Routledge Setting the Agenda for Global Peace: Conflict and Consensus Building (Gender in a Global/Local World)

Anna Snyder provides a detailed account of the challenges women representatives in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) faced in building bridges across diverse ethnic, racial, national, regional, and ideological backgrounds at the 4th United Nations (UN) Conference on Women. This book traces the process by which women's peace groups set an agenda for global policies in the area of women and armed conflict. Setting the Agenda for Global Peace shows how NGOs use conflict to develop transnational social movements and to build consensus around issues of global concern. Using this conference as a case study, Snyder finds three purposes for social movement conflict: contention arising from policy development; deep-rooted historical conflict; and conflicts over NGO network priorities. Drawing together feminist, conflict resolution, and social movement theories, this comprehensive text analyzes the large scale decision making processes for NGOs and points towards future directions for conflict resolution and consensus building. Review 'This book provides a fascinating account and analysis of what happens when women across the world try to develop policies to advance peace. Anna Snyder honestly faces the difficult realities of using consensual processes to forge agreements among women in diverse non-governmental organizations with unequal power and whose members differ in culture and historical experiences. Most significantly, with enlightening specificity, she presents effective ways to deal constructively with the inevitable conflicts that arise in these increasingly important efforts.' Louis Kriesberg, Maxwell Professor Emeritus of Social Conflict Studies, Syracuse University, USA 'Setting the Agenda for Global Peace explores one of the most important problems faced by those organizing for social change: How do groups overcome their many differences in order to mobilize unified movements for social justice? Anna Snyder's rich accounts help illuminate the ways that activists expressed their conflicts in the course of organizing around the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, and her analysis integrates theory and research on conflict resolution to assess the relationships between conflicts and coalition building. In the process, she presents a detailed and insightful look at some of the social processes that are subsumed under the amorphous label of "globalization." This book is essential reading for students and scholars of all social movements and conflicts (not just transnational ones) and for practitioners seeking to build coalitions across class, culture, race, and other differences.' Professor Jackie Smith, State University New York, Stony Brook, USA 'This lively and creative ethnography follows activists from three regions as they participate in the development of a global women's peace movement. The analysis highlights moments when individual agency and the strategic efforts of activists are effective, but also illuminates how structural inequalities can undermine co About the Author Anna C. Snyder, Menno Simons College, Canada