Feminist Commitments Towards a Horizontal Women, Peace, and Security Critical Learning Community.

This article examines an experimental Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) fellowship program that fostered a critical learning community among 40 grassroots women peacebuilders across 13 African countries over three years. It highlights the program's feminist epistemological approach, which centers grassroots women as knowledge producers and challenges dominant, hierarchical expert paradigms that often marginalize their lived experiences and counter-expertise. The fellowship emphasized collective knowledge production, care, solidarity, and non-extractive research methods, while navigating practical challenges such as language barriers, visibility risks, and power imbalances between the Global North and South. The study underscores the importance of recognizing diverse, everyday peace work beyond state-centric frameworks and advocates for epistemic justice by valuing marginalized voices in peace and security discourse.