Violence Against Women in and Beyond Conflict: The Coloniality of Violence

Violence against Women in and beyond Conflict explores the processes and structures that underlie and contribute to sexual violence and internal displacement in armed conflict, utilizing extensive ethnographic research to provide cutting-edge insights.

The author argues that the key to understanding violence against women lies at the intersection of transnational capital, race, and gender that not only contribute to its production but also to its persistence. The book uses the Colombian armed conflict as the primary case study but develops a broader framework for theorizing the relationship between the global political economy, the history of coloniality, and intersectional constructions of gender and race with regard to conflict and violence. It offers an understanding of violence against women as not isolated from, but part and a symptom of, a larger system of political, social, and economic inequality that is rooted in colonialism, and exploited and exacerbated by transnational capital relations. The author also shows how the state and non-state actors, most prominently paramilitaries, are involved in this relationship of violence. The book highlights implications for meaningful and sustainable peace in post-conflict contexts.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, gender studies, and conflict studies; as well as policymakers, (non)governmental organizations, and practitioners interested in conflict and security.

Julia Carolin Sachseder is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Departments of International Relations and Gender Studies at the Central European University, Austria. She is also an affiliated postdoctoral Researcher at the Austrian Institute of International Affairs (OIIP), and a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria. Her research interests involve primarily the political economy and (post)coloniality of violence and (in)security, gender, as well as non-state and corporate actors in peace and conflict.