Kumudini Samuel is a member of DAWN’s Executive Committee and is on DAWN’s Political Restructuring and Social Transformation (PRST) team.
This article is published in the DAWN Informs June 2016 Edition.
DAWN is currently engaged in a research project to map the political economy of conflict and gender based violence. The research will focus on the political economy of violence/terror (with special reference to the violence of armed conflict and war) and gender based violence against women (with special reference to sexual violence).
We decided to look at armed conflict and gender based violence as political violence with a range of political and economic dimensions “connected to both private patriarchy and the differential gender impacts of economic globalisation.” We thought such an analysis can potentially further illuminate the dynamics of gender and social relations within war-torn and conflict affected polities.
The impact of armed conflict and violence on gender relations, gender equality and social justice is a critical concern. This includes specifically the nature and impact of the armed conflict related gender-based violence against women. While there have been studies of the causes and consequences of such violence on the lives of women, the gendered analysis of the political economy of conflict and the ways in which political, economic, social and ideological processes intersect to impact and shape the gendered impact of conflict-related gender-based violence against women has received less attention.
The link between the causes of conflict and sexual violence need to be discussed in the context of structural inequalities mediated by patriarchy at the level of the household or the community, and in national and global political economies during or in the aftermath of conflict. This project will cover not only sexual violence in conflict but also other forms of violence against women, such as the endemic nature of domestic violence or economic violence, or the ways in which violations of socio-economic rights in ‘peace’ heighten in armed conflict and situate women in conjunctures of vulnerability to gender-based violence.
A political economy analysis compels us to understand how the multiple crises generated by economic globalization and development, resultant macro-economic policies, trade liberalization, economic de-regulation and the financial and climate crises, and militarization, pose new challenges. This requires a gendered analysis of political, economic and social processes as they impact on violence against women in conflict. It must be understood that women’s security is also inseparably linked to the material basis of relationships that govern the distribution and use of resources, entitlements and authority within the home, the community and the transnational realm1. It also calls for analysis of how women’s political, economic and social subordination makes women (in differentiated strata) vulnerable to violence and an understanding that violence against women is not merely a consequence of men’s aggression in the private or public sphere. For example, rape has resulted in women losing access to property through multiple means because due to rape they have been rejected by their families and lost access to or have had their property confiscated, including through bogus marriages, such as in Rwanda.
This research will use a political economy framework or lens, to discuss gender-based violence against women in conflict situations (including, but not limited to sexual violence), by taking structural inequalities into account, contributing thereby to a nuanced and better understanding of, and therefore means of addressing not only direct armed conflict related gender-based violence but also in relation to the elimination of violence and the construction of social justice, and specifically equal and equitable gender relations.
The analysis will seek to juxtapose three inter-related components – the politics of economics; the struggle for political power and the gender order in the discussion of the Political Economy of Violent Conflict and Gender-Based Violence Against Women.
The research case studies and issue papers will relate to conflicts in the Great Lakes Region, Africa; Sudan and South Sudan; Nigeria; Egypt, Libya and Iraq; Columbia; North East India; Indonesia; Papua New Papua New Guinea. ~
1 True, Jacqui (2010), The Political Economy Of Violence Against Women: A Feminist International Relations Perspective, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, Volume 32, P. 40.