Today’s post comes to us from Jennifer Moore, the Regents’ Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico and author of the new book Women’s Work: Building Peace in War-Affected Communities of Uganda and Sierra Leone. Women’s Work presents a reimagined theory of peacebuilding and transformative justice based on the experiences and insights of women farmers and microentrepreneurs who lived through protracted civil conflicts. In this thoughtful piece, Moore reflects on the long and complex process of researching and writing the book, from its earliest stages as an idea through years of interviews with women activists—with complications and detours along the way, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Moore’s own rethinking of her work’s methodology and structure.
Women’s Work has been a labor of love. The book has taken me ten years to write. Originally, it was to follow on the heels of my earlier monograph, Humanitarian Law in Action within Africa, which compared the post-civil war transitional justice experiences of Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Burundi. While researching that book, I met the organizers of three grassroots women’s peacebuilding networks, one in each country. I wanted to write a second book built on my previous top-down approach to transitional justice, that instead took a bottom-up look at post-conflict peacebuilding in the three countries.
However, pulling off an interview-based narrative non-fiction book on women-led community development proved to be challenging on several unforeseen levels. First, combining feminist ethnography (as someone untrained in anthropology beyond an undergraduate degree) with human rights-infused legal scholarship was initially a hard sell for publishers and hard to pull off in practice. Second, the political environment in Burundi in the late 2010s seemed too dangerous to permit an expatriate to do the kind of successive community visits I contemplated without endangering my interpreters and logisticians, not to mention myself and the individual women I wished to get to know. Thirdly, after starting my work in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted my research from 2020 to 2022. As a result of all three factors, my methodology and the duration of my research evolved and extended, in ultimately fortuitous ways.
From 2016-2019, I undertook three successive summer visits to five communities each in both the Acholi Region of Northern Uganda and the Moyamba and Koinadugu Districts of Sierra Leone. I was able to interview the same 30ish women across those ten communities during four successive summer visits. In Sierra Leone, I interviewed ten women leaders within the Fambul Tok Peace Mothers network of village-level community groups, most of them four times in successive years (2016-2019). In Uganda, I interviewed around fifteen women leaders within the Refugee Law Project’s Women’s Advocacy Network, most of them three times (2016-2018).
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and I hit some bumps in the road in the midst of my blind peer review process. Prompted by one of my reviewers, I came to see that I needed to figure out if my methodology was one of testing a theory of transitional justice, on the one hand, or on the other hand, one of building such a theory through my interactions with my women interviewees: ten Sierra Leoneans from four different ethnic groups (Mende, Fula, Mandingo, and Limba) and around fifteen Ugandans of Acholi ethnicity. During the 2020-22 period of the pandemic, when I could not travel to the two countries, I revised and reformulated the manuscript structure and my methodology with the help of my reviewers, editors and colleagues.
I gradually devised or came to understand my methodology as one of interview-based qualitative research, longitudinal in nature, and with a kind of “relationship-based convenience sampling.” Similarly, I came to understand my analytic framework as a hybrid of theory-testing and theory-building. What this meant to me was that I was sharing my own three-stranded-braid conception of transformative justice with my interviewees. Hence I asked them if and how they resonated with a tri-partite notion of post-violence justice which interwove: (1) forgiveness and restorative justice; (2) accountability and compensatory justice; and (3) livelihood and redistributive justice. I asked them to expand upon, riff off of, adapt, and/or replace this framework with their own conceptions of justice.
To a remarkable extent, many of the women shared with me their vision of forgiveness and “restorative justice” in terms of survival. (“If we don’t forgive, we cannot live together.”) Also to a prevalent degree, they shared their impressions that accountability and “compensatory justice” are most significant in interpersonal terms. (“Accountability is being honest, showing respect, and being willing to coexist.”) Finally, many shared their common understanding of livelihood and “redistributive justice” in the form of sustainable economic activity, often through communal micro-loan programs, collaborative farming, and micro enterprise, in order to generate funds for health care and school fees for their children, both girls and boys. (“Livelihood is everything I do with my hands to provide for my family.”)
When I returned to Sierra Leone in 2022, and to both Sierra Leone and Uganda in 2023, I picked up the thread of my qualitative interviews, meeting again with the same roughly 25 women across the two countries, whom I had not seen for between three and four years. It was an opportunity to reinforce professional friendships with my interpreters, while rekindling personal connections with the women interviewees themselves. The time apart gave me both new and enhanced perspectives, as well as a grounding and reinforcement of the most compelling and enduring aspects of my analytic framework. It also allowed me to receive from the individual women their own evolving understandings of peacebuilding that we had been sharing and conversing about together since 2016.
After my community visits in 2022 and 2023, the manuscript was almost ready. We went through final editorial board review and copy edits in 2023 and 2024, so that it was ready for production and publication in March of 2025.
My hope is that Women’s Work will educate and inspire readers on themes of transitional/restorative justice from the perspective of the women who have survived armed conflict and are navigating long-term survival, dispute resolution, women’s empowerment, and sustainable livelihood activities in their war-affected communities in Acholiland, Northern Uganda and throughout communities in the Northern and Southern Provinces of Sierra Leone. These women leaders and cooperative members are making peace, piecemeal. They work for the long haul, in incremental, daily, and seasonal cycles of material survival and community vitalization. Their work is ongoing and they wish for but don’t wait for assistance from their partners and their governments. The peace and justice they experience are the peace and justice they make themselves, individually and collectively, in their daily lives. Their experiences are the lifeblood of this book. Their insights have laid the foundation for any scholarly and practical contributions this work might have for the study and practice of women-centric restorative justice and peacebuilding in war-torn regions around the world.
The next phase of my research and writing journey is to get portions of the book translated into Ugandan Acholi and Sierra Leonean Krio. In the meantime, later this year and early next, I plan to bring copies of the book to put in the hands of the women in the ten communities whose shared insights and life stories made this book come to life.
