The literature on gender, peace and security and the growing body of critiques of contemporary peacebuilding have developed largely in isolation from one another. Although there have been some recent attempts to make linkages between the two, specific feminist critiques of the liberal peacebuilding consensus are lacking. This is despite the potentially valuable contribution that such a merging could bring to our understanding of both the goals and the means through which peacebuilding is understood and practiced by the international community. Furthermore, applying the critiques of liberal peacebuilding approaches could also deepen the analysis and cast light on the way that the international community integrates gender issues into peacebuilding processes, and the inherent problems in their approach. This thesis will contribute to bridging this gap by drawing on both sets of literature, and through an in-depth case study of Sierra Leone, will assess the UN's efforts to integrate gender issues into its peacebuilding policies and programming from 2002-2007. The central argument of the thesis is that the international community's gender and peacebuilding agenda in Sierra Leone is based on liberal feminist assumptions which inherently limit and challenge the extent to which the UN has been able to bring about a positive transformation in gender roles and relations. By contrasting UN liberal peacebuilding with the locally-rooted and context- specific experiences and approaches of women's organisations and networks working for peace at the community and national levels in Sierra Leone, this thesis will argue that building on these informal activities may represent an opportunity for a more emancipatory and gender-sensitive form of peacebuilding.
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