High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women’s Mobilization in Violent Contexts. By Julia Margaret Zulver. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 194 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN: 9781978827097.

Abstract

For a long time, women and gender have been excluded from mainstream understandings of international processes. Feminist perspectives in international relations (IR) scholarship have existed for some time, but they have been put at the margins of mainstream theoretical traditions: feminist IR scholars were not taken seriously, and there was no significant engagement dialogue with them. The crux of feminist IR is to look at global issues in a particular way and to understand those issues through the prism of gender, rejecting the metanarratives. As argued by Cynthia Enloe (2014, 3), “making useful sense—feminist sense—of international politics requires us to follow diverse women to places that are usually dismissed by conventional foreign affairs experts as merely ‘private,’ ‘domestic,’ ‘local,’ or ‘trivial.’” In High-Risk Feminism in Colombia, Julia Margaret Zulver provides a brilliant analysis of women’s lives in conflict and postconflict settings, arguing that the gender continuum of violence does not end with the conflict, even when women are involved in the peace negotiations. Her argument is based on the idea that women’s experiences in violent contexts are often not aligned with the traditional, mainstream understanding of armed conflicts. In that sense, Zulver looks at the question of why these women still decide to mobilize and join organizations fighting for gender justice, despite being dangerous to them to do so. Thus, even with many eminent threats and risks in postconflict settings, many women in grassroots organizations choose to act collectively in pursuit of gender justice. Zulver defines this as “high-risk” behavior, which in Colombia is not exclusive to women’s or feminist groups—in the context of paramilitary groups seeking social control, any activity that seeks community cohesion and collective action can be considered high risk, taking into account the possible consequences. For women, there is the extra layer of risk of subverting the expected gender roles of being a woman andmaking demands around gender equality. As argued by Zulver, when women engage with gender justice work, “not only do their feminist goals