This book examines how people's self-awareness is affected by both internal and external factors amid war and poverty. It explores how agency has influenced the inward human development of rural women who face triple disadvantages related to gender, ethnicity, and access to economic power.

It presents a multidisciplinary perspective on the intersection of war and poverty through narratives of surviving women. It advances understandings of how rural people, peasants and Indigenous Peoples of Peru, particularly women, have experienced poverty and war as a combination of oppression, repression and aggression. It explores their disempowered agency is affected and evolves post-conflict, in the search for justice. It does this by taking a capabilities approach combined with insights from perspectives on raising consciousness and inner transformation in human development, in which awareness of rural people’s experience enables them to be free and can move them from survival to conscious agents.

This book offers new narratives to evaluate the hazards of poverty and war and the potential human security for rural people agency and empowerment in building peace. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioner of development studies, peace and security, political studies, and political geography.