Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project
University of California, Berkeley
The Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project focuses on political conflict and gendered and sexualized violence at the intersections of coloniality, capitalism, minoritization, majoritarianism, and the racialization of difference. Interdisciplinary in practice and rooted in local knowledges, the project contends with quotidian and protracted violence and the contested terrain of social justice and people’s rights. It aims to understand how those who are targeted and affected by violence live with its condition and effects, define mechanisms for justice, seek psychosocial healing and effective political solutions, and undertake to memorialize.
The project focuses on the centrality of political and foundational violence in (post)colonial nation-states, initially emphasizing South Asia. There, apparatuses of majoritarian, (trans)nationalist and religionized violence and militarization are mobilized to assist the neo-liberal state’s processes of “securitization” via the assimilation/annihilation of othered, minoritized subjects. Across conflict zones and spaces of violence, violent death, the threat of death, maiming, disappearances, and dispossession function to routinize states of emergency, siege, and exception. Violence is dispersed through legal and extrajudicial means. Targeted communities and decolonial movements, too, use violence as response. The ongoing conditions of social and material death are variously memorialized, including in language, the arts, and iconography.
How are the conditions and events of violence gendered, sexualized, and racialized? What critical sites and practices of counter-memory, mourning, memorialization, and the sacred emerge in response?
Seeking to inform scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, the project works with transnational, collaborative networks of victimized-survivor-subjects, scholars, and academic and civil society leaders and institutions. It undertakes pioneering research and publishes major studies of violence and responses to violence. It engages affected communities in documenting remembrance. It is constructing an archive of political conflict in South Asia. The project also organizes events such as speakers’ series and conferences.
Contact Information
Paola Bacchetta, Professor and Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender, and People's Rights
Angana Chatterji, Visiting Research Anthropologist and Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People's Rights
Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project, Center for Race & Gender
638 Barrows Hall, MC 1074, University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
United States http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/politicalconflict
centerrg@berkeley.edu
Region
North America
Year Established
2012
Fellowships and Potential Scholarly Affiliations
Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project Fellowships