by Marie-Rose Tshite
Abstract
As a Congolese peace scholar-activist, I draw on interviews with 36 women involved in the Inter-Congolese Dialogue peace process to reflect on the ethical as well as epistemological challenges of researching women’s peacemaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo. During my interactions with the interviewees, they questioned me about my life as they assessed whether to share their hidden narratives, long invisibilised in academic and governmental archives. My positionality granted me access to these women, but it also precipitated expectations to convey their stories responsibly. Hence, I faced these issues through the constant awareness of power relationality. This article advances Makana’s “ebb and flow of fieldwork” approach (2018) by introducing an “African feminist ethics of co-creation,” a situated framework that focuses on shared authorship and ethical reciprocity as tools for structural redress against colonial and heteropatriarchal silencing.
Keywords: co-creation, the women of Sun City, women peacebuilders, African feminist ethics, oral history, epistemic justice, structural redress
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03_FA2025_Vol6.3_Feature_Tshite