Navigating friction: women’s peacebuilding in hybrid regimes

International peacebuilding paradigms represent women’s organizations as important peacebuilding partners. However, most conflict-affected states are authoritarian or hybrid regimes, where women’s peacebuilding work may be associated with both difficulties and danger. While feminist peacebuilding scholarship has focused its critique on the frictional encounters between local women’s organizations and international liberal peacebuilding, it has not sufficiently explored how women’s peacebuilding practices are shaped by authoritarian state policies. Bringing together feminist work on friction in global-local encounters and work on civil society-state relations in non-democratic settings, we argue that friction is manifested as tensions and conflicts in several relationships. Drawing on interviews with women activists in and from Sri Lanka and Myanmar, this article examines how women’s organizations negotiate the constraints and pressures emerging from their relationships with international peacebuilding partners and donors, as well as with state authorities. Women’s organizations engage in a delicate balancing act to navigate state tactics of repression, co-optation and legitimation, and this precarious position is often further complicated by the practices and norms of international peacebuilders. Exploring these multidimensional frictional dynamics, the article contributes to a fuller understanding of the political conditions that shape the peacebuilding practices of women’s organizations and the ways in which they mobilize to navigate these conditions.