The Sophie Davis Forum on Gender, Conflict Resolution and Peace
The issue of the role of gender in the field of violent conflict and transition to peace has received growing attention in recent years, however it is most often addressed in broad academic frameworks such as gender studies or conflict studies. Thanks to a new generous contribution of Mr. Alan Davis, the Leonard Davis institute for International Relations (LDI) is now creating a research forum that will focus more specifically on the various links between gender, conflict and peace studies (for example, the role of women within conflicts and conflict resolution, in peace-making processes, and gender-based approaches to understanding conflicts and conflict resolution).
Exploring gender studies, peace and security is especially salient in the local reality of protracted conflict which offers an abundance of empirical examples of gender-related issues. Such examples include women’s activism in protest movements such as the Four Mothers Movement (which called for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon) or during the recent "Arab Spring”, women's experience in and approach to peace negotiations, the experience of Palestinian women under occupation, questions related to gender and the military and the changing perspectives in Israeli society and institutions regarding military service and gender. At the same time, Israel can benefit from learning about events and processes outside Israel, how gender is affected by protracted conflicts, how it affects conflict resolution, etc.
The new research forum will contribute significantly both to the development of the field of gender, conflict and peace studies in Israel, as well as to the field abroad, through outreach to the larger academic community in North America, Europe, and the Third World, and will link the issue of gender studies to that of international studies. In addition, raising interest in and awareness of such issues may also help empower women in Israel, both within the academic arena and beyond it.
The research forum on Gender, Conflict, and Peace will address both general conceptual gender-conflict related issues as well as cases that are unique to the Israeli and Middle Eastern environment. To promote this broad agenda the Forum plans to provide a post-doctoral fellowship, grants for research groups, organize conferences on related issues and invite prominent scholars from abroad to offer short courses and give public talks on topics related to Gender, Conflict, and Peace.
Coordinator and principal researcher
Dr. Tal Nitsán
Dr. Tal Nitsán is a feminist scholar critically examining socio-cultural global and local perspectives of the intersections between gender, violence, and law & society. Her interdisciplinary projects navigate between three main research sites: Israel/Palestine, Guatemala, and North America. She currently holds the Sophie Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow on Gender, Conflict Resolution and Peace at the Davis Institute for International Relations, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research on transnational women’s human rights discourse in theory and practice offers a comparative perspective on the role of dignity and diversity in promoting social justice in Guatemala and Israel. Dr. Nitsán taught several undergraduate courses on gender and socio-legal issues in both the Anthropology and the Sociology Departments at the University of British Columbia (UBC), and has been actively implementing insights from her fieldwork with the Guatemalan movement to end violence against women into campus-based activism on gendered violence. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at UBC where she was a Liu Institute Scholar. Her PhD was supported by multiple fellowships and research grants and one of her dissertation chapters was awarded the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (The Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, University of Texas School of Law). She holds an MA in Anthropology and Sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she was a Truman Institute fellow. Her MA was supported by multiple fellowships and research grants and received The Shaine Center for Research in the Social Sciences Master’s thesis award as well as The Israeli Sociological Society's Master’s Thesis Recognition Award. She volunteered at the Jerusalem Rape Crisis Center, was a member of the UBC Advisory Committee on Sexual Assault Awareness, and serves on the American Anthropology Association’s Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology (CoGEA).
Women and Armed conflicts
Armed conflicts impact the lived experiences of individuals in diverse and varied ways, in relation to their social locations (gender, class, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age). While women were always affected by armed conflicts—as worriers and/or family members of warriors, as means to harm the morals and continuity of the rival group, as survivors—through history, women’s wartime experiences were rarely recorded. This series will focus on a range of ways in which armed conflicts, in various geographic locations, impact women’s lived experiences. It aims to help us familiarize ourselves with less discussed wartime experiences, to better understand question of complex victimhood and agency in oppressive and violent circumstances, and mostly to challenge our views regarding ) wars (particular ones and wars in general).