By the turn of the millennium, a once marginalised feminist agenda – the prevention of harm to women’s bodily integrity – ultimately succeeded in becoming integrated into a range of powerful norms and codified interventions across a wide range of interlinked global institutions.
Whether in the language of combatting violence against women (VAW) or gender-based violence (GBV), harms to women’s bodily integrity are now addressed by numerous Security Council resolutions (famously starting with UN 1325); raised at the International Criminal Court in the Hague (as sexual violence in war); laterally integrated into global development imperatives (such as CEDAW and, more recently, the SDGs); made a central concern in any context of humanitarian intervention; and encoded in protocols and conventions at the core of both the global refugee and human trafficking regimes. They are also recurrently invoked as a global security issue (the “Hillary Doctrine”) and in the most recent iteration – tethered to the anti-terrorism agenda of combatting “violent extremism”.
Originally considered a major feminist success story, the integration of GBV-VAW across the operations of global governance has increasingly become a cause of concern; with feminist scholars across IR, Peace and Security Studies as well as International Legal Theory at the forefront of uncovering its racial/ neo-colonial logics, as well as its recurring geopolitical hazards.
As part of the series on Power, Politics and Hope, this Sussex Development Lecture will focus on the integration of this global GBV-VAW agenda into one stream of global governance, humanitarianism, and through an ethnographic focus based on the context of Gaza (prior to the current genocidal war) unravel how it operates as a technology of humanitarian governance on the ground.
Through understanding the intended and unintended effects and consequences of these humanitarian technologies on the lives of those dependent on them, as well as the silences and selective visibilities they produce, the aim of this talk is to clear a space for a discussion of what an ethically grounded and liberatory anti-gender violence politics might look like.
Speaker
Rema Hammami is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Birzeit University in the West Bank, Palestine where she currently directs the PhD Program in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.
She is a founder and faculty member of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University where she formerly directed its Graduate Program in Gender and Development and produced multiple studies on various aspects of gender, development and humanitarianism for UN Agencies operating in the Palestine.
The former chair of the University’s Right to Education Campaign she is also co-founder and former director of the Women’s Affairs Centre in Gaza, and more recently, current vice-president of Insaniyyat, the Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. Her current work focusses on two areas of inquiry: the geopolitics of gender violence, development and humanitarianism in the contexts of the interlinked forces of international trusteeship and Israeli colonialism; and the everyday politics of gender, embodiment and survival within Israel’s spatial apparatus of control of the occupied West Bank.
She has held the Prince Claus Chair in Equity and Development at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, been a Carnegie Centennial Scholar at Columbia University and a Mahmud Darwish Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies at Brown University. Recent publications include Destabilizing Mastery and the Machine: Palestinian Agency and Gendered Embodiment at Israeli Military Checkpoints (Current Anthropology 2020) and the co-edited book (with with Lila Abu Lughod and Nadera Shalhub-Kevorkian), The Cunning of Gender Violence: Feminism and Geopolitics (Duke University Press 2023).
Chair
Dr Birgul Kutan, Lecturer (Education), School of Education and Social Work, University of Sussex.
How to watch
This Lecture will be streamed on Zoom
Key contacts
