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Open research questions in Gender, Security, and Conflict

118 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 6,384 Gender, Security, and Conflict papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • To move beyond victim-blaming culture and support empowerment, we offer several recommendations. (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) Raise awareness and shift norms. Education campaigns should involve community and religious leaders, not just schools. Tackling attitudes through education is vital and local influencers can play a key role. For example, faith leaders could be trained to speak out against blaming victims. Radio programmes in local languages and village forums can explain that women are not at fault for abuse. Improve access to survivor support. This means expanding rural clinics, crisis centers and helplines that are sensitive to victim-blaming. Health and police personnel need gender-sensitivity training so they respond with care rather than judgment. Promote conscientization and participation. It is important to develop programmes that encourage critical dialogue within communities. For example, men’s groups could meet to discuss gender roles and the harms of blaming women. Women’s cooperatives and savings groups provide safe spaces for survivors to share experiences and build confidence. Strengthening laws and their enforcement. Nigeria’s Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act (2015) and other laws need full implementation. Authorities must hold abusers accountable regardless of the victim’s status. Sensitization programmes for police and judges can help end practices like demanding bride-price as justification for abuse. All interventions should be culturally responsive and rooted in an African-centered feminist approach. This means building on positive local values (such as communal care) and respecting indigenous knowledge. Programmes should empower women to frame solutions in their own terms. For instance, using local storytelling, proverbs, or music can counteract myths without seeming foreign.

    Victim blaming and cultural narratives in rural Nigeria: A study using Longwe’s women empowerment framework · 2026 · DOI

  • By centering an under-researched site in IR, this thesis reveals how everyday digital publics construct inverse gendered hierarchies not for external validation, but as a vital, bottom-up coping mechanism to stabilize a threatened national Self.

    Women's Bodies, Men's Security: Vietnamese Postcolonial Masculinity and the Digital Construction of Intra-Colonial Hierarchies · 2026 · DOI

  • In three main parts, “Resisting the Body,” “Affect as Agency,” and “Maternal Body at War,” we engage with the text to argue that while in recent decades, academic scholarship regarding women’s experience and participation in the war have expanded and enriched, there is an intellectual gap in understanding how women who considered themselves ordinary survived the war that framed each female body as an invading space of abjection and annihilation.

    “Ordinary” Women in Stories from the Edge : An Exploration of Affect and Ethics in the Narratives of 1971 Liberation War of Bangladesh · 2025 · DOI

  • Few studies have explored enslaved women’s weaponized resistance and how they shaped the landscape of the US slaveholding South for their own violent purposes.

    Challenging the overseer: enslaved women’s violent resistance in the US antebellum South · 2025 · DOI

  • This essay also argues that gender should be explored in relation not only to objectivefactors such as the age, socio-economic background and religiosity of rescuers, but also in relationto more subjective factors such as internal dynamics in marriages and individual family practices,the individual system of beliefs, and parental and sexual desires of married, widowed and singlemale and female rescuers.

    The history of rescue in Poland and genderperspective: new approaches and questions · 2024 · DOI

  • While a considerable knowledge base that explores the gendered discourses of NAPs on WPS already exists, a key gap in the literature —that has only more recently begun to be explored with greater rigor— is the bridging of queer and feminist theories to further push the boundaries of discursive policy analysis.

    (En)gendering Peace: A Queer Feminist Analysis of South Africa’s (2020-2025) National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security · 2023 · DOI

  • Despite the fact that the world has been working with this concept since 2014, when Sweden adopted the principles of feminism in its decision-making process, there is still no consensus on what the FFP should be like.

    Feminist Foreign Policy. Concept Development, Defining Elements, Formulation of the Research Framework · 2022 · DOI

  • , through the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda) evidence on the effectiveness of gender-specific and gender-transformative interventions to improve women's empowerment in fragile and conflict-affected states and situations (FCAS) remains understudied.

    Strengthening women's empowerment and gender equality in fragile contexts towards peaceful and inclusive societies: A systematic review and meta‐analysis · 2022 · DOI

  • Uzbekistan’s first law targeting violence against women (2019) appears against the backdrop of decades of understudied resistance and struggle on the part of non-state actors, such as activists, survivors and volunteer organizers.

    Grassroots struggles against domestic violence in Uzbekistan: strategies of exit and voice · 2022 · DOI

  • The entangled character of Ottoman and Egyptian feminisms (for a detailed examination, see Torunoğlu 2019) was not limited to the exchange of ideas between the two centers.

    Comparative and Integrative History in Ottoman and Turkish Women’s and Gender Studies · 2021 · DOI

  • United Nations-led Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes have increasingly included female ex-combatants; however, the contribution of such DDR programmes to female ex-combatants’ empowerment and reintegration, as well as to peace-building, remains debated.

    Rethinking female ex-combatants, reintegration, and DDR: towards political reintegration? · 2021 · DOI

  • In Cambodia, this has meant a partial account of sexual and gender-based violence—one that is limited to the three-year, eight-month and 20-day rule of the Khmer Rouge, and that marginalizes survivor experiences from other episodes of the 30-year-long internal conflict.

    The Missing Picture: Accounting for Sexual and Gender-Based Violence during Cambodia’s ‘Other’ Conflict Periods · 2020 · DOI

  • As feminist research gains new impetus with the twentieth anniversary celebrations of UNSCR 1325, our findings provide new insights into the workings of this agenda in a region that has been under-explored within WPS scholarship.

    Global pathways or local spins? National Action Plans in South America · 2020 · DOI

  • More research is warranted, including on sexual violence against men and boys in Somalia, sexual violence by family and community members in conflict and displacement settings, sexual exploitation of adolescent boys, and sexual violence including sexual exploitation of persons with diverse sexual orientation and gender identity.

    Characteristics and Impacts of Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys in Conflict and Displacement: A Multicountry Exploratory Study · 2020 · DOI

  • That power was, of course, limited by the gendered and marital hierarchies that framed women’s worlds, but McInnis successfully demonstrates that life in the empire offered women newfound opportunities and symbolic importance.

    Women of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Army Officers’ Wives in India and the U.S. West by Verity McInnis · 2019 · DOI

  • The need for a paradigm shift is warranted by the continued high levels of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), directed predominantly towards women, experienced in post-conflict contexts.

    Sexual and gender-based violence: the case for transformative justice in Cambodia · 2018 · DOI

  • It finds that the EU's ability to promote gender inclusive approaches to SSR is limited by the structure of the EU's own assumptions and capabilities, and institutional constraints in third countries.

    Gender and the EU's Support for Security Sector Reform in Fragile Contexts · 2018 · DOI

  • Abstract The sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) of civilians by international peacekeepers is a form of post-conflict violence that is pernicious and understudied, but far from inevitable.

    Military socialization, disciplinary culture, and sexual violence in UN peacekeeping operations · 2017 · DOI

  • This paper seeks to fill the gap in the literature by engaging in an examination and critique of the ways in which the Council of Europe has incorporated and framed VAW within various legal and policy initiatives.

    Towards a Transformative Conceptualisation of Violence Against Women ‐ A Critical Frame Analysis of Council of Europe Discourse on Violence Against Women · 2016 · DOI

  • Yet Martínez’s [End Page 78] contributions to theorizing and practicing Chicana feminism, third world feminism, and Black and Latina/o coalition building have not been examined in-depth in feminist scholarship.

    “To Live a Humanity under the Skin”: Revolutionary Love and Third World Praxis in 1970s Chicana Feminism · 2015 · DOI

  • This essay addresses this gap in the literature by using a textual approach to explore the visual elements of a controversial image picturing two US Air Force servicewomen breastfeeding in uniform, which was released by the Mom2Mom Support Group in the summer of 2012.

    Breastfeeding as Subversive · 2014 · DOI

  • In the rest of this introduction, I describe the scarce literature on student resistance to feminist pedagogies and situate my work in dialogue with feminist scholars whose experiential pedagogical pieces have helped me in the design and teaching of GWST 340.

    Negotiating the Geopolitics of Student Resistance in Global Feminisms Classrooms · 2013 · DOI

  • This article addresses an underreported aspect of contemporary warring in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): the experiences of women soldiers and officers in the Congolese national armed forces (Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo [FARDC]).

    Fearless Fighters and Submissive Wives · 2013 · DOI

  • Using data from multiple sources, it focuses on the main characteristics and patterns of activism starting from the Gulf War of 1990–1991, paying particular attention to its growth and decline during the 1990s, an understudied period in the literature on women's movements in the Middle East.

    Women’s Rights in the Middle East: A Longitudinal Study of Kuwait · 2009 · DOI

  • Excavating the understudied group complicates the history of African American women's activism, black feminism, American communism, human rights, and the Cold War by revealing the ways in which a small group of black women radicals invented their own unique understandings of liberation and human rights during the McCarthy period.

    A “New Freedom Movement of Negro Women”: Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War · 2008 · DOI

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118 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 6,384 Gender, Security, and Conflict papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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