This Disasters journal special issue is a joint initiative of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) and the Justice and Security Research Programme (which ended in 2016). The issue was funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa of the London School of Economics, ESRC Centre for Public Authority in International Development (CPAID), and the Social Science Research Council.
The issue, entitled ‘Gender, sexuality and violence in humanitarian crises’, includes contributions of articles from members of the Consortium, including Thea Hilhorst (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam), Rachel Gordon, Holly Ritchie (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam), Teddy Atim (Tufts University) and Dyan Mazurana (Tufts University). The special issue will be fully open access from January 2018 – January 2019.
Overview:
There is a large and rich scholarship on gender, sexuality, and violence in relation to conflict, disasters, and forced displacement. The extent to which the findings of this literature make their way into humanitarian policy and programming, though, is uneven. All of the papers in this special issue of Disasters concentrate on gender in settings that constitute humanitarian crises. They all examine areas that are, or have been until recently, dense with humanitarian action: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lebanon, northern Uganda, Somalia, South Sudan, and the refugee route from Syria to Greece. The seven papers address the gendered impacts of humanitarian interventions from different dimensions. In some of the papers, these interventions are the direct topic of investigation; in others, they loom in the background while their effects are felt in the ways in which women and men negotiate their roles and find spaces to manage their lives in challenging settings. Together, the collection provides food for thought for the humanitarian community and highlights themes and issues that are crucial to humanitarian interventions.
Articles in this issue:
- Gender, sexuality, and violence in humanitarian crises (pages S3–S16) Dorothea Hilhorst, Holly Porter and Rachel Gordon
- ‘I followed the flood’: a gender analysis of the moral and financial economies of forced migration (pages S17–S39) Roxanne Krystalli, Allyson Hawkins and Kim Wilson
- Gender and enterprise in fragile refugee settings: female empowerment amidst male emasculation—a challenge to local integration? (pages S40–S60) Holly A. Ritchie
- Women survivors and their children born of wartime sexual violence in northern Uganda (pages S61–S78) Teddy Atim, Dyan Mazurana and Anastasia Marshak
- Beyond the hype? The response to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2011 and 2014 (pages S79–S98) Dorothea Hilhorst and Nynke Douma
- ‘That thing of human rights’: discourse, emergency assistance, and sexual violence in South Sudan’s current civil war (pages S99–S118) Alicia Elaine Luedke and Hannah Faye Logan
- Policing men: militarised masculinity, youth livelihoods, and security in conflict-affected northern Uganda (pages S119–S139) Rebecca Tapscott
- Resilient patriarchy: public authority and women’s (in)security in Karamoja, Uganda (pages S140–S158) Julian Hopwood, Holly Porter and Nangiro Saum
