preview

The Relationship Between Gender, Conflict and Violence Essay

Better Essays

The relationship between gender, conflict and violence is a particular issue that hits home to me having spent six months last year working in Iraq with a local NGO and UNHCR working with incoming Syrian Refugees and in particular undertaking project development for Combatting sexual and gender based violence (GBV) within Iraqi Kurdistan. The effects of conflict on women, and violence being imposed on women within conflict zones is one that needs to be discussed, promulgated, advocated for and addressed deeply within the crux of development programmes and equally by national governments alike particularly those affected by conflict/war, post-conflict and fragility. It is only through shedding light on the atrocities which are/have been …show more content…

Gender and Development more generally have overtly focused on women’s economic roles (Razavi and Miller 1995) to the detriment of developing a holistic body of theory that addresses the human condition in all its aspects and responds to the voices and the experiences of men and women at local levels.

Shifts in Gender and Armed Conflict
At the international level, there was a brief period of optimism that generated after the end of the Cold War, which inevitably ceased and gave rise to a new world order (Featherstone 1996). The new world order that emerged can be characterized by new regional conflicts and an escalation in armed conflicts and civil wars within states. The former classic form of warfare went out the window. There was now no longer two distinguishable armies on a battlefield fighting over territory and sovereignty. This classical view of warfare formerly offered protection to non-combatants, however with the transition from classical warfare to unconventional warfare, protagonists began deliberately targeting civilians including women and children. Unconventional warfare has seen a rise in technical capacity and the industrial

Get Access