oiip

28.10.2022
12:00 - 17:30

As (post)conflict countries, such as Colombia, Iraq, Nepal and Sri Lanka, among others, highlight, transitions from war to peace are often fraught with security challenges and the risk of a “continuum of violence”, particularly affecting women and other marginalized groups. Despite engagements from various sides to end war, the desired outcome of such struggles is too often not straightforwardly achieved: the overall reduction of violence and an increase in security for all.

While scholarship has largely focused on local actors, in particular state and non-state actors, in mitigating or inhibiting violence, in this workshop we aim to go beyond state-centric and institutionalist frameworks. In so doing, we shift our attention to the underexplored but exponentially growing link between global corporate actors, such as private military and security companies (PMSCs) as well as transnational corporations (TNCs), and gendered violence. Research shows that corporate actors cannot be considered neutral global players but rather an emerging challenge to international peace and security shaping (post)conflict contexts. PMSCs have perpetrated gender-based violence, including sexual abuse, trafficking and rape (Chisholm 2014; Eichler 2015; Stachowitsch 2013) and TNCs have increasingly been criticized for being involved in the forceful displacement of the local population from resource rich territories through e.g., their collaboration with armed groups (Hristov 2014; Meger 2016; Sachseder 2020). We therefore want to use this workshop to further explore the role of global corporate actors in peace and conflict, and bring together scholars from various disciplines, including, but not limited to, political economy, security studies, political geography and anthropology.

The aim of this workshop is to 1) engage in important knowledge exchange across disciplinary and experiential thinking, 2) begin to establish collectively new ways of thinking about how to advance women peace and security that considers the role of market actors and market logics that increasingly underpin war transitions towards peace and 3) build a strong community of like-minded scholars and practitioners through regular knowledge exchange and mentoring in writing that extends beyond the workshop.

If you are interested in participating, and sharing your work, please send an abstract to sachsederj@ceu.edu. Deadline for abstracts will be on July 01 2022.

To this end, we will be looking at collectively turning these papers into a special issue. Participants are asked to initially produce and disseminate ahead of the workshop papers around 3000 words in length. Beyond the initial workshop, we will engage collectively with each other’s work in the building towards submission. Deadline for paper on October 01, 2022.

Sponsored by the Women Peace and (Private) Security Research Network