa. She is interested in gender, militarism and diplomacy, particularly in the discourse and implementation of 'global' norms such as the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Most recently, she has coedited the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research. She is one of incoming editors of the International Feminist Journal of Politics and serves on the editorial boards of Security Dialogue, Third World Quarterly, Millennium: Journal of International Studies and Critical Terrorism Studies. She is the author and editor of several books and journal articles and regularly contributes to media debates as an op-ed writer.
Read more about Swati Parashar.