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Beyond Vulnerability: Exploring the Political Agency of Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence

Applicant Dr. Philipp Schulz
Subject Area Political Science
Term from 2019 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426849903
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

This project explored how male survivors of wartime sexual violence experienced and practiced different forms of political agency. While sexual violence against men and boys is increasingly recognized in scholarship and policy-making, if and when there is attention to men and boys as victims of wartime sexual violence, the focus has been on their vulnerabilities, portraying survivors as passive, humiliated, and indefinitely stripped of their masculine identities. While feminist international relations (IR) scholarship has begun to examine the active roles of women and girls as agents within the context of armed conflict, how male survivors - in spite of their gendered vulnerabilities - also exercise political agency in myriad ways had previously not been considered and analysed. This project addressed this gap, for the first time ever directing the focus on male sexual violence survivors’ experiences of political agency. Drawing on a broad understanding of agency, the project explored the myriad ways in which men and boys who were affected by wartime sexual violence actively engaged with their experiences, how they resisted violence, how they navigated the complicated intersections of voice, silence and erasure, and how they organized themselves. To this end, the project draws on in-depth qualitative and ethnographic research with groups of male survivors of sexual violence, primarily in northern Uganda but also focused on settings like Sri Lanka or the former Yugoslavia. The research underpinning this project yields numerous important results and findings for our understanding of the experiences of wartime sexual violence survivors, and with regards to the role of agency in conflict-affected spaces. Rather than being passively subjected to and affected by violence, male survivors in these contexts – Uganda, Sri Lanka and the former Yugoslavia – actively engage with their experiences and thereby refute the stereotypical image of the ever-passive, vulnerable victim. Concrete examples of these forms of agency include specific spaces, such as survivor support groups, where survivors get together to support one another or carry out different forms of income-generating activities. These insights are important to guide and inform future programming and policy-making for interventions against conflict-related sexual violence – at the UN, EU and NGO-level – on how to meaningfully provide assistance to survivors, and how to include them in efforts to prevent, redress and respond to CRSV.

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