ICG recently released a report titled "Beyond Victimhood: Women's Peacebuilding in Sudan, Congo, and Uganda", which states that peacebuilding cannot succeed if half the population is excluded from the process. Women make a difference, in part because they adopt a more inclusive approach toward security and address key social and economic issues that would otherwise be ignored. But in all three countries, as different as each is, they remain marginalised in formal processes and under-represented in the security sector as a whole. The report details the situation in each country, as well as providing concrete reccomendations to the governments. Read report in full here.

I finally got around to re-reading some of the essays in Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. I first came upon this book as part of my Master's curriculum- there were too many books to read, and not enough time and I was forced to rush through it but I had always intended to read it at a leisurely pace another time. A compilation of Butler's more recent essays, the essays explore what it might mean to undo restrictive conceptions of gender and sexuality. Butler considers the norms that govern gender as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. Most interestingly to me, she writes about the "New Gender Politics" that has emerged in recent years, a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, and their complex relations to feminist theory.