Gender, Civilian Security and the Paradox of War Norms

8 November 2013, 1342 EST

I am traveling this week for the 40th Anniversary Celebration at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at University of Oregon, where I completed my doctoral work ten years ago next month. CSWS was kind enough to fund field travel for my dissertation back then, which became my first book, and it’s a pleasure to be back to present at their event. In a few hours I’ll present a short talk on “War and Civilian Security,” tying together my earlier work on gender and civilian immunity with emerging and very urgent trends in human security norm development. The YouTube version is here:

A longer and more academic version of this argument was presented earlier this week at the University of Bergen, Norway, at a workshop on Gender Essentialisms in Protection Practices and can be viewed here.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.