Gender and the micro-dynamics of violent conflicts

ABSTRACT

Conventional stories about conflicts often miss the role of everyday practices in escalating and de-escalating violence and how intersecting social dynamics of gender, ethnicity, age, and religion shape these practices. In this article, we introduce the Special Section on Gender and the Micro-Dynamics of Violent Conflicts. Situating the section within the scholarship on gender and violent conflict, we discuss the opportunities and paradoxes opened up by the adoption of a micro-level approach. We present theoretical and methodological reflections that emerge from the findings of the contributions and that arose in the process of implementing the research project on which these articles draw. We also reflect on the practical implications of our research. Specifically, we discuss conundrums of violent conflict research regarding two key feminist concepts – namely, gender and intersectionality – and explore (explanatory) arguments about the complex intersectional relationships between gender and violent conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• conflict
• violence
• intersectionality
• causality

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the previous editors of the International Feminist Journal of Politics for their great support and patience in elaborating this Special Section. Thanks also go to the three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and generous comments. Financial support under the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (400240_146777 and 400240_171176) is gratefully acknowledged. See project website at http://graduateinstitute.ch/home/research/centresandprogrammes/genre/gender- dimensions-of-conflict.html.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The research design of the project was developed by Krause (2018) in her book Resilient Communities: Non-Violence and Civilian Agency in Communal War. We expand and develop the framework of the book by integrating a gender lens and investigating further communities in Indonesia and Nigeria.

2 For additional contributions from this research project adopting a similar lens but focusing on peacebuilding practices, see Prügl et al. (2021).

3 Various terms have been proposed in the literature to refer to these axes of differentiation: see, for example, “grounds of identity” (Crenshaw 1991), “social divisions” (Yuval-Davis 2006), and “axes of inequality” (Klinger and Knapp 2005). In our research, we emphasize the importance of a dynamic understanding that allows us to focus on how these axes are co-constituted and interwoven, rather than just added on top of each other, and how each social differentiation dynamic has its own particularities and “ontological basis” (Yuval-Davis 2006, 195).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development [Grant Numbers 400240_146777 and 400240_171176].

Notes on contributors

Christelle Rigual

Christelle Rigual is a political scientist and a research affiliate with the Gender Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland, where she coordinated the Swiss Programme for Research on Global Issues for Development (r4d) project The Gender Dimensions of Social Conflict, Armed Violence and Peacebuilding. She holds a PhD in International Relations and Political Science from the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Elisabeth Prügl

Elisabeth Prügl is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland. Her research and teaching focus on feminist international relations (IR) and gender politics in international governance. She was the responsible applicant of the r4d project The Gender Dimensions of Social Conflict, Armed Violence and Peacebuilding. Since January 2022, she has been co-editor of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. This article was accepted for publication before she assumed the role.

Rahel Kunz

Rahel Kunz is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Political Studies at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research draws on feminist poststructuralist and postcolonial theories to focus on gender issues in migration and development, and conflict and security. She was a co-applicant of the r4d project The Gender Dimensions of Social Conflict, Armed Violence and Peacebuilding.