Peace from the threshold: queer women’s everyday peacebuilding in Burundi

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda originated as a radical feminist project, yet its implementation has been shaped by liberal peacebuilding logics that impose linear timelines, fix gender categories and narrow expectations of participation. In authoritarian contexts resistant to gender and sexual rights, these logics do more than limit who can participate; they create forms of collusion between liberal peace frameworks and state regulation, producing an exclusionary and heteronormative vision of peace. Drawing on fieldwork alongside queer women engaged in WPS spaces in Burundi, I show in this article how participants navigate these constraints through practices of strategic conformity, community and discretion, conceptualizing these dynamics through the subject position of the threshold/held woman: a participant who performs the idealized traits demanded by WPS programming while operating in liminal, often concealed ways that sustain her safety and agency. These threshold/held practices reveal queer temporalities in which safety, visibility and participation are provisional and continually renegotiated, and attending to these experiences troubles the linear, measurable and visibility-driven assumptions that have come to dominate WPS implementation. Queering WPS from the threshold exposes both the agenda’s exclusions and also the alternative forms of peace and political possibility that its frameworks cannot fully hold.