Research

My research over the years has largely focused on global governance in terms of peace processes and the necessary conditions for sustainable and just peace in an interconnected world. The overall question leading my research endeavours has been— how do different global dynamics, discourses, and power relations affect peace processes and how they shape and are shaped by local struggles rooted in people’s everyday lives? Informed by an intersectional and critical political economy approach, my work engages with the post-war realities shaped by gender, race/ethnicity, and class and the ways in which they affect and are affected by macro and micro peace processes.

My work focuses on three different, interconnected areas:

Gendered and intersectional experiences of peace and post-war justice

The main research project on which I am currently working is a book manuscript titled Intersectional Justice and Peace Processes: Rethinking Justice in Post-War Societies. In it, I analyse the gender provisions in peace agreements and the ways in which they are translated into laws and policies. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with women in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Colombia, the book highlights the gendered and intersectional impact of those ‘translations’ and advances the concept of intersectional justice in peace processes. This manuscript is partially based on my PhD dissertation with focus on gender and conflict, titled “Peace for Whom: Agency and Intersectionality in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

Related publications in gender, intersectionality, and peace (in reverse chronological order):

Political economy of peace processes

The analysis of the formation of post-conflict economies provides a response to my overarching research question from a different perspective. Namely, despite their crucial importance, conflict-related socioeconomic issues have been subject to relatively little exploration. The lack of attention to the everyday translations of post-conflict economy formation leaves a vacuum in our understanding of peace, particularly just peace, and the formation of post-conflict economies of peace. Together with my co-editors and colleagues, Dr Birte Vogel, University of Manchester (UK) and Dr Werner Distler, Philipps University of Marburg (Germany), I have been working on developing a joint project that will study the processes and outcomes of ‘post-war economy formation’ in a systematic and comparative manner in three case studies. Our project engages with debates over the formation of economic systems and practices, the way different actors shape, adopt or alter them, and their relation to the intersectional realities and experiences of intervention or peace. It notably highlights how such processes impact the way societies recover and what kind of a peace economy emerges.

Related publications in post-war economy formation (in reverse chronological order):

Everyday agency in peace processes

The third research area in which I have worked is the role of agency in the realm of the post-war everyday. This research has focused both on individual and collective agency, be it population groups or civil society organizations. What agentive moments do we witness in the everyday domain and what kind of agencies are encouraged or silenced by the existing peace process power dynamics?

Related publications in everyday agency in peace processes (in reverse chronological order):