Suchergebnisse

What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee camps and population flows are but some of the characteristics of conflict-affected societies rendering them vulnerable to pandemics such as Covid-19. Importantly, societal crises are deeply gendered; women and men experience conflicts and are affected by them in profoundly different ways. Focusing on the 'first wave' of Covid-19 in 2020, I map out the gendered impacts of Covid-19 in conflict-affected societies with particular focus on women. I situate their experience of the dual crisis in the context of 'vulnerability multipliers' that limit the ability of individuals to manage societal crises. I find that the pandemic and policy responses to it exacerbated multiple forms of gendered insecurity. They include physical, economic and health insecurities as well as increasing political marginalisation. All this points to multiple, overlapping insecurities operating simultaneously, leading to 'layered violence' whereby the pre-existing violence against women and girls escalates, subjecting them to more intense forms of harm.

What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee camps and population flows are but some of the characteristics of conflict-affected societies rendering them vulnerable to pandemics such as Covid-19. Importantly, societal crises are deeply gendered; women and men experience conflicts and are affected by them in profoundly different ways. Focusing on the 'first wave' of Covid-19 in 2020, I map out the gendered impacts of Covid-19 in conflict-affected societies with particular focus on women. I situate their experience of the dual crisis in the context of 'vulnerability multipliers' that limit the ability of individuals to manage societal crises. I find that the pandemic and policy responses to it exacerbated multiple forms of gendered insecurity. They include physical, economic and health insecurities as well as increasing political marginalisation. All this points to multiple, overlapping insecurities operating simultaneously, leading to 'layered violence' whereby the pre-existing violence against women and girls escalates, subjecting them to more intense forms of harm.

Abstract
Much has been written on the 2011 intervention in Libya and its implications to the R2P principle, but we know less about the lived experience of protection in a context where the post-intervention responsibility for protecting civilians was quickly transferred to the interim authorities who had limited governance capacity. This has resulted in 'localised protection' where militias, tribal elders, and family members constitute the main actors providing protection to their respective communities. Although this is in line with the growing emphasis on local ownership underwriting UN and donor discourse, a troubling upshot of the localised protection is that it often disempowers, and at times subjects the protected to further insecurity and violence. The aim of this analysis is to explore this dynamic of protection and insecurity. I draw on feminist theorising of the masculine protection logic and argue that civilians in Libya negotiate multiple, gendered protection bargains that often produce perverse outcomes, by subjecting the 'protected' to renewed or increased insecurities, rather than reducing them.

Abstract
Approaches variously described as critical, reflexive, postpositivist, and agonistic constructivism reject the idea that the meaning of a norm can be fixed. These approaches look instead to the role that discursive practice plays in repeatedly constructing meaning. While the focus on how discourse shapes the meaning of a norm can tell us something about the ongoing social significance of that norm, it does not answer the question of whether that norm is normatively appropriate. Taking its cue from pragmatic ethics, this paper addresses the above limitation in the existing scholarship. It does so by not only tracing norms' meanings in use, but also crucially evaluating the extent to which they are useful in alleviating the social problems they were designed to address. The theoretical argument is illustrated by examining the meanings in use of the rebuilding norm in the aftermath of the 2011 humanitarian intervention in Libya; how was the norm understood and practiced? What were the consequences of such meanings in use? I argue that this type of analysis can significantly improve our understanding of normative outcomes of norm contestation processes by bringing to the fore the practical consequences of norms, their various meanings, and the political environment within which they are enacted.

Approaches variously described as critical, reflexive, postpositivist, and agonistic constructivism reject the idea that the meaning of a norm can be fixed. These approaches look instead to the role that discursive practice plays in repeatedly constructing meaning. While the focus on how discourse shapes the meaning of a norm can tell us something about the ongoing social significance of that norm, it does not answer the question of whether that norm is normatively appropriate. Taking its cue from pragmatic ethics, this paper addresses the above limitation in the existing scholarship. It does so by not only tracing norms' meanings in use, but also crucially evaluating the extent to which they are useful in alleviating the social problems they were designed to address. The theoretical argument is illustrated by examining the meanings in use of the rebuilding norm in the aftermath of the 2011 humanitarian intervention in Libya; how was the norm understood and practiced? What were the consequences of such meanings in use? I argue that this type of analysis can significantly improve our understanding of normative outcomes of norm contestation processes by bringing to the fore the practical consequences of norms, their various meanings, and the political environment within which they are enacted.

Whilst much has been written on emergence of new norms in international politics, we know significantly less about changes to the ideas and assumptions that underpin such norms. Examined at micro-level, most norms consist of a set of ideas and assumptions that form the basis of what is considered as appropriate, legitimate or even the required thing to do. Far from being stable, ideational constitutions of norms can undergo significant changes in the course of the norm emergence process. Enquiring into such changes is important if we are to move beyond static and linear accounts of norm evolution. Using changes in the ideational constitution of the responsibility to protect – specifically, the de-emphasis of the responsibility to rebuild – as its vantage point, the analysis seeks to answer the following question: what drives change in ideational constitutions of international norms? The chief argument advanced in this article is that misalignments at the level of broader normative structures (external misalignments) and within norms (internal misalignments) result in changes in the ideational constitutions of emerging norms.