The Gendered Construction of ?Peace?: Conflict in Israel/Palestine and the Women?s International League for Peace and Freedom.

My paper follows the policies of an international women’s organization (the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) on the conflict in Israel/Palestine from 1946 to 1975 to demonstrate that their idea of ‘peace’ was influenced and shaped by the two intertwined ideological discourses of modernity and Orientalism. The WILPF eventually came to reframe their idea of ‘peace’ through their increasing reliance on feminist social criticism, thus contributing to reshape the ideological context in which they were situated. I argue that feminist social criticism made possible for the WILPF to break the entrapment of the context that created and shaped it, to the extent in which it: 1) was self-reflective about its often unstated but constitutive values, practices, and norms; 2) practiced inclusivity in deliberations; and 3) subjected its own values, practices, and norms to critical and continual evaluation. This is a methodological process that Brooke Ackerly identified in the practice of Third World feminist activists and that she thinks improves on deliberative democratic theory, making it ‘deliberative democracy in the real world.’ ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]