Stigma, Gender and Violence: Rethinking the Stigmatization of Survivors of Wartime Abuses

This project examines stigmatization against three categories of victims of wartime abuses: Survivors of sexual violence, children born of war, former child soldiers.

The purpose of this project is to advance our understanding of how stigmatization affects sustainable peace by scrutinizing two interconnected links; the link between stigma and violence and the link between stigma and gender. In order to reach this aim, this dissertation sets out to explore the social mechanisms of this stigma and which logics underpins it by bridging gender studies and stigma research. The insights from this study adds to the emerging field of feminist peace literature by theorizing stigmatization as an inherently gendered phenomena, responsible for perpetuating the experience of wartime violence among its victims and therefore pose an obstacle for achieving a sustainable and feminist peace. As such, this study contributes to dismantle the binary between war and peace by pointing at how stigmatization against victims of wartime abuses is a continuation of wartime violence which bleeds into peacetime.


This PhD project is part of DFF-funded PROTEX project: How the EU, UN and AU practice protection of civilians in Mali, Somalia and the Central African Republic. Chiara de Franco (PI), Christina Stefan (University of Leeds, UK), Linnea Gelot (Folke Bernadotte Academy, Sweden).