Prof. Donna Pankhurst - Staff Profile

Name	Prof. Donna Pankhurst
Contact Position	Professor of Peacebuilding & Development, Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning SSIS Description BA PhD Liv.
Email Address	d.t.pankhurst@bradford.ac.uk

Research Areas

Main Research Interests

Selected Publications
Gender and Conflict
Gender and Peacebuilding
Contemporary issues of development in Africa
Post-conflict Justice and Reconciliation, particularly in Africa
Memory and Peacebuilding

Main Geographic Area:

Africa: especially Uganda, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Namibia

Donna Pankhurst's main area of research interest is gender issues in conflict and post-conflict settings. Such issues include men's experiences, and issues of masculinity, as well as the experiences of women. She is part of a network of scholars who are developing this area and her new book focuses on the aspect of post-conflict reconciliation and justice.

Her research history concentrated on fieldwork in Southern Africa (particularly Zimbabwe and Namibia) but she has also worked in Sudan, and other countries in East and West Africa. More recently she has concentrated on Uganda as a case study, and tries to get back there whenever she can! She has worked with a number of NGOs and international organisations as advisor and consultant. These experiences have helped to ensure that publications are relevant for audiences beyond academia.

The work on Uganda is building on an earlier British Academy-funded project, 'What Happens When the Fighting Stops', which researched some of the processes of peacebuilding in several of Uganda's regions. Uganda is a fascinating case study through which Donna is exploring Uganda's potential post-conflict lessons for other countries.

She is also developing work on approaches to peace-building with regard to Truth Commissions, Justice and Reconciliation. This work is exploring the idea that the different approaches taken to these issues depends not only on the type of conflict that took place, but also on the type of society that emerges, and that therefore for some parts of the world Truth Commissions may not be at all helpful, in spite of their current popularity.

Donna has been Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching in the School of Social and International Studies since 2000. This role involves her in considerable university responsibilities beyond the Department of Peace Studies. She supervises a number of PhD students, who are also working on African countries (including Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Nigeria and Kenya) and post-conflict gender issues (eg. gender and landmines).

Donna worked with Prof. Jenny Pearce on the Ouseley Commission to look at race issues in Bradford in 2001, and is a founding member of the University's Programme for a Peaceful City. She is also a long-standing Chair of Governors of one of Bradford's biggest inner-city comprehensive schools, with a predominantly ethnic minority intake, and is active in representing the voices of governors in consultation with the Local Education Authority. She currently chairs the District's Education Strategy Group, which aims to facilitate public debate about strategic educational issues.

Selected Publications

Bibliography

* Editor, Gendered Peace. Women¿s Struggles for Reconciliation and Justice, Routledge, forthcoming. August, 2007.

This volume makes a contribution in the growing literature on women, conflict and peacebuilding, and arose from a United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) publication. Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World, Report for A decade after the UN conference at Beijing, 2004.

The book¿s particular focus is on the moments after a peace accord, or some other official ending of a conflict, often denoted as `post-conflict¿ or `post-war¿. Such moments often herald great hope for holding to account those who committed grave wrongs during the conflict, and for a better life in the future. For many women, both of these hopes are often very quickly shattered in starkly different ways to the hopes of men.

Such periods are often characterised by violence and insecurities and the official ending of a war often fails to bring freedom from sexual violence for many women. Not only do many women normally face a continuation of at least some of the aggression that they faced during the war, but they also often face new forms of violence. Furthermore, in post-war policies women¿s needs tend to be systematically ignored, or even deliberately marginalized, in ways that echo earlier periods, but which also often take on a new element of aggression against women¿s rights and behaviour.

Within such a context, efforts on the part of women, and those made on their behalf, to hold to account those who commit crimes against them, and to access their rights are difficult to make, are often dangerous, and are also often deployed with little effect. This volume explores international contexts, and a variety of local ones, in which such struggles take place, and evaluates their progress. It also considers some of the explanations for `blockages¿ and, by considering cases from a contrasting range of places (Sierra Leone, Rwanda, South Africa, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, East Timor, Peru, Central America and the Balkans), reviews the extent to which it is possible to make generalisations across the world.

It contains two chapters by the author (which are available from www.unrisd.org and as a joint UNRISD/ Peace Studies Working Paper). The first chapter intervenes in the debates about the different experiences of women and men during and after war. In particular it subjects to scrutiny the phenomenon of the `backlash¿ against women that often takes place when wars end, and reviews the efficacy of different post-conflict peacebuilding policy approaches. The final chapter of the book by Donna focuses on the explosion of violence by men against women that often takes place as part of the backlash, and examines different explanations that are offered. In particular it explores the usefulness of the concept `masculinity¿ in this context and finds it lacking, suggesting that instead we need to understand more about the lived reality of men¿s lives, just as we strive to do with regard to women¿s lives.

Other publications in this area

* `Gender, Armed Conflict and the Search for Peace¿, chapter 3, Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World, Report for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) A decade after the UN conference at Beijing, 2004

* `Sex Wars and Other Wars. Towards a Feminist Approach to Peacebuilding¿, Development in Practice, vol 13, nos 2 & 3, May 2003: 154-178).

* `Women and Politics in Africa. The Case of Uganda¿, in Parliamentary Affairs. A Journal of Comparative Politics, Vol 55, No 1, January 2002: pp119-128, ISSN 0031 290 ¿ and in -- Karen Ross (ed) Women, Politics and Change, Oxford University Press (Hansard Society Series in Politics and Government), 2002: pp. 119-128 (same chapter title), ISBN 019 851541 3.

* 'Making a Difference? The Inclusion of Gender into International Conflict Management Policies', pp. 129-135, in Marianne Braig and Sonja Wolte (eds), Common Ground Or Mutual Exclusion? Women's Movements And International Relations, Zed Press, 2002, pp 226, ISBN 1 84277 159 0.