Victims Perpetrators Or Actors Gender Armed Conflict And Political Violence

This work explores the links between political, economic and social violence and illustrates how local community organizations run and managed by women play a key role throughout conflict situations, not only for meeting basic needs, but also as advocates, fostering trust and collaboration.

Increasing levels of global conflict and political violence provide a critical challenge for development theorists and practitioners. Many countries have endured decades of armed conflict, and others live under the permanent menace of political violence. Throughout, the gendered impacts of armed conflict and political violence are key issues. The gendered causes, costs, and consequences of violent conflicts have been underrepresented, and often misrepresented. This book gives a broader understanding of the complex, changing relations between women and men in societies facing violence and conflict.

Reports from war zones often note the obscene victimization of women, who are frequently raped, tortured, beaten, and pressed into sexual servitude. Yet this reign of terror against women not only occurs during exceptional moments of social collapse, but during peacetime too. As this powerful book argues, violence against women should be understood as a systemic problem—one for which the state must be held accountable. The twelve essays in Gender Violence in Peace and War present a continuum of cases where the state enables violence against women—from state-sponsored torture to lax prosecution of sexual assault. Some contributors uncover buried histories of state violence against women throughout the twentieth century, in locations as diverse as Ireland, Indonesia, and Guatemala. Others spotlight ongoing struggles to define the state’s role in preventing gendered violence, from domestic abuse policies in the Russian Federation to anti-trafficking laws in the United States. Bringing together cutting-edge research from political science, history, gender studies, anthropology, and legal studies, this collection offers a comparative analysis of how the state facilitates, legitimates, and perpetuates gender violence worldwide. The contributors also offer vital insights into how states might adequately protect women’s rights in peacetime, as well as how to intervene when a state declares war on its female citizens.

"This edited volume brings together U.S. and European scholars within political science, comparative politics, international relations, and other related disciplines and practitioner fields to offer theoretical and methodological perspectives on gender and political violence and to encourage conversation across subfields and disciplines on the topic"--

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of, as well as responses to, sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the functions and effects of wartime sexual violence as part of a global political economy of violence. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity in a tangled web of plunder and profit. Difficult questions of accountability are tacked; in particular, the caes of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities and other crimes.

Traditionally, much of the work studying war and conflict has focused on men. Men commonly appear as soldiers, commanders, casualties, and civilians. Women, by contrast, are invisible as combatants, and, when seen, are typically pictured as victims. The field of war and conflict studies is changing: more recently, scholars of war and conflict have paid increasing notice to men as a gendered category and given sizeable attention to women's multiple roles in conflict and post-conflict settings. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict focuses on the multidimensionality of gender in conflict, yet it also prioritizes the experience of women, given both the changing nature of war and the historical de-emphasis on women's experiences. Today's wars are not staged encounters involving formal armies, but societal wars that operate at all levels, from house to village to city. Women are necessarily involved at each level. Operating from this basic intellectual foundation, the editors have arranged the volume into seven core sections: the theoretical foundations of the role of gender in violent conflicts; the sources for studying contemporary conflict; the conflicts themselves; the post-conflict process; institutions and actors; the challenges presented by the evolving nature of war; and, finally, a substantial set of case studies from across the globe. Genuinely comprehensive, this Handbook will not only serve as an authoritative overview of this massive topic, it will set the research agenda for years to come.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, this book delves into visual and text-based materials to unpack gender-based violence(s) perpetrated and experienced by both sexes within and beyond the conflict zone.