3---Feminist theorizing can strategically play on essentialism to inform policy, but it should NOT be the telos of our imaginations

As argued in this chapter, the power of gender obscures and militates against the potential alliances between diverse women and men and among them across borders to resist war and other forms of violence. In the process, this chapter problematizes dominant constructions of security, examines the strategy of “adding women” to security structures and policies, desta-bilizes assumptions undergirding the gendered divisions of violence, and takes on contempo-rary forces that are expanding the crisis of insecurity. It is critical of “solutions” that put peacemaking and peacebuilding solely on the backs of poorly resourced and marginalized women and vilify only certain men to defl ect attention away from elites (including some women) who promote militarism and war in the name of security. But it also sees some value in what has been called “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1987), which refers to the way groups of people like “women,” who are, in reality, non-homogeneous, have diverse experiences, and have multiple and even conflicting interests, can still make political claims as a group on the basis of what they perceive as their shared perspectives and conditions on the understanding that the commonalities they identify and strategically mobilize to make political demands for change are not timeless or the result of innate traits. As such, strategic essentialism constitutes a political strategy for diverse women to articulate interests in and paths to peace and act together (with supportive men) to bring about disarmed security.