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Women, War Trauma, and Peace Building: Gendered Attitudes in Sierra Leone and Liberia

The ´women and peace´ hypothesis has long been an important influence in both scholarly and popular thinking around gender and conflict, suggesting that women hold more pacific attitudes than men. However, this hypothesis has until recently never been studied in countries that have been torn by internal armed conflict. Building on findings from a recent study on Rwanda, the present proposal suggests, counter to the hypothesis, that due to the different types and levels of trauma exposure women and men are subjected to in war, women will have significantly more negative attitudes than men to issues of relevance for peacebuilding. In essence, we suggest that there is a gendered effect on peacebuilding attitudes that go through exposure to war-related trauma and psychological health. Using a cross-disciplinary approach, combining peace research with psychology, this project will conduct surveys, focus groups, and in depth interviews in Sierra Leone and Liberia, to explore the challenges of and attitudes towards post-conflict peacebuilding among women and men. The project will make a unique contribution theoretically but also practically by increasing our knowledge of women´s and men´s experiences of and attitudes to peacebuilding in post-conflict settings, and the reasons for these attitudes, which will provide critical information for understanding the challenges of peace-building, and ultimately for improving the prospects for peace.

Project ID

SE-0-SE-29-2014-3780-251-43082

Activity status

2 - Implementation

Aid type

D02 - Other technical assistance

% to Liberia

100.00

Organisations

Funding

Sweden

Extending

The Swedish Research Council

Implementing

Uppsala universitet

CRS code	%
Research/scientific institutions (43082)	100.0