“Civil Action and the Microdynamics of Violence During the Bosnian War,” in Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence, edited by D. Avant, M. Berry, E. Chenoweth, R. Epstein, C. Hendrix, O. Kaplan, and T. Sisk (Oxford University Press 2019).

“Who Made the Women’s March?” with Erica Chenoweth, in The Resistance, edited by David Meyer & Sidney Tarrow (Oxford University Press 2018).

“War, Women, and the Aftermath: Finding Resilience in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Nepal,” in Gender and Development: The Economic Basis of Women’s Power, edited by R. Blumberg and S. Cohn (Sage 2019).

Articles

Radicalising resilience: mothering, solidarity, and interdependence among women survivors of war. Journal of International Relations & Development.

As the concept of resilience has expanded in the social sciences, critics have lamented its neoliberal undertones. Programming focused on women affected by war is often structured around cultivating individual women’s strength and leadership, positioning women as sources of stability whose adaptability helps make their communities ‘more resilient’. Yet thinking of resilience as an individualised outcome belies the embodied and relational experiences at the core of the concept: that to become resilient is to continue standing in the face of violent, unjust systems. In this article, I draw from hundreds of interviews with women survivors of war in different contexts to illustrate patterns in the process of becoming resilient after atrocities. I show how this process is structured by a series of relationships—including of mothering, solidarity with others, and interdependence. As such, I argue for a ‘radicalisation’ of our conceptualisation of resilience and suggest that becoming resilient reflects a relational process that embodies resistance to a politic of domination.

No safety in numbers: political representation and political violence targeting women in Kenya. International Feminist Journal of Politics, with Hilary Matfess and Roudabeh Kishi.

Although quotas and other efforts to increase women’s political participation can ensure that the descriptive representation of women changes dramatically over a short period of time, it is not clear that social norms and political interests can shift as quickly as the distribution of legislative seats. Rather than being interpreted as a move toward a more pluralistic and representative form of government, the increased number of women in office may represent a threat to those who benefit from the status quo, and their resistance to losing their privilege may manifest in myriad forms of discrimination and violence. The relationship between political violence targeting women and increasing numbers of women in politics is often overlooked, despite the recognized potential for “backlash” against women’s empowerment initiatives. This article leverages data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) to explore the impact of increasing numbers of women in government on violence targeting women in Kenya. The findings show that rates of political violence targeting women have risen in tandem with the share of seats held by women in the lower chamber. That increasing women’s representation in political office may result in violent backlash against women generally should prompt greater attention from policymakers and academics to patriarchal resistance to women’s advancement.

Women’s Rights After War: On Gender Interventions and Enduring Hierarchies, with Milli Lake. Annual Review of Law and Social Science. Vol 17.

Postwar recovery efforts foreground gender equality as a key component of building more liberal democracies. This review explores the burgeoning scholarship on women's rights after war, first grappling with war as a period of possibility for building new gender-inclusive institutions. We review efforts in three arenas: increasing women's political representation in postwar democratic transitions; improving access to justice for women through the extension of property rights and bodily autonomy within systems of carceral justice; and integrating women into labor markets and security sectors through various components of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Yet these inclusionary efforts have too often sought to dismantle one form of oppression (gender inequality) without challenging others. We document how projects to center women in liberal democratic reforms following war inadvertently overlook other manifestations of violence at the core of these institutions.

Implementing Inclusion: Gender Quotas, Inequality, and Backlash in Kenya, with Yolande Bouka & Marilyn Muthoni Kamuru. Politics & Gender.

Extensive research has affirmed the potential of gender quotas to advance women's political inclusion. When Kenya's gender quota took effect after a new constitution was promulgated in 2010, women were elected to the highest number of seats in the country's history. In this article, we investigate how the process of implementing the quota has shaped Kenyan women's power more broadly. Drawing on more than 80 interviews and 24 focus groups with 140 participants, we affirm and refine the literature on quotas by making two conceptual contributions: (1) quota design can inadvertently create new inequalities among women in government, and (2) women's entry into previously male-dominated spaces can be met with patriarchal backlash, amplifying gender oppression. Using the ongoing process of quota implementation in Kenya as a case to theoretically question inclusionary efforts to empower women more generally, our analysis highlights the challenges for implementing women's rights laws and policies and the need for women's rights activists to prioritize a parallel bottom-up process of transforming gendered power relations alongside top-down institutional efforts.

What Prevents Peace? Women and Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Nepal, with Trishna Rana. Peace & Change, 44(3): 321-349.

There is an emerging consensus that women must play a more substantial role in transformations from violence to stability. The UN Women, Peace, and Security framework recognizes the unique challenges women face during war and affirms the important role they play in the prevention and resolution of conflicts. Despite this framework and other related efforts, peace remains elusive for many who have lived through armed conflict. What prevents formal, internationally led peacebuilding efforts from fostering sustainable peace in ordinary citizens’ lives? Put differently, despite the variety of peacebuilding mechanisms offered, what prevents peace from taking hold, for women in particular? In this paper, we focus on two postwar cases: Bosnia and Nepal. Drawing on interviews with more than seventy women in both countries, we identify five barriers that pre- vent women from feeling at peace in their daily lives: economic insecurity, competing truths, hierarchies of victimhood, continuums of violence, and spatial and temporal dislocation. We conclude by outlining ways that women in both countries work to overcome those barriers by pioneering innovations in peacebuilding, which may reveal possibilities for future interventions.

Women’s Political Inclusion in Kenya’s Devolved Political System, with Yolande Bouka and Marilyn Muthoni Kamuru. Journal of East African Studies.

Kenya’s 2010 constitutional reforms devolved the political system and included a quota designed to secure a minimum threshold of women in government. While the 2017 elections yielded the country’s highest proportion of women in government in history via both elected and appointed positions, many political entities still fell short of the new gender rule, leaving them in noncompliance with the constitution. The 2017 elections reveal a tension: while devolution raised the stakes of local elections and the quota has improved women’s political inclusion, these reforms have not fundamentally changed the power of political parties, the way campaigns are financed, cultural ideas about women’s leadership, and the pervasiveness of violence in Kenyan elections. Drawing on data from both the national and county levels, this article maps these persistent obstacles to women’s political inclusion and argues that increasing women’s political power will require both the full implementation of the constitution, as well as a broader consideration of how power operates and is consolidated.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2019.1592294

Liberation Movements and Stalled Democratic Transitions: Reproducing Power in Rwanda and South Africa through Productive Liminality, with Alex Beresford and Laura Mann. Democratization.

Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2018.1461209

The lack of convergence towards liberal democracy in some African countries reflects neither a permanent state of political aberration, nor necessarily a prolonged transitional phase through which countries pass once the “right” conditions are met. Examining the cases of two ruling parties, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the African National Congress in South Africa, we develop the concept of productive liminality to explain countries suspended (potentially indefinitely) in a status “betwixt and between” mass violence, authoritarianism, and democracy. On the one hand, their societies are in a liminal status wherein a transition to democracy and socio-economic “revolution” remains forestalled; on the other hand, this liminality is instrumentalized to justify the party’s extraordinary mandate characterized by: (a) an idea of an incomplete project of liberation that the party alone is mandated to fulfil through an authoritarian social contract, and (b) the claim that this unfulfilled revolution is continuously under threat by a coterie of malevolent forces, which the party alone is mandated to identify and appropriately sanction.

Barriers to Women’s Progress After Atrocity: Evidence from Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Gender & Society: 31(6): 830-853.

Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243217737060

Researchers have recently documented the unexpected opportunities war can present for women. While acknowledging the devastating effects of mass violence, this burgeoning field highlights war’s potential to catalyze grassroots mobilization and build more gender sensitive institutions and legal frameworks. Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina serve as important examples of this phenomenon, yet a closer examination of both cases reveals the limits on women’s capacity to take part in and benefit from these postwar shifts. This article makes two key contributions. First, it demonstrates how the postwar political settlement created hierarchies of victimhood that facilitated new social divisions and fractured women’s collective organizing. Second, it argues that while war creates certain opportunities for women, a revitalization of patriarchy in the aftermath can undermine these gains. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with women in both countries, this article ultimately questions the extent to which postwar mobilization can be maintained or harnessed for genuine gender emancipation.

Gender Politics After War: Mobilizing Opportunity in Post-conflict Africa. Thematic Review, with Milli Lake, Arizona State University. Politics & Gender: 13(2): 336-349.

Thematic review of: Gender, Violence and Politics in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jane Freedman (2015); Mobilizing Transnational Gender Politics in Post-Genocide Rwanda, Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel (2015); and Women and Power in Post-Conflict Africa, Aili Mari Tripp (2015).

From Violence to Mobilization: War, Women, and Threat in Rwanda. Mobilization: An International Quarterly: 20(2): 135-156.

Access: http://mobilizationjournal.org/doi/abs/10.17813/1086-671X-20-2-135

Theories of social movement emergence posit “threat” as an important concept in explanations of mobilization. This article uses the case of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to investigate whether threats that stem from mass violence can also have a mobilizing effect. Drawing from interviews with 152 women in Rwanda, this paper reveals how threatening conditions created by the genocide initiated a grassroots mobilization process among women. This mobilization featured women founding and joining community organizations, engaging in new forms of claims-making towards state institutions, and eventually running for political office. Two mechanisms facilitated this process: the social appropriation of feminine cultural values for the re-conceptualization of women as legitimate political actors, and the processes by which foreign actors brokered connections between individual women, organizations, and government. This paper concludes by suggesting that this mobilization served as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the meteoric rise of women in Rwanda’s politics.

When 'Bright Futures' Fade: Paradoxes of Women's Empowerment in Rwanda. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: 41 (1): 1-27.

Access: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/681899

Since the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has emerged as a global model for the promotion of women in society. Today, Rwanda has progressive gender-sensitive laws, more girls than boys in primary school, and the world’s highest percentage of women in parliament. But has this national-level progress manifested in an actual improvement in the lives of ordinary Rwandan women? If not, what has prevented these rights-based empowerment efforts from taking hold? Drawing from interviews with 152 women at all levels of Rwandan society, this article illustrates the contradictory and complicated nature of women’s empowerment efforts. It identifies three paradoxes that capture how efforts to promote women can be undermined by deeply rooted social processes. First, women are granted new rights but cannot access them unless they are married, which further reinforces their dependence on men. Second, policies aim to empower women through education, but have unintended consequences that create new forms of oppression. Third, in order to advance the image of a “modern Rwanda” the government restricts women’s labor, further entrenching their poverty. Each of these paradoxes suggests that efforts to remedy women’s subordination may actually end up reinforcing it.

Understanding the Political Motivations that Shape Rwanda’s Emergent Developmental State, with Laura Mann, University of Leiden. New Political Economy: 21(1): 119-144.

Access: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2015.1041484#.VpbWCjZcvw8

Twenty years after its horrific genocide, Rwanda has become a model for economic development. At the same time, its government has been criticized for its authoritarian tactics and use of violence. Missing from the often-polarized debate are the connections between these two perspectives. Synthesizing existing literature on Rwanda in light of a combined year of fieldwork, we argue that the GoR is using the developmental infrastructure to deepen state power and expand political control. We first identify the historical pressures that have motivated the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) to re-imagine the political landscape. Sectarian unrest, political rivalry, wider regional insecurity, and aid withdrawal have all pressured the RPF to identify growth as strategic. However, the country’s political transformation extends beyond a prioritisation of growth and encompasses the reordering of the social and physical layout of the territory, the articulation of new ideologies and mindsets, and the provision of social services and surveillance infrastructure. Growth and social control go hand in hand. As such, the paper’s main contribution is to bring together the two sides of the Rwandan debate and place the country in a broader sociological literature about the parallel development of capitalist relations and transformations in state power.