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):
- Intersectional Justice and Peace Processes: Rethinking Justice in Post-War Societies [in preparation].
- “Navigating to Subsistence: The Gendered Struggles in the Post-war Everyday and Their Implications for Peace.” Politics & Gender 16: 3 (2020).
- “Feminised Work, Invisible Labour: Against the Formal-Informal Economy Dichotomy.” In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, ed. Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Catia Confortini. London and New York, Routledge. 2021.
- “The Mother, the Wife, the Entrepreneur? Women’s Agency and Microfinance in a Disappearing Welfare State.” Civil Wars 20: 2 (2018).
- “Government of Peace and Resistive Subjectivities: Autonomy, Ethnicity and Gender in Northeast India and Bosnia and Herzegovina” In Cultures of Governance and Peace: A Comparison of EU and Indian Theoretical and Policy Approaches, ed. J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond, Ranabir Samaddar. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016 [with Atig Ghosh].
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):
- Economies of peace: Economy formation processes in conflict-affected societies. London: Routledge. 2019 [co-edited with Werner Distler and Birte Vogel].
- “Economies of Peace: Processes of Economy Formation in Conflict-affected Societies.” Civil Wars 20: 2 (2018) [with Werner Distler and Birte Vogel].
- “Navigating to Subsistence: The Gendered Struggles in the Post-war Everyday and Their Implications for Peace.” Politics & Gender 16: 3 (2020).
- “Feminised Work, Invisible Labour: Against the Formal-Informal Economy Dichotomy.” In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, ed. Tarja Väyrynen, Swati Parashar, Élise Féron, Catia Confortini. London and New York, Routledge. 2021.
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):
- “EU Support to Civil Society Organisations in Conflict-Ridden Countries: A Governance Perspective from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, and Georgia.” International Peacekeeping 23: 2 (2016) [with Krisoffer Liden, Nona Mikhelidze and Birte Vogel].
- “Agency, Autonomy and Compliance in (Post-)Conflict Situations: Perspectives from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Jammu and Kashmir.” In Cultures of Governance and Peace: A Comparison of EU and Indian Theoretical and Policy Approaches, ed. J. Peter Burgess, Oliver P. Richmond, Ranabir Samaddar. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016 [with Sumona Das Gupta, Birte Vogel and Navnita Chadha Behera].
- “Space, Class and Peace: Spatial Governmentality in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In Spatialising Peace and Conflict: Mapping the Production of Places, Sites and Scales of Violence, ed. Annika Björkdahl, Susanne Buckley-Zistel, 141-158. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 201