Book talk: IPEG book prize 2024 winner, ‘Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy'

In this book talk Melissa Johnston of the University of Queensland will present her book, Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste, winner of the 2024 IPEG Book Prize. Johnston uses gender and class to explain the uneven outcomes in peacebuilding outcomes, arguing that in the cases under examination peacebuilders made concessions to elites and violent men in order to keep the peace, a tendency amplified by local-turn approaches to peacebuilding. This tendency has reinforced the valorisation of armed masculinity, associated most strongly with the dominant class, which has in turn justified the unequal distribution of state petroleum resources. In addition, she argues that gender, class, and domestic violence are connected through brideprice, rendering legal and political reforms ineffective. Finally, the book examines microfinance finding that instead of empowering women as intended its main beneficiaries were elites, repeating patterns of accumulation and rule through debt established during the Indonesian era.

Registration will close two hours before the event begins