Research |
My research begins with a simple question: What might we learn if we took peace as seriously as war? Guided by feminist and postcolonial traditions in peace and conflict studies, I turn to the everyday—to the stories, silences, and embodied experiences of those living through and after violence. I use interpretive methods, including storytelling and discourse analysis, to trace how gender shapes both the realities of conflict and the possibilities of peace. Across my work, I remain committed to collaboration and reciprocity, often co-creating research with the communities I walk alongside, and centering their ways of knowing in both process and outcome.
To follow the threads of my research journey, keep reading below. |
Current Projects
"When Heroes Hurt: Stories of Everyday Masculinities, Violence, and Peace After Armed Conflict"
How is peace experienced by everyday people after armed conflict? What on-the-ground stories do people tell themselves about continuing violences after war has ended? This book project represents a sustained intervention in the ways political science typically theorizes peace, developing an everyday ontology of peace which accounts for the persistence of everyday violences and the justifications for those violences across communities affected by the dual wakes of conflict and colonialism. I build a case that (1) our existing ontologies of peace in International Relations (IR) are essentially reverse, if not empty, ontologies of war, and (2) that even recent efforts to thematize peace as something more than the absence of conflict fail to address the central roles that gender and gendered subjectivities play in the lived realities of peace. Bringing postcolonial feminist theories to bear on the entanglements between gender, violence, and colonial durabilities after war, I unravel the stories of people who are trying to make sense of violence in the midst of recovering from it, where individuals carry hope and fear and peace and violence together in the same embrace. Using an interpretive storytelling methodology across two case studies—Northern Ireland and Burundi—I show how attention towards ‘good guy’ logics of masculinist protection in the post-conflict space reveals distinct, gendered attachments to violence which are often recognized as part of the peace story by people living in the aftermath of war. Ultimately, an everyday ontology of peace illuminates both violent peaces, or peaces which are marked by routine, everyday violences, and peaceful violences, or violences which are invoked in the name of peace. From this everyday ontology of peace, I make the case that efforts to both understand and build peace must examine gender’s centrality to human socialization and interpersonal relationships, and further, the coloniality of gender’s role in constructing possibilities for living in relation with one another.
**********
"We do not have the luxury of being queer here." Authoritarianism, Liberal Peacebuilding, and the WPS Agenda's Queer Perspectives Problem." (under review)
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda originated as a radical feminist project, yet its global implementation has been shaped by liberal peacebuilding logics that impose linear timelines, fix gender categories, and narrow expectations of participation. In authoritarian contexts resistant to gender and sexual rights, these logics do more than limit who can participate; they create forms of collusion between liberal peace frameworks and state regulation, producing an exclusionary and heteronormative vision of peace. Drawing on fieldwork alongside queer women engaged in WPS spaces in Burundi, I show in this article how participants navigate these constraints through practices of strategic conformity, community, and discretion, conceptualizing these dynamics through the figure of the threshold/held woman: a participant who performs the idealized traits demanded by WPS programming while operating in liminal, often concealed ways that sustain her safety and agency. These threshold/held practices reveal queer temporalities in which safety, visibility, and participation are provisional and continually renegotiated, and attending to these experiences troubles the linear, measurable, and visibility-driven assumptions that have come to dominate WPS implementation. Queering WPS from the threshold exposes both the agenda’s exclusions and also the alternative forms of peace and political possibility that its current frameworks cannot fully hold.
**********
Thnaibat, D. & Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “The Temporal Politics of Youth Peace Education: Method, Memory, and Stories of Resistance." In Youth, Peace, and the Politics of Worldbuilding. Edited by Helen Berents, Katrina Leclerc, and Siobhan McEvoy-Levy.
Youth peace education is often framed as a space for cultivating civic responsibility, reconciliation, and emotional resilience. These approaches, however, rest on liberal peace assumptions that treat peace as a linear process and position young people as citizens-in-training whose agency must be earned through discipline and maturity. This chapter introduces the Temporal Disruption Model (TDM), a pedagogical and methodological framework that challenges these assumptions by centering youth as political actors in the present. Drawing on decolonial and queer theory, the article treats storytelling as a method that disrupts dominant timelines of peacebuilding. Stories surface memory, refusal, and speculation as forms of political presence through which young people contest imposed narratives of participation and progress. Using case studies from Palestine and Burundi alongside fieldwork with peace practitioners, the article shows how storytelling can both unsettle dominant frameworks of peace education and open space for alternative political horizons.
**********
Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “When Significant Experiences Aren’t Statistically Significant: Feminist Storytelling and Ontologies of Life and Death in International Relations” In Why Not Ask What?: Descriptive Inquiry in Political Science, edited by Carolyn E. Holmes, Michelle Jurkovich, Meg K. Guliford, and Mary Anne Mendoza-Davé.
Storytelling has long been central to feminist research, particularly within Black Feminist Thought, where narrative and lived experience form the basis of knowledge. As a method, storytelling offers a distinctive form of descriptive inquiry that centers the particular, foregrounds experience, and challenges dominant epistemological frameworks. It broadens the scope of social science by illuminating the meaning-making practices of individuals whose lives are often marginalized or erased by dominant, quantifiable approaches. As Sarojini Nadar notes, storytelling disrupts claims to objectivity, embraces reflexivity, unsettles master narratives, and opens space for alternative ways of knowing. Yet feminist political scientists who use storytelling frequently encounter the question: “But how is this science?” This chapter takes that tension seriously, arguing that storytelling is not only compatible with scientific inquiry but essential for producing robust understandings of the social world. Drawing on fieldwork in post–Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland, I show how storytelling functions as a vital descriptive method in the study of war and peace. Dominant IR ontologies, which code war as one and peace as zero, flatten the enduring and entangled realities of conflict. In contrast, stories reveal an ontology of peace grounded in life and all its griefs, joys, contradictions, and resiliences, showing that meaningful knowledge of war and peace demands attention towards lived experience.
**********
Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “The Activist-Researcher Quandary: Unpacking Reflexivity, Responsibility, and Feminist Research Praxis in the Field.” In Women’s Lived Experience as Researchers: Situating the Personal in Qualitative Inquiry, edited by Meena Khatwa and Jyoti Belur. Routledge.
This chapter examines the tensions between feminist reflexivity and feminist activism through the lens of a white Western researcher studying gender-based violence in Burundi. Drawing on participatory action research and feminist methodologies, I explore how power, positionality, and reflexivity shape not only the research process and my relationships with collaborators, but also the kinds of claims that can be ethically made from such work. Engaging feminist scholarship in global politics, I reflect on how storytelling as a method has challenged my own activist commitments in contexts where I am distinctly an outsider. The chapter is grounded in encounters with Burundian women who, while sharing experiences of violence, also resist Western framings of gender-based violence prevention, reading them as foreign or colonial intrusions. These moments surface difficult questions about feminist research ethics and the limits of activist scholarship in cross-cultural contexts. Reflexivity, in this setting, requires both examining my own biases and also interrogating the assumptions I carry about what constitutes feminist intervention in the first place. By analyzing these frictions, the chapter outlines the ethical quandaries that arise when personal feminist convictions conflict with the lived perspectives of the women at the center of the research. Ultimately, I propose a framework for navigating these tensions that honors the voices of the women involved, problematizes the imposition of Western feminist ideals, and fosters an ethical approach to research that is rooted in humility and care and the need to embrace the sense of feeling unsettled that deep reflexivity should produce.
**********
Ngia Yeo, Tsing & Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “The Security State and Feminist Reimaginings of Vulnerability." In Rethinking National Security: Gender, Theory, and Practice, edited by Sandra Biskupski-Mujanovic, Veronica Kitchen, and Tanya Narozhna.
National security discourses often center on the imperative to protect the State from external threats, framing security as the capacity to eliminate vulnerability. Across mainstream IR, this logic naturalizes practices of control by translating the embodied, affective realities of vulnerability into the sanitized language of uncertainty and risk management. Feminist theories unsettle these framings by revealing vulnerability not as a deficiency to be overcome but as a complex, relational, and generative condition. This chapter forwards a feminist reformulation of vulnerability through two interrelated arguments. First, we show how dominant security logics position vulnerability as a problem to be minimized through rational control, a reduction that relies on gendered hierarchies which cast exposure, dependence, and relationality as feminized and devalued. Second, we draw on feminist scholarship to refigure vulnerability as ambiguous—a thick signifier with multiple and contradictory meanings that both enable and unsettle the political order of national security. We illustrate the stakes of this reframing through deep securitization in Singapore, where vulnerability operates less as an objective condition than as a site of collective meaning-making. Interpreting deep securitization through subject formation, we argue that the State’s continual return to its own vulnerability enables the reproduction of authority and legitimizes disciplinary practices. Reimagined as ambiguous and generative, vulnerability opens possibilities for more relational and emancipatory forms of security.
Publications
Hooser. K. (2026). “Student-Centered Learning.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Teaching and Pedagogy in Political Science, edited by Daniel J. Mallinson, Julia Marin Hellwege, and Joseph Roberts
This chapter examines Student-Centered Teaching and Learning (SCTL) as a transformative pedagogical framework within Political Science. Grounded in constructivist and critical pedagogies, SCTL positions students as active participants and co-constructors of knowledge, emphasizing engaged learning, collaboration, formative assessment, and student autonomy. I explore SCTL’s alignment with the disciplinary study of power, highlighting how it cultivates critical inquiry, democratic dispositions, and connections between knowledge and lived experience. At the same time, I identify the challenges of implementing SCTL in Political Science, including structural constraints, persistent classroom hierarchies, the myth of neutrality, and the pressures of teaching in politically polarized contexts. Ultimately, SCTL offers a relational, ethical, and politically conscious approach to cultivating empowered and critically engaged learners.
**********
Hooser, K. (2025). “Doing Gender, Doing Peace: Eurocentrism, Masculinities, and the WPS Agenda’s ‘Add Men and Stir’ Problem.” In Routledge Handbook of Masculinities, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, edited by Henri Myrttinen, Farooq Yousaf, Chloé Lewis, Elizabeth Laruni, Philipp Schulz and Heleen Touquet. Routledge.
An increasing call for integration of masculinities-centered programming in the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda has resulted in the recent development of a number of programs aimed at men and boys. One such approach to incorporating masculinities has been to focus on gender social norms related to manhood as a pathway for transforming patriarchal structures, disrupting militarized violence, and generating sustainable, meaningful inclusion for women. In this chapter, I argue that, to a large extent, the beginnings of this shift towards masculinities programming has been marked by a common critique against the WPS agenda writ-large: Eurocentrism. Specifically, I use the case study of post-conflict Burundi to demonstrate that the common emphasis on gender social norm change to thwart both violence against women and the exclusion of women from decision-making spaces deploys Western logics and reflects an ‘add men and stir’ approach which ignores local ways of thinking and being. Using a feminist postcolonial lens, I re-consider the function and form of gender amidst the dual wakes of conflict and colonialism and identify the challenges of understanding masculinities transformation within a communitarian culture where the individual is imagined as deeply connected within a web of actors.
**********
Hooser, K. (2023). “Educating Around Conflict: Civil Society Oppression and Peace Education in Burundi.” In Teaching Peace Amidst Conflict and Post-Colonialism, Cambridge Scholars Press, edited by Chris Davey, Maria Paula Unigarro Alba, Cris Toffolo, and Juan Felipe Carrillo Gafaro.
Burundi’s relapse into widespread violence following the 2015 elections has invigorated calls for increased peace education efforts among youth and adults. While studies suggest Burundian public support for incorporating peace curricula in schools, that path has been slow and fraught with obstacles. The intersection of a complicated relationship between government and civil society, pervasive fear and suspicion, and a culture of respectability and deference has both hindered efforts to build extensive curricula and shaped existing peace education designs in problematic ways. Specifically, programs, while emphasizing tolerance and creative methods for addressing interpersonal conflict, tend to eschew discussions about the history of conflict in Burundi and the ethnic, religious, and political divisions that persist as drivers of conflict today. In this chapter, I explore civil society's role in peace education through the question: How is peace framed and taught in spaces where speech is closely monitored and fear and intimidation limit civil society engagement? Using a survey of existing civil society efforts and interviews with local peace practitioners, I argue that, despite a widespread grassroots understanding of peace education as crucial to a peaceful future for Burundi, what that education looks like and the extent to which it is permitted to grapple with deep-seated fractures in the social fabric of society is hampered by state suspicion of civil society. Ultimately, peace cannot be fully realizable without genuine and sustained practices of dialogue about how to live well together with and through difference.
**********
Hooser, K., Kanyange, C., and Nijebariko, B. (2023) “When the Hen Sings: The Role of Silence in Women’s Participation in Peacebuilding in Burundi.” Conjonctures de l’Afrique Centrale, 39.
In this cross-cultural collaboration, my team makes the case that women's inclusion in Burundi under policies related to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda has taken an 'add women and stir' approach that leaves Burundian women increasingly present at the proverbial table, and yet, when women are included, silence and being silenced mark their experiences in remarkable ways. To better understand the importance and role of voice in the context of women's inclusion in peacebuilding, our project uses focus groups in three Burundian provinces to examine silence as a gender social norm. Inspired by the Burundian proverb “The hen does not sing when the rooster is near,” we explore the struggle around voice and what it might mean to bring voice to or open up spaces to hear voices from women in Burundi who are silent and silenced. Through the multiple voices of our multi-national team, we experiment with hearing and situating voices both as a WPS programming concern in Burundi and as a practice of cross-cultural, Global North-South collaboration. Our distinct experiences mean that our team does not speak through a single voice or view our worlds through a single lens. As such, we use this project as an opportunity to explore the challenges of hearing silences, spotlighting the textures of our differences, and begin to imagine what it would mean for the hen to truly sing in Burundi.
Policy Reports
Hooser. K., Kanyange, C., Nijebariko, B., & Murphy, T. September 2021. “Exploring Social Norms in Burundi: A Report on the First Phase of Research” View Here
**********
Hooser, K. & Billing, T. May 2021. “Moving from Violence to Peace: An International Working Group on Individuals and Communities in Transition” View Here
**********
Hooser, K. & Knuppe, A. November 2019. “Exploring Obstacles to Social Cohesion in the Aftermath of Violent Conflict: A Scholar-Practitioner Symposium” View Here
**********
Gelpi, C., Knuppe, A., Hooser, K., & Gurevich, V. November 2019. “Symposium Report: Exploring Obstacles to Social Cohesion in the Aftermath of Violent Conflict: A Scholar-Practitioner Symposium” View Here
**********
“Peacebuilding and Violent Extremism: Key Insights and Lessons from a Global Consultation Convened by Peace Direct” (quoted throughout); April 2017; View Here
"When Heroes Hurt: Stories of Everyday Masculinities, Violence, and Peace After Armed Conflict"
How is peace experienced by everyday people after armed conflict? What on-the-ground stories do people tell themselves about continuing violences after war has ended? This book project represents a sustained intervention in the ways political science typically theorizes peace, developing an everyday ontology of peace which accounts for the persistence of everyday violences and the justifications for those violences across communities affected by the dual wakes of conflict and colonialism. I build a case that (1) our existing ontologies of peace in International Relations (IR) are essentially reverse, if not empty, ontologies of war, and (2) that even recent efforts to thematize peace as something more than the absence of conflict fail to address the central roles that gender and gendered subjectivities play in the lived realities of peace. Bringing postcolonial feminist theories to bear on the entanglements between gender, violence, and colonial durabilities after war, I unravel the stories of people who are trying to make sense of violence in the midst of recovering from it, where individuals carry hope and fear and peace and violence together in the same embrace. Using an interpretive storytelling methodology across two case studies—Northern Ireland and Burundi—I show how attention towards ‘good guy’ logics of masculinist protection in the post-conflict space reveals distinct, gendered attachments to violence which are often recognized as part of the peace story by people living in the aftermath of war. Ultimately, an everyday ontology of peace illuminates both violent peaces, or peaces which are marked by routine, everyday violences, and peaceful violences, or violences which are invoked in the name of peace. From this everyday ontology of peace, I make the case that efforts to both understand and build peace must examine gender’s centrality to human socialization and interpersonal relationships, and further, the coloniality of gender’s role in constructing possibilities for living in relation with one another.
**********
"We do not have the luxury of being queer here." Authoritarianism, Liberal Peacebuilding, and the WPS Agenda's Queer Perspectives Problem." (under review)
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda originated as a radical feminist project, yet its global implementation has been shaped by liberal peacebuilding logics that impose linear timelines, fix gender categories, and narrow expectations of participation. In authoritarian contexts resistant to gender and sexual rights, these logics do more than limit who can participate; they create forms of collusion between liberal peace frameworks and state regulation, producing an exclusionary and heteronormative vision of peace. Drawing on fieldwork alongside queer women engaged in WPS spaces in Burundi, I show in this article how participants navigate these constraints through practices of strategic conformity, community, and discretion, conceptualizing these dynamics through the figure of the threshold/held woman: a participant who performs the idealized traits demanded by WPS programming while operating in liminal, often concealed ways that sustain her safety and agency. These threshold/held practices reveal queer temporalities in which safety, visibility, and participation are provisional and continually renegotiated, and attending to these experiences troubles the linear, measurable, and visibility-driven assumptions that have come to dominate WPS implementation. Queering WPS from the threshold exposes both the agenda’s exclusions and also the alternative forms of peace and political possibility that its current frameworks cannot fully hold.
**********
Thnaibat, D. & Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “The Temporal Politics of Youth Peace Education: Method, Memory, and Stories of Resistance." In Youth, Peace, and the Politics of Worldbuilding. Edited by Helen Berents, Katrina Leclerc, and Siobhan McEvoy-Levy.
Youth peace education is often framed as a space for cultivating civic responsibility, reconciliation, and emotional resilience. These approaches, however, rest on liberal peace assumptions that treat peace as a linear process and position young people as citizens-in-training whose agency must be earned through discipline and maturity. This chapter introduces the Temporal Disruption Model (TDM), a pedagogical and methodological framework that challenges these assumptions by centering youth as political actors in the present. Drawing on decolonial and queer theory, the article treats storytelling as a method that disrupts dominant timelines of peacebuilding. Stories surface memory, refusal, and speculation as forms of political presence through which young people contest imposed narratives of participation and progress. Using case studies from Palestine and Burundi alongside fieldwork with peace practitioners, the article shows how storytelling can both unsettle dominant frameworks of peace education and open space for alternative political horizons.
**********
Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “When Significant Experiences Aren’t Statistically Significant: Feminist Storytelling and Ontologies of Life and Death in International Relations” In Why Not Ask What?: Descriptive Inquiry in Political Science, edited by Carolyn E. Holmes, Michelle Jurkovich, Meg K. Guliford, and Mary Anne Mendoza-Davé.
Storytelling has long been central to feminist research, particularly within Black Feminist Thought, where narrative and lived experience form the basis of knowledge. As a method, storytelling offers a distinctive form of descriptive inquiry that centers the particular, foregrounds experience, and challenges dominant epistemological frameworks. It broadens the scope of social science by illuminating the meaning-making practices of individuals whose lives are often marginalized or erased by dominant, quantifiable approaches. As Sarojini Nadar notes, storytelling disrupts claims to objectivity, embraces reflexivity, unsettles master narratives, and opens space for alternative ways of knowing. Yet feminist political scientists who use storytelling frequently encounter the question: “But how is this science?” This chapter takes that tension seriously, arguing that storytelling is not only compatible with scientific inquiry but essential for producing robust understandings of the social world. Drawing on fieldwork in post–Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland, I show how storytelling functions as a vital descriptive method in the study of war and peace. Dominant IR ontologies, which code war as one and peace as zero, flatten the enduring and entangled realities of conflict. In contrast, stories reveal an ontology of peace grounded in life and all its griefs, joys, contradictions, and resiliences, showing that meaningful knowledge of war and peace demands attention towards lived experience.
**********
Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “The Activist-Researcher Quandary: Unpacking Reflexivity, Responsibility, and Feminist Research Praxis in the Field.” In Women’s Lived Experience as Researchers: Situating the Personal in Qualitative Inquiry, edited by Meena Khatwa and Jyoti Belur. Routledge.
This chapter examines the tensions between feminist reflexivity and feminist activism through the lens of a white Western researcher studying gender-based violence in Burundi. Drawing on participatory action research and feminist methodologies, I explore how power, positionality, and reflexivity shape not only the research process and my relationships with collaborators, but also the kinds of claims that can be ethically made from such work. Engaging feminist scholarship in global politics, I reflect on how storytelling as a method has challenged my own activist commitments in contexts where I am distinctly an outsider. The chapter is grounded in encounters with Burundian women who, while sharing experiences of violence, also resist Western framings of gender-based violence prevention, reading them as foreign or colonial intrusions. These moments surface difficult questions about feminist research ethics and the limits of activist scholarship in cross-cultural contexts. Reflexivity, in this setting, requires both examining my own biases and also interrogating the assumptions I carry about what constitutes feminist intervention in the first place. By analyzing these frictions, the chapter outlines the ethical quandaries that arise when personal feminist convictions conflict with the lived perspectives of the women at the center of the research. Ultimately, I propose a framework for navigating these tensions that honors the voices of the women involved, problematizes the imposition of Western feminist ideals, and fosters an ethical approach to research that is rooted in humility and care and the need to embrace the sense of feeling unsettled that deep reflexivity should produce.
**********
Ngia Yeo, Tsing & Hooser, K. (forthcoming). “The Security State and Feminist Reimaginings of Vulnerability." In Rethinking National Security: Gender, Theory, and Practice, edited by Sandra Biskupski-Mujanovic, Veronica Kitchen, and Tanya Narozhna.
National security discourses often center on the imperative to protect the State from external threats, framing security as the capacity to eliminate vulnerability. Across mainstream IR, this logic naturalizes practices of control by translating the embodied, affective realities of vulnerability into the sanitized language of uncertainty and risk management. Feminist theories unsettle these framings by revealing vulnerability not as a deficiency to be overcome but as a complex, relational, and generative condition. This chapter forwards a feminist reformulation of vulnerability through two interrelated arguments. First, we show how dominant security logics position vulnerability as a problem to be minimized through rational control, a reduction that relies on gendered hierarchies which cast exposure, dependence, and relationality as feminized and devalued. Second, we draw on feminist scholarship to refigure vulnerability as ambiguous—a thick signifier with multiple and contradictory meanings that both enable and unsettle the political order of national security. We illustrate the stakes of this reframing through deep securitization in Singapore, where vulnerability operates less as an objective condition than as a site of collective meaning-making. Interpreting deep securitization through subject formation, we argue that the State’s continual return to its own vulnerability enables the reproduction of authority and legitimizes disciplinary practices. Reimagined as ambiguous and generative, vulnerability opens possibilities for more relational and emancipatory forms of security.
Publications
Hooser. K. (2026). “Student-Centered Learning.” In Elgar Encyclopedia of Teaching and Pedagogy in Political Science, edited by Daniel J. Mallinson, Julia Marin Hellwege, and Joseph Roberts
This chapter examines Student-Centered Teaching and Learning (SCTL) as a transformative pedagogical framework within Political Science. Grounded in constructivist and critical pedagogies, SCTL positions students as active participants and co-constructors of knowledge, emphasizing engaged learning, collaboration, formative assessment, and student autonomy. I explore SCTL’s alignment with the disciplinary study of power, highlighting how it cultivates critical inquiry, democratic dispositions, and connections between knowledge and lived experience. At the same time, I identify the challenges of implementing SCTL in Political Science, including structural constraints, persistent classroom hierarchies, the myth of neutrality, and the pressures of teaching in politically polarized contexts. Ultimately, SCTL offers a relational, ethical, and politically conscious approach to cultivating empowered and critically engaged learners.
**********
Hooser, K. (2025). “Doing Gender, Doing Peace: Eurocentrism, Masculinities, and the WPS Agenda’s ‘Add Men and Stir’ Problem.” In Routledge Handbook of Masculinities, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, edited by Henri Myrttinen, Farooq Yousaf, Chloé Lewis, Elizabeth Laruni, Philipp Schulz and Heleen Touquet. Routledge.
An increasing call for integration of masculinities-centered programming in the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda has resulted in the recent development of a number of programs aimed at men and boys. One such approach to incorporating masculinities has been to focus on gender social norms related to manhood as a pathway for transforming patriarchal structures, disrupting militarized violence, and generating sustainable, meaningful inclusion for women. In this chapter, I argue that, to a large extent, the beginnings of this shift towards masculinities programming has been marked by a common critique against the WPS agenda writ-large: Eurocentrism. Specifically, I use the case study of post-conflict Burundi to demonstrate that the common emphasis on gender social norm change to thwart both violence against women and the exclusion of women from decision-making spaces deploys Western logics and reflects an ‘add men and stir’ approach which ignores local ways of thinking and being. Using a feminist postcolonial lens, I re-consider the function and form of gender amidst the dual wakes of conflict and colonialism and identify the challenges of understanding masculinities transformation within a communitarian culture where the individual is imagined as deeply connected within a web of actors.
**********
Hooser, K. (2023). “Educating Around Conflict: Civil Society Oppression and Peace Education in Burundi.” In Teaching Peace Amidst Conflict and Post-Colonialism, Cambridge Scholars Press, edited by Chris Davey, Maria Paula Unigarro Alba, Cris Toffolo, and Juan Felipe Carrillo Gafaro.
Burundi’s relapse into widespread violence following the 2015 elections has invigorated calls for increased peace education efforts among youth and adults. While studies suggest Burundian public support for incorporating peace curricula in schools, that path has been slow and fraught with obstacles. The intersection of a complicated relationship between government and civil society, pervasive fear and suspicion, and a culture of respectability and deference has both hindered efforts to build extensive curricula and shaped existing peace education designs in problematic ways. Specifically, programs, while emphasizing tolerance and creative methods for addressing interpersonal conflict, tend to eschew discussions about the history of conflict in Burundi and the ethnic, religious, and political divisions that persist as drivers of conflict today. In this chapter, I explore civil society's role in peace education through the question: How is peace framed and taught in spaces where speech is closely monitored and fear and intimidation limit civil society engagement? Using a survey of existing civil society efforts and interviews with local peace practitioners, I argue that, despite a widespread grassroots understanding of peace education as crucial to a peaceful future for Burundi, what that education looks like and the extent to which it is permitted to grapple with deep-seated fractures in the social fabric of society is hampered by state suspicion of civil society. Ultimately, peace cannot be fully realizable without genuine and sustained practices of dialogue about how to live well together with and through difference.
**********
Hooser, K., Kanyange, C., and Nijebariko, B. (2023) “When the Hen Sings: The Role of Silence in Women’s Participation in Peacebuilding in Burundi.” Conjonctures de l’Afrique Centrale, 39.
In this cross-cultural collaboration, my team makes the case that women's inclusion in Burundi under policies related to the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda has taken an 'add women and stir' approach that leaves Burundian women increasingly present at the proverbial table, and yet, when women are included, silence and being silenced mark their experiences in remarkable ways. To better understand the importance and role of voice in the context of women's inclusion in peacebuilding, our project uses focus groups in three Burundian provinces to examine silence as a gender social norm. Inspired by the Burundian proverb “The hen does not sing when the rooster is near,” we explore the struggle around voice and what it might mean to bring voice to or open up spaces to hear voices from women in Burundi who are silent and silenced. Through the multiple voices of our multi-national team, we experiment with hearing and situating voices both as a WPS programming concern in Burundi and as a practice of cross-cultural, Global North-South collaboration. Our distinct experiences mean that our team does not speak through a single voice or view our worlds through a single lens. As such, we use this project as an opportunity to explore the challenges of hearing silences, spotlighting the textures of our differences, and begin to imagine what it would mean for the hen to truly sing in Burundi.
Policy Reports
Hooser. K., Kanyange, C., Nijebariko, B., & Murphy, T. September 2021. “Exploring Social Norms in Burundi: A Report on the First Phase of Research” View Here
**********
Hooser, K. & Billing, T. May 2021. “Moving from Violence to Peace: An International Working Group on Individuals and Communities in Transition” View Here
**********
Hooser, K. & Knuppe, A. November 2019. “Exploring Obstacles to Social Cohesion in the Aftermath of Violent Conflict: A Scholar-Practitioner Symposium” View Here
**********
Gelpi, C., Knuppe, A., Hooser, K., & Gurevich, V. November 2019. “Symposium Report: Exploring Obstacles to Social Cohesion in the Aftermath of Violent Conflict: A Scholar-Practitioner Symposium” View Here
**********
“Peacebuilding and Violent Extremism: Key Insights and Lessons from a Global Consultation Convened by Peace Direct” (quoted throughout); April 2017; View Here