From Victims to Peace Builders: Challenging Dominant Views of Women in Conflict

The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs presents Kelebogile Zvobgo and “From Victims to Peace Builders: Challenging Dominant Views of Women in Conflict.”

In this presentation, Dr. Zvobgo will introduce dominant narratives of women in conflict situations – narratives from popular culture, government, and even the scholarly literature that essentialize woman as victims. She will then discuss two marginalized narratives, women as perpetrators and women as peacebuilders, which, in combination with the first, better match reality. Finally, she will propose that a just peace is a feminist peace—where women are not only allowed to achieve control over their lives, per feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe, but are also empowered to transform their communities as their nations exit conflict.

Kelebogile Zvobgo is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Government at William & Mary and founder and director of the International Justice Lab. She is also a faculty affiliate at the Global Research Institute, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Stephen M. Kellen Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her research broadly engages questions in human rights, transitional justice, and international law and courts, and has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Human Rights, and mainstream outlets like Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post. She has appeared on ABC News, Bloomberg TV, CNN, NPR, and PRX, and has been quoted in The Atlantic and Vox, among others. Both the American Political Science Association and the International Studies Association awarded her Best Paper in Human Rights in 2019 and Best Dissertation in Human Rights in 2022. Her first book, Governing Truth: NGOs and the Politics of Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press), explains variation in governments’ decisions to adopt transitional justice institutions, design them to succeed, and follow up on them with additional measures.

For more information on the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs events, visit our website. Visit here for more information on Kelebogile Zvobgo.