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NOS-HS-Sekr. nord. sam.nemd. HumSam

EWS. GENDER, POWER AND VIOLENCE: Interdisciplinary and philosophical inquiries into war, conflict and crisis (GPV)

Awarded: NOK 0.24 mill.

Project Number:

212684

Project Period:

2011 - 2013

Partner countries:

The aim of this philosophical and interdisciplinary project is to develop new conceptual tools for understanding local and global conflicts between contemporary human communities. The project is based on the view that contemporary conflicts differ from ea rlier wars and involve new modes of organized systematic violence. In contemporary wars, over 90% of casualties are civilians, and most of them are women and children. In many cases women, men and children also suffer from sexual violence in conflicts. T hus, different approaches are needed. GPV contributes new conceptual tools (a) by clarifying and critically assessing the historical genesis of contemporary concepts of crisis, conflict, and war, and by tracing the conceptual inheritance of contemporary d iscourses; (b) by analyzing these concepts in relation to experiences of human embodiment and gender differences; and (c) by developing an interdisciplinary theory of conflict that integrates the perspectives of individuals and communities, in contrast to contemporary theories of conflict that focus mainly on its political and public dimensions.. One hypothesis is that one cannot understand experiences of communality, which play an important role in contemporary violent conflicts, without understanding t he different types of communities (e.g., political, religious, and ethnic) and their different understanding of reproduction, expansion, and continuity, and the roles of men, women, and children in conflicts between such communities. A second hypothesis i s that just war theory, that has long dominated the philosophical and political discourse on war, is inadequate to understand the gendered, ethical, experiential, political, and ontological meanings of war. The project uses interconnected theoretical and methodological sources in which the members of these project have expertise. These include husserlian phenomenology, the internal criticism addressed against it and classical political philosophy.

Funding scheme:

NOS-HS-Sekr. nord. sam.nemd. HumSam

Thematic Areas and Topics

No thematic area or topic related to the project