Women’s Participation and Everyday Peace: A Challenge for Catholic Social Ethics

This article considers how to advance women’s participation in peacebuilding, a major goal of the UN Women, Security and Peace (WPS) agenda. Catholic social teaching (CST) offers a compelling vision of human participation, but the tradition fails to meaningfully engage the diverse realities of women. We bring critical and feminist peace studies literature into conversation with CST to illuminate how CST’s gendered and scalar biases can undermine the church’s stated aspirations to equal participation. We argue that Catholic social ethics can more adequately address the needs of women peacebuilders by taking up the lens of “everyday peace,” which illuminates the agency of marginalized persons and communities through attention to quotidian, mundane, and embodied realities, including care practices. We demonstrate the value of this lens through case studies of peacebuilding interventions by Caritas Uganda and the John Paul II Justice and Peace Centre that promote women’s participation in the Bidibidi refugee settlement in northwestern Uganda.