Critical Feminist Justpeace: Grounding Theory in Grassroots PraxisBy Karie Cross RiddleOxford University Press, 2024

2025 marked the 25th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which launched the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda, a pioneering comprehensive gender perspective on international conflicts and a roadmap for countries in peacebuilding processes. In assessing the successes and failures of this agenda, Critical Feminist Justpeace by Karie Cross Riddle is a relevant contribution to the theoretical discussion of feminism in international relations and its explanatory capacity for global phenomena that face significant challenges in these uncertain times.

Riddle employs a critical feminist methodology to advance a normative theory of change, bearing the book's name, which overturns the traditional ways peacebuilding is understood and materialized. The book adopts a top-down approach, beginning with international organizations and states, and then transitioning to local-level peacebuilding.

The normative aspect of Riddle's proposal is based on the strand of feminism known as transnational feminism, which draws on contributions from development, decolonial, and postcolonial theories in the context of globalization and the erosion of national borders. It employs the lens of intersectionality to problematize social interactions in territorial spaces across borders, advocating for the establishment of global support networks that prioritize the Global South. Therefore, the author defines critical feminist justpeace based on its goals, which are to reduce structural power hierarchies and direct forms of violence that directly affect historically marginalized groups and promote equitable justice outcomes at the public and private levels.

The book's thesis argues that while the WPS agenda has integrated and institutionalized women's experiences and problems as agents in peace processes in the context of armed conflict, its implementation has been deficient. The author critiques the agenda for not fully addressing the substantive issues in remote territories, leading to ineffective peacebuilding. From this thesis emerges her effort to construct a grounded theory of ‘Critical Feminist Justpeace,’ identifying the central critical positions regarding the WPS agenda and peacebuilding processes in general. However, the work fails to illuminate how the author has constructed this theory in a clear and didactic manner while emphasizing its usefulness as an alternative path and a guide for thinking about the relationship between gender, armed conflict, and peace.

While acknowledging the value of research and the incorporation of feminism into an analysis of the implications of an armed conflict such as this one on the lives of women and girls, the emphasis on this case study does not allow for the reproduction of an analytical model with considerable degrees of generalization at the methodological and methodological levels, considering that the aim of any theory is universality. The........

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