Gender issues in conflict and post-conflict societies

While there has been a great deal of feminist research on women in conflict societies, the majority of studies of the causes of conflict, and much of the literature on ‘conflict transformation’ continue to sideline gender issues. Insofar as women are discussed, they are positioned as ‘victims’ of the conflict or as ‘outside’ the conflict and therefore capable of facilitating processes which will help to end it.

Research is needed to explore:

• whether mainstream methodologies (including realist or strategic approaches, conflict transformation methodologies and consociationalism) can be ‘gender-sensitized’ to provide a more complex understanding of how gender relations have operated within and impact upon the conflict
  This would also require a critical examination of feminist theories of citizenship, ethnicity and conflict, which argue that mainstream approaches are irredeemably, gender-biased.
• an examination of male and female understandings of the impact of gender on the initiation, conduct and ending of conflict. The central question would be to what extent if at all are men and women influenced by social and cultural norms and practices of masculinity and femininity in their activities promoting or opposing conflict?