![](https://www.crg-ghent.be/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Maria.jpeg)
Maria Martin de Almagro Iniesta
Maria’s research is at the intersection of gender studies, international peacebuilding governance, and the role of knowledge production and meaning-making practices in world politics. Theoretically, much of her work investigates concepts and performances of authority, legitimacy, and power through poststructural and postcolonial accounts and feminist and interpretive methodologies. Empirically, as an IR scholar and an Africanist, she studies the micro-dynamics of war-to-peace transitions in Sub-Saharan Africa with the aim of producing original findings that derive from an in-depth study of this region, but that can at the same time inform broader debates in the discipline. More concretely, she has written extensively on the advocacy around, and implementation of, the United Nations Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security agenda at global, national, and local levels in post-conflict contexts.
She has extensive experience doing field research in conflict-affected countries, including field research experience in Burundi, Liberia, DRC, and South Africa. She is interested in the power of inductive research and grounded theory methodologies for bringing to the fore the world vision of the research subjects.
New Policy Brief: Gender and Disarmament, Demobilization, Reintegration (DDR) Programmes in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Reflections for the P-DDRCS
Published by Governance in Conflict Network.
Feature:Research on local communities’ resilience when climate change sparks conflict
" International organizations such as the UN, EU, and OECD have highlighted the intensified connection between environmental change and conflict. Rapid environmental changes have severe consequences for countries at war or in post-conflict phases"
New Publication: Singing truth to power
Transformative (gender) justice, musical spatialities and creative performance in periods of transition from violence
Seminar: Women, Peace and Security
Discussion the important role of women in conflict situations and the need for inclusive approaches to avoid or resolve conflicts.
Book Launch: Good soldiers don’t rape with Megan Mackenzie
This book uses feminist theories of ‘rape culture’ and institutional gaslighting to identify myths, and misconceptions about military sexual violence.
New Publication: Sustaining gender: Natural resource management, conflict prevention, and the UN Sustaining Peace agenda in times of climate catastrophe
This article explores how decentralisation policy and specifically the establishment of communes rurales in DR Congo turned into a profoundly destabilising juncture, shaking existing governance arrangements
Book Launch: Gender and Citizenship in Transitional Justice by Sanne Weber
In this book talk on 23 January (12:30) , Sanne will describe what gender-sensitive peace and justice looks like for those supposed to benefit from these processes, based on fieldwork in two locations on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast.
New Special Issue in Territory, Politics, Governance: Transnational Assemblages and Security Knowledges.
This Special Issue focuses on the notion of transnational security assemblages as central to understanding multiscalar processes of security knowledge production.
Gender, Climate Change and Conflict in practice: Adaptation, Resilience and Sustainable Peace in the Africa Great Lakes Region
This project aims to map and examine how local communities in general, and women’s movements in particular, adapt and remain resilient in settings where climate change is exacerbating protracted conflict.
Gender, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management
With this project, we propose a deeper critical interrogation of what meanings gender equality and women’s empowerment assume in natural resource management initiatives in conflict-affected countries.
Current research projects:
Gender, Climate Change and Conflict in practice: Adaptation, Resilience and Sustainable Peace in the Africa Great Lakes Region
This project aims to map and examine how local communities in general, and women’s movements in particular, adapt and remain resilient in settings where climate change is exacerbating protracted conflict.
Gender, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management
With this project, we propose a deeper critical interrogation of what meanings gender equality and women’s empowerment assume in natural resource management initiatives in conflict-affected countries.
Social resilience after sexual violence in Eastern DR Congo: from decay over reparations to accountable governance
Eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) has known over three decades of war and violence in which the population in general and women in particular became victimized in a situation of state and societal decay.
Research Projects under Supervision:
Gender, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management
Decolonising social norms change: An analysis of the politics of knowledge production in relation to Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting and child marriage
What does peace have to do with it? Examining the creation and operationalisation of peace arrangements and their actors in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
Petro-sexuality in the Niger Delta: tracing back the colonial roots of toxic geographies and masculinity