Research |
My research begins with the question: how might our understandings of (peace, security, war, etc.) be different if considered through a gender lens? Situating my work in feminist peace and conflict studies, I use interpretive methodologies (including storytelling and discourse analysis) to better understand the grounded experiences of women in a variety of political contexts. In my work, I maintain a commitment to collaboration, participatory research, and local knowledge, and often co-author and design projects in close relationship with the communities I work alongside.
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Everyday Masculinities and Peace
"Violence as Peace: 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.
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.
Community Gender norms and peacebuilding
"When the Hen Sings: The Role of Silence in Women's Participation in Peacebuilding in Burundi" (with Chantal Kanyange and Beatrice Nijebariko)
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.
An article building off this collaboration has been published in Conjonctures de l'Afrique Centrale. Pre-print available upon request.
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.
An article building off this collaboration has been published in Conjonctures de l'Afrique Centrale. Pre-print available upon request.
Masculinities and state foreign policy
"Welcome to the Gray Zone: Taking a Gender Lens to U.S. Strategic Anxiety" (with Jennifer Mitzen)
US grand strategy grapples with the threat of conflict waged in a ‘gray zone’ between war and peace. Gray zone conflict encompasses a range of coercive, aggressive actions short of war that defy frameworks for thinking about threat and defense. They are ‘risk confused’: objectives, actors, relevant international norms, and the role of force can be uncertain. Given this ambiguity, any state response is fraught: treating gray zone conflict as war risks over reaction; ignoring it risks escalation. Gray zone conflict thus provokes strategic anxiety. Much scholarly work on gray zone conflict is definitional, locating it among theories of war and peace. In this paper, we treat the definitional exercise as a strategy for containing the anxiety of ambiguity and bring a gender lens to the gray zone category. The gray zone provokes anxiety because it does not fit the war-peace binary. But feminist peace and security studies tells us that aggression has never fit a simple binary; it always has spilled into and sometimes looked like the everyday. Exploring recent iterations of the U.S. National Security Strategy, we illustrate how current U.S. thinking around the gray zone extends a masculinist logic of protection into any area designated as gray, and, in propping up war via an empty category into which even the most mundane of activities and domestic locales can be dumped, the gray zone in security discourse expands the state’s militarized, war footing, increasing its reach into the everyday life of its citizen.
US grand strategy grapples with the threat of conflict waged in a ‘gray zone’ between war and peace. Gray zone conflict encompasses a range of coercive, aggressive actions short of war that defy frameworks for thinking about threat and defense. They are ‘risk confused’: objectives, actors, relevant international norms, and the role of force can be uncertain. Given this ambiguity, any state response is fraught: treating gray zone conflict as war risks over reaction; ignoring it risks escalation. Gray zone conflict thus provokes strategic anxiety. Much scholarly work on gray zone conflict is definitional, locating it among theories of war and peace. In this paper, we treat the definitional exercise as a strategy for containing the anxiety of ambiguity and bring a gender lens to the gray zone category. The gray zone provokes anxiety because it does not fit the war-peace binary. But feminist peace and security studies tells us that aggression has never fit a simple binary; it always has spilled into and sometimes looked like the everyday. Exploring recent iterations of the U.S. National Security Strategy, we illustrate how current U.S. thinking around the gray zone extends a masculinist logic of protection into any area designated as gray, and, in propping up war via an empty category into which even the most mundane of activities and domestic locales can be dumped, the gray zone in security discourse expands the state’s militarized, war footing, increasing its reach into the everyday life of its citizen.
feminist ontologies of War and Peace
“When Significant Experiences Aren’t Statistically Significant: Feminist Storytelling and Ontologies of Life and Death in International Relations”
Storytelling has long been a mainstay in feminist research. As a method, storytelling invokes a distinct kind of descriptive research, one where the particular is brought into focus and experience becomes central to knowledge production. Feminist storytelling expands the typical frames of social science to consider the lived and meaning-making experiences of people whose lives are often excluded from or distorted by the quantifiable manipulation of social life, and it allows us to capture holistic, grounded understandings of the concepts we use to describe the social world. To demonstrate the importance of storytelling to the study of International Relations (IR), in this article I explore ontologies of war and peace in IR and make the case that, without sustained attention towards everyday stories, these existing ontologies which are crucial to the discipline are empty and lack clear insights into the way people live war and peace in their day-to-day lives. Folding together feminist IR scholarship on corporeality and experience, Black Feminist Thought on the erasure and persistence of Black death, and recent scholarship on the specter of death in global politics, I trace stories from post-Arusha Accords Burundi to demonstrate that IR’s treatment of war and peace, each rooted to an ontology of (specific) death(s) and the counting of (specific) dead bodies, marks a serious failure in knowing war and peace. Ultimately, I use stories to illustrate that, if the science of war and peace is to mean anything at all to lived realities, it demands attention towards story.
This article is currently Under Review as part of a special issue on descriptive research methodologies in IR.
Storytelling has long been a mainstay in feminist research. As a method, storytelling invokes a distinct kind of descriptive research, one where the particular is brought into focus and experience becomes central to knowledge production. Feminist storytelling expands the typical frames of social science to consider the lived and meaning-making experiences of people whose lives are often excluded from or distorted by the quantifiable manipulation of social life, and it allows us to capture holistic, grounded understandings of the concepts we use to describe the social world. To demonstrate the importance of storytelling to the study of International Relations (IR), in this article I explore ontologies of war and peace in IR and make the case that, without sustained attention towards everyday stories, these existing ontologies which are crucial to the discipline are empty and lack clear insights into the way people live war and peace in their day-to-day lives. Folding together feminist IR scholarship on corporeality and experience, Black Feminist Thought on the erasure and persistence of Black death, and recent scholarship on the specter of death in global politics, I trace stories from post-Arusha Accords Burundi to demonstrate that IR’s treatment of war and peace, each rooted to an ontology of (specific) death(s) and the counting of (specific) dead bodies, marks a serious failure in knowing war and peace. Ultimately, I use stories to illustrate that, if the science of war and peace is to mean anything at all to lived realities, it demands attention towards story.
This article is currently Under Review as part of a special issue on descriptive research methodologies in IR.
Liberal Peacebuilding and the women, peace, and security agenda
"The Model Woman and the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda: When Authoritarianism and Liberal Peacebuilding Collude, a Case Study in Burundi"
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda’s global call for women’s inclusion in peacebuilding has increasingly become a cornerstone of the liberal peacebuilding project. The implementation of WPS priorities around the world has raised a number of criticisms, including questions about the extent to which adoption of WPS national action plans (NAPs) proffers legitimacy for authoritarian countries on the world stage, as well as the myriad ways that the WPS agenda has ignored LGBTQ experiences with peace and violence. I build on these critiques to argue that, in the case of illiberal states with resistance towards gender equality and LGBTQ rights, the public acceptance of WPS priorities produces collusion between authoritarian states and liberal peacebuilding processes under an exclusionary, heteronormative framework. Spotlighting post-civil war Burundi as a case study, I argue that civil society’s embrace of the WPS agenda in Burundi has reinforced rigid, binary conceptions of gender and cemented an ideal-type ‘woman participant’ worthy of inclusion in the public arena. Drawing on content analysis of Burundi’s NAPs and interviews with civil society stakeholders, I show how such policies are a symbolic form of power vis-à-vis the Global North, but they also work to solidify a heteronormative, cisgender framing of ‘women’ that accepts only ‘ideal’ women—married, elite, educated, straight, cisgender mothers—as potential leaders in peacebuilding. While these ‘exceptional’ women are increasingly finding themselves a seat at the table, those who exist outside this archetype remain excluded and erased from national WPS priorities.
This article is part of a special issue on queer theory and the Women, Peace, and Security agenda.
The Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda’s global call for women’s inclusion in peacebuilding has increasingly become a cornerstone of the liberal peacebuilding project. The implementation of WPS priorities around the world has raised a number of criticisms, including questions about the extent to which adoption of WPS national action plans (NAPs) proffers legitimacy for authoritarian countries on the world stage, as well as the myriad ways that the WPS agenda has ignored LGBTQ experiences with peace and violence. I build on these critiques to argue that, in the case of illiberal states with resistance towards gender equality and LGBTQ rights, the public acceptance of WPS priorities produces collusion between authoritarian states and liberal peacebuilding processes under an exclusionary, heteronormative framework. Spotlighting post-civil war Burundi as a case study, I argue that civil society’s embrace of the WPS agenda in Burundi has reinforced rigid, binary conceptions of gender and cemented an ideal-type ‘woman participant’ worthy of inclusion in the public arena. Drawing on content analysis of Burundi’s NAPs and interviews with civil society stakeholders, I show how such policies are a symbolic form of power vis-à-vis the Global North, but they also work to solidify a heteronormative, cisgender framing of ‘women’ that accepts only ‘ideal’ women—married, elite, educated, straight, cisgender mothers—as potential leaders in peacebuilding. While these ‘exceptional’ women are increasingly finding themselves a seat at the table, those who exist outside this archetype remain excluded and erased from national WPS priorities.
This article is part of a special issue on queer theory and the Women, Peace, and Security agenda.
Book chapters
Masculinities and the wps agenda in burundi
Hooser, K. “Doing Gender is Doing Peace: Communitarian Cosmologies, Masculinities, and the WPS Agenda in Burundi.” In Routledge Handbook of Masculinities, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, edited by Henri Myrttinen, Farooq Yousaf, Chloé Lewis, Elizabeth Laruni, Philipp Schulz and Heleen Touquet, forthcoming 2024
In this chapter, I map out common program approaches in Burundi to gender social norm change related to masculinities, and make the case that existing frameworks are problematically rooted in Eurocentric constructions of gender and individualistic agency. Through a feminist ethos that centers local epistemologies, I consider the challenges of understanding masculinities and gender norm change within a communitarian culture where the individual is imagined as deeply connected within a web of actors. I find that a collectivist, relational lens is crucial to understanding experiences of gender in Burundi, with important implications for WPS programming aimed at transforming masculinities. Through the grounded stories of everyday Burundians, I advocate for moving beyond a Eurocentric framework of individualistic agency and accounting for the interlocking ways that preserving gender norms in Burundi is simultaneously imagined as preserving peace.
In this chapter, I map out common program approaches in Burundi to gender social norm change related to masculinities, and make the case that existing frameworks are problematically rooted in Eurocentric constructions of gender and individualistic agency. Through a feminist ethos that centers local epistemologies, I consider the challenges of understanding masculinities and gender norm change within a communitarian culture where the individual is imagined as deeply connected within a web of actors. I find that a collectivist, relational lens is crucial to understanding experiences of gender in Burundi, with important implications for WPS programming aimed at transforming masculinities. Through the grounded stories of everyday Burundians, I advocate for moving beyond a Eurocentric framework of individualistic agency and accounting for the interlocking ways that preserving gender norms in Burundi is simultaneously imagined as preserving peace.
Civil society and peace education
Hooser, K. “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, 2023. Pre-print available upon request. Purchase the full edited volume here.
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.
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.
Public Engagement and Policy Publications
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
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