Women's everyday peacebuilding in the shadow of a divisive past: inter-communal care networks in Northern Sri Lanka

Feminist and critical peace research both emphasize the everyday as a vital site of peacebuilding. This article examines the Muslim and Tamil women's inter-communal network, KESHA, in Mannar in Northern Sri Lanka. In a setting of complex population displacement, communal conflict, and violence, I argue that women gained social standing, companionship, and security through their care and peacebuilding work and that they improved inter-communal relations. The article centers care and empathy within peacebuilding, while focusing on women's peacebuilding in a context of gender, class, and ethnic marginalization. I examine women's care and peacebuilding as “quiet politics,” highlighting emotions, self-trust, and openness as less visible aspects of peacebuilding and care. Women in Mannar engaged in “continuums of care,” using their care work in their families and communities to underpin their inter-communal peacebuilding. Departing from an instrumental focus on social practices and negative peace, prevalent in some critical peacebuilding literature, the article engages with interdependence, vulnerability, relationality, and empathy, and offers a more transformative understanding of everyday peacebuilding and peace.