Powi Lecture #10: Con­flicts, Sexual Vio­lence and Women Empow­er­ment? Insights from DR Con­go, Libe­ria, and Sri Lanka

Armed conflicts and wars inflict human suffering, destroy
institutions, and infrastructure. Despite all this, several recent
studies have found that women’s political representation and agency
thrives after armed conflicts. This paradox is attributed to the
ability of wars to disrupt entrenched social hierarchies and thus
provide opportunities for marginalized groups including women. In
this talk, Prof. Koos provides a critical perspective of overly
optimistic macro-level approaches, and argues that in order to
understand the implications of wars and conflicts, the experiences,
behaviors, and attitudes of individuals, families and communities
need to be at the center of research. To that end, Prof. Koos will
talk about his new ERC-funded project (www.wareffects.eu) that
focuses on the micro-level dynamics of war and gender relations.
Moreover, he will present a forthcoming article on the
sociopolitical legacies of conflict-related sexual violence. The
paper draws on original surveys from more than 10,000 respondents
in DR Congo, Liberia, and Sri Lanka, showcases novel measurement
strategies to provide respondents anonymity, and concludes that
survivors of sexual violence engage in collective action and
mobilize in their communities, however, with the drawback that this
mobilization is largely driven by men. The article provides a new
theoretical perspective by shifting the debate from a focus on
victimhood towards survivor agency while acknowledging that gender
norms appear to remain an obstacle to women’s empowerment. Carlo
Koos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at
the University of Bergen. He is also affiliated with the
Development Learning Lab, the WomanStats Project, and the German
Institute of Global and Area Studies. Previously he worked as
humanitarian aid worker with Médecins Sans Frontières in South
Sudan, Libya, Egypt, Swaziland and Uganda. Recorded on October
12th, 2023, University of Innsbruck. Image: Eivind Senneset, UiB
---- Music by Lost Harmonies. This podcast gives the views of the
author(s), and not the position of the Department of Political
Science. This work by the Department of Political Science at the
University of Innsbruck is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC
BY-NC-ND 4.0).