It is well known that large-scale conflict affects people differently depending on their gender, age, ethnicity, and other social characteristics. How those effects differ, however, can only be revealed by locally contextualised in-depth research. This panel will discuss research from across the SLRC countries to better understand gendered approaches to and implications of livelihoods and recovery in populations surviving conflict. How do the effects of war-related sexual and gender-based violence live on in individuals’ and households’ capacity for recovery and longer-term well-being? How are livelihoods systems and networks, and people’s participation in them, shaped in overlapping ways by social markers such as gender and ethnicity? How are gender roles themselves (re)shaped by conflict – and what are aid-related impacts on livelihoods and access to basic services? These and other questions will be addressed using country-level empirical data and insights from the synthesis of SLRC survey data.

Chair: Dr Rachel Slater, SLRC-ODI

This panel is part of a recovering from conflict conference sub-stream convened by The Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) in collaboration with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). SLRC is a six-year global research programme exploring livelihoods, basic services and social protection in conflict-affected situations. Funded by UK Aid from the UK government (DFID), Irish Aid and the European Commission (EC), SLRC was established in 2011 with the aim of strengthening the evidence base and informing policy and practice around livelihoods and services in conflict. SLRC’s research focuses on eight conflict-affected countries: Afghanistan; Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC); Nepal; Pakistan; South Sudan; Sri Lanka; Uganda; and Sierra Leone. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) is a partner institution and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) is the lead institution. www.securelivelihoods.org

Abstracts:

Interrogating the promises of schooling in Pakistan

Dr Shenila Khoja-Moolji, University of Pennsylvania

In the dominant discourse on girls' empowerment it is argued that girls should go to school so that they can enter the workforce, contribute to the national GDP, and enhance their own and their families' welfare. However, these promises often do not unfold for low-income girls. In this presentation, Dr Khoja-Moolji will draw on a case study with low-income girls from Southern Pakistan to discuss how waged-work is often seen as a majboori (compulsion) due to its exploitative nature. She calls for re-directing our attention to advocate for improving working conditions and securing higher incomes (rather than just jobs) for women and girls. 

Masculinity in Afghanistan

Dr Chona Echavez and co-author, AREU

The political economy of violence in Sri Lanka

Dr Vagisha Gunasekara, SLRC Sri Lanka and the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies

Through a qualitative study on women beedi rollers in the North of Sri Lanka, this study illuminates how gendered violence is generated and sustained through political economic relations and processes, and their intersections with gender, caste and class oppression. The central contention of this study is that situating gendered violence in the political economy allows an understanding of how women’s labour bears a signature of violence. Through a case study of the beedi rollers in Vettikadu, a small fishing village in the Jaffna Peninsula, the paper locates the experiences and narratives of women beedi rollers of Vettikadu at the intersection of a sexualised division of labour and space and an exploitative beedi industry. Furthermore, this study inquires gendered violence in relation to conditions of ‘war’ and ‘post-war’. 

Networks and Livelihoods: The importance of relationships in Afghanistan’s distributional economy (Paper by Danielle Huot and Adam Pain)

Ms Danielle Huot, SLRC Afghanistan

After more than a decade of international interventions and programming in Afghanistan, poverty rates have worsened and livelihood insecurity deepened. Evidence gathered over a 15-year period as part of a longitudinal study in three contrasting provinces of Afghanistan – Herat, Kandahar, and Sar-i-Pul, as well as in-depth market studies on the onion trade in Nangarhar, saffron and rural labour in Herat, and petty trade in Kandahar, indicates this is in part because policy and programming aimed at agricultural growth misses the vital role of relationships in the economy. Social connections underpin most market activities in rural Afghanistan and networks determine who has access to what – in this sense the economy cannot be said to be fully commodified but has strong distributional elements.

The way in which networks are generated and their properties vary by context. In those villages well-endowed with irrigated land and where this land is mostly owned by one or two elite families (two Kandahari villages and one Herati village), three types of relationships underpin network dynamics. The first is that of primary inclusion which describes elites that are typically landed and have influence over outcomes of the village (by way of involvement with Community Development Councils (CDCs) or other informal shuras). Those who have primary inclusion generally have connections to the provincial or national level and are able to use them in a variety of ways. Next is secondary inclusion, which refers to those who are connected to the elites in such a way that they are able to deploy those upward connections to their benefit. Last is hierarchical or patron-client relations in which a poorer household is dependent upon a richer one for work, food, and shelter. In villages with a limited or more equally distributed amount of irrigated land, relations underpinning network dynamics are different as they are not often based on the inequalities in land, power, and wealth to needed to establish dependency relations. Instead, households attempt to expand their networks horizontally rather than upwards, solidifying connections between others in their socioeconomic class. Notably, a market in which this system of relationships begins to break down is that of opium poppy in Sar-i-Pul as it possibly among the more commodified of agricultural markets in Afghanistan.