War Isn’t Anarchy

Political violence continues to aggravate poor nations in the African and Middle Eastern regions yet there is little understanding on the impact of political violence on poverty or those within war landscapes trying to escape poverty. Rather than analysing situations of political violence as situations of anarchy and a problem separate to the alleviation of…

Complicating War, Women and Our Understanding of Iraq

Aretxaga in Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland argues that peace and war are not so much two opposed states of as multifaceted, ambiguous, mutually imbricated arenas of struggle. And Nordstrom in “Gendered War” contests existing conceptions of the female soldier: “What… is a female soldier? A woman who acquires a…

Cat Supervising Checkpoint in Beirut

Forget them: Women After War

 We continue to both champion and fear women in power – from the growing awareness of women’s role as active combatants in conflicts across historical and geographical spectrums to the popularisation of female warriors in media/culture (shout out to Ray in Star Wars and Katniss in the Hunger Games) to the recent growth in female…