Research
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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 an interpretive, storytelling methodology to examine the co-construction of masculinities and violent nationalisms and the continuum of violences from war to peace. In my research, I maintain a commitment to collaboration and local knowledges and often work alongside, design, and co-author through global partnerships. I explore the relationship between masculinities, violence, and peace on three levels: the experiential/everyday, the community, and the State.
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Everyday Masculinities and Peace
"Violence as Peace: Stories of Everyday Masculinities, Violence, and Peace After Armed Conflict"
In my dissertation, I argue that current treatments of positive peace fail to understand the fundamental role that gender plays in the function and form of peace narratives and experiences in the everyday. Applying a gender lens to everyday practices of masculinity and the language of positive peace in local peacebuilding programming, my research explores the central role that war-linked masculinities play in obstructing efforts at growing positive peace after widespread violence. Analyzing relational, ordinary language interviews and focus groups in Northern Ireland and Burundi, I posit two patriarchal scripts rooted in the lives of ordinary people—'peace-loving protectors’ and ‘righteous revolutionaries’—as especially problematic for positive peacebuilding because each cloaks justifications for violence behind acceptable constructions of ‘good guy’ masculinities. Fundamentally, I make the case that efforts to understand and build positive peace must examine gender and the coloniality of gender's centrality to human socialization, interpersonal relationships, and possibilities for living in relation with one another.
In my dissertation, I argue that current treatments of positive peace fail to understand the fundamental role that gender plays in the function and form of peace narratives and experiences in the everyday. Applying a gender lens to everyday practices of masculinity and the language of positive peace in local peacebuilding programming, my research explores the central role that war-linked masculinities play in obstructing efforts at growing positive peace after widespread violence. Analyzing relational, ordinary language interviews and focus groups in Northern Ireland and Burundi, I posit two patriarchal scripts rooted in the lives of ordinary people—'peace-loving protectors’ and ‘righteous revolutionaries’—as especially problematic for positive peacebuilding because each cloaks justifications for violence behind acceptable constructions of ‘good guy’ masculinities. Fundamentally, I make the case that efforts to understand and build positive peace must examine gender and the coloniality of gender's centrality to human socialization, interpersonal relationships, and 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.
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.
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.
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 2023
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 crucial 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 crucial 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.
gender and the conflict heritage industry in northern ireland
Hooser, K. “Militarized Masculinities in the Public Space: Exploring Masculine Discourses in Northern Ireland’s Museums.” In Routledge International Handbook on Heritage and Gender Studies, edited by Jenna Ashton, forthcoming Summer 2023
In this chapter, I argue that the conflict memorial and museum landscape in Northern Ireland complicates post-conflict peacebuilding in two crucial ways: (1) it produces a particularly gendered conflict narrative(s), where women are either silent or essentialized as victims or beacons of peace, and (2), these gendered narratives are laced with troubling depictions of masculinity, especially an emphasis on men as warriors, and honor and chivalry as justifications for violence. Using participant-observation and interviews with museum curators and collection owners, I examine the conflict heritage industry in Northern Ireland and demonstrate that, while these sites can be important spaces for curators and even marginalized communities to tell their own truths and re-affirm their conflict memories, they also generate contested memories of the past, present, and future cemented by masculinist understandings of both the conflict and the potential for peace. On those terms, I theorize the conflict heritage industry in Northern Ireland as a space rooted in gendered mythologies, where what is forgotten and what is remembered and the very politics of ‘doing’ history in Northern Ireland is fundamentally shot through with gendered notions of whose stories matter and what and how stories are worth remembering.
In this chapter, I argue that the conflict memorial and museum landscape in Northern Ireland complicates post-conflict peacebuilding in two crucial ways: (1) it produces a particularly gendered conflict narrative(s), where women are either silent or essentialized as victims or beacons of peace, and (2), these gendered narratives are laced with troubling depictions of masculinity, especially an emphasis on men as warriors, and honor and chivalry as justifications for violence. Using participant-observation and interviews with museum curators and collection owners, I examine the conflict heritage industry in Northern Ireland and demonstrate that, while these sites can be important spaces for curators and even marginalized communities to tell their own truths and re-affirm their conflict memories, they also generate contested memories of the past, present, and future cemented by masculinist understandings of both the conflict and the potential for peace. On those terms, I theorize the conflict heritage industry in Northern Ireland as a space rooted in gendered mythologies, where what is forgotten and what is remembered and the very politics of ‘doing’ history in Northern Ireland is fundamentally shot through with gendered notions of whose stories matter and what and how stories are worth remembering.
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, forthcoming Fall 2022
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