Setting the Agenda for Global Peace

Book excerpt: 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.