 is like that. Welcome everyone to the FTGS Global Voices Seminar Series. This series of events with incredible scholars is designed to showcase and amplify the expertise and research of members of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies section of the ISA in partnership with King's College London. Our events are recorded and they're going to be available on YouTube later on, so make sure to follow our social media to get the links. The series is hosted by Dr. Amanda Sheatham here present, a senior lecturer in security studies and researcher in gender and security at King's College London and also co-hosted by me, Lua Tomás. I'm currently a PhD student researching feminist movements in South America in a historical perspective. The Global Voices Seminars and aim to promote a global conversation on issues pertaining to feminism, gender and international relations and for today, we are pleased to welcome as our speaker Dr. Julia Zover, currently a Marie Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at the Oxford School of Global Area Studies and also at the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico. Her work investigates women's high-risk leadership in Latin America with a focus on Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia. She has extensive research and also practical experience along the Colombia-Venezuela border where she supports Lady Smith, Cosas de Mujeres Gender Data Project with vulnerable women. She earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and has recently launched her book called High-Risk Feminism in Colombia just last month, so congratulations. To discuss Dr. Zover's research, we have Dr. Yao Boisting, sorry, it's a mispronouncing, a professor in gender and development at King's College London as well. Thank you so much for being with us today and I want to remind everyone that you can also write questions in the chat for our Q&A section later on. So Dr. Zover, the floor is yours. Hi there, good morning. As Luah said, we've had some technical issues. I'm going to have my camera on just for a minute but I actually am on field work right now doing some follow-up work to the research from this book which happened as part of my new fellowship which I might explain at the end. For all that, I came to the small town and looked for the place with the best internet and it was working last night. It was kind of a shrug and a hand up and it's not working this morning so I'm connecting via my phone and Amanda has graciously said that she will flip through the slide so I'm going to turn my video off but I am here. Thank you so much to all for the invitation this morning. I'm really excited to be able to present my book to you and to hear Yelki's comments. Yelki, actually I was mentioning before we got going was I wrote one of the endorsements for my book many months ago so I really appreciate her being here and I'm looking forward to hearing your comments. And I guess I'm just going to get started. So this book at high risk time in Colombia, Women's Mobilization in Violent Context, was the product of PhD research I did and then some post-doc research I did and then came together in book form during the pandemic when I was like everyone trapped at home but being here in Colombia today and this morning and kind of some of the conversations I've been having really has put it back into really vibrant perspectives for me so Amanda if you don't mind going to the next slide. I'm going to begin by reading one of the stories that begins the book and when the site comes up yeah that's the picture so this is kind of the picture that gives the context to where I was but this is this is a story of one of the women who I met in the north of Colombia in late 2016 I think. So the book begins by talking about Angela's story and it says Angela and I were sitting on a bus traveling from Tobacco to Barranquilla when she decided to share her story with me. We'd met a few months earlier when I first arrived in Colombia and although we'd spent lots of time together she'd never chosen to open up to me about her past. Originally from Magdalena she and her husband were displaced from the countryside to an urban center after her family members were murdered by paramilitaries. It was in that city that her husband was killed and she had to move to El Pocón, a slum near Cartagena with her children. This was where she joined the Liga de Mujeres de Lasadas the League of Displaced Women and moved that later to the city of women. Her second husband was murdered on the doorstep of her house when their youngest child was only six months old. She told me about the early days of the city when the women continued to be threatened by armed groups. Her words were clear despite so much pain so many violations so much damage the voice of us women has always survived. We'd woken up early and we were en route to a rally where women from all over the Caribbean coast would come together to express their support for the peace accord negotiated between the Colombian government and the FARC. It was a moment of expectation you can see in this picture full of hopeful symbols women wearing white images of doves of peace t-shirts with brightly colored messages of sea referring to the yes vote for the national referendum and Angela told me that she had been reflecting on what the day meant to her. She said behind every smile there is a story. Next slide please Amanda. And then years later at the opposite end of the country Sandra and I were sitting in the office of a local government employee in southern Putumayo near to the border with Ecuador. The desk fan created a background of white noise that at times made it hard to hear her particularly when her voice lowered as she spoke about memories of the past. I asked if she could tell me a little bit about how she had come to join the Alianza de Mujeres Tejigueres de Vida del Putumayo the women's Alliance of Putumayo. She developed delved into a story that involved kidnap and sexual abuse of the young woman. It was this experience that eventually led her to join the Alianza where she was finally able to talk to other women about her experiences and find solidarity and group membership. For her the traumas of the past were an intrinsic part of the reason why she joins the Alianza. Being part of this organization is dangerous for Sandra today. She told me that only a few months before when this conversation was in 2018 armed men had entered her house and told her that unless she stopped her community work and joined them they would kill both her and her daughters. While our conversation focused on resistance and resilience it was clear that times were tense. As soon as we left the building we were accompanied by her government-issued bodyguard who's followed us a few paces behind as we walked to a small restaurant located on the edge of the town's plaza. The next time I met up with Sandra in late 2019 she was no longer living in the south. That's had become too much and she had been forced to displace herself to the departmental capital of Mokwa. Next slide please. So for those of you here today who don't know much about the Colombian context I'm sure that if you've seen the title of the book you probably do have some understanding. All of these stories and the stories I'm going to be referring to today and the stories that build up the main content of the book come from Colombia and come out of the context of a civil war that was drawing to a close when I began my research and then continued to change and transform and reconsider as the research was ongoing. Colombian conflicts had many iterations, had many different actors but in 2016 a peace process was eventually signed between the FARC who was at that time the biggest guerrilla group and the government of Colombia and that was an end to five decades of war between these two factions. However we know that during the conflict gendered violence was rife and of the almost nine million victims who were registered by the country's transitional justice mechanism over half of them, just over half of them were women and we also know that sexual violence was constant, actually wasn't the constant, it was very frequent in many parts of the country during the arms conflict and we know that 34,000 cases of this violence have been registered although because of difficulties around reporting, around fear, around shame that's clearly a low ball number but what it tells us is that sexual violence and other kinds of gendered violence is in the context of this conflict were used widely for social and territorial control by armed groups, the various armed groups who were at play and yet as I just hinted to even after the peace accord was signed the areas where the FARC had had dominance were left empty and so other groups in different forms and reconfigurations of new groups began to fill these power vacuums of vying for vying for this control and using violence again so since the peace process was the the peace accords were signed in 2016 we've seen this real uptick in violence which looks like mass displacement, more massacres, sexual violence is in some places returning the killing of social leaders and particularly right now which is why I'm here which is between the two rounds of the national election, violence against communities and against social leaders in particular is is it a high that we haven't seen since some of the darkest days of the conflict and we also know as this next slide says that gender, sorry that conflict is gender then I cited Cynthia Coburn here but Professor Volke Poston's work sorry is very much about this too kind of the idea that not only has Cynthia Coburn says that that conflict is gender in terms of the kinds of violence so she says that men and women die different deaths, aren't abused in different ways in wars because of the physical differences between the sexes and because of the different meanings that are ascribed to male and female bodies but she also talks as Joakie does about conflict is gendered in terms of time in terms of what it means to have a pre-conflict moment a conflict moment a post-conflict moment and they talk about this on a continuum of violence or a continuum of conflict so for example Cynthia Coburn talks about her experiences and her research saying that sometimes this nominally post-war period is better called inter vellum or a pause before fighting against again and Professor Bosson's work talks in the case of Peru for example about how violence continued through this heightened conflict moment into a post-conflict moment and what that tells us about the the violence itself as it extends beyond this kind of circumscribed or bounded period in time which we can say perhaps you know bad things happen in conflicts this is how we can explain it how do we explain and understand these gendered forms of conflict when perhaps the the peace records have already been signed or the violence in theory is is no longer supposed to be accessed from reaching parties so next next slide please so in the context of of thinking about conflict is gendered and thinking about the Colombian conflict is gendered I started to ask myself as I was doing my PhD you know why is it that in these moments of high violence it was during conflict technically as I began um why is it that we you know that that we're seeing that women are going out and mobilizing because in the face of these high risks of violence during both conflicts and then afterwards as I continued my research for this nominally a post-conflict moment we might assume that women turn inside to primes like the house to care of themselves to protect themselves and that as a function of fear of violence as a function of the dictated norms around what women's roles are supposed to be as a fear of socializing social isolation we think I thought at least and some of the literature would point to and social movement studies literature would point to the fact that women or you know citizens wouldn't mobilize when doing so put such a great risk on their head but this isn't always the case in Colombia which I'm sure the title of this book kind of gave away um the next slide please because in Colombia as in in other countries as I've learned what we actually see is that sometimes women do go out and mobilize putting themselves directly in harm's way and so the question in this book aims to to tackle and investigate and answer to a degree is why when the response to acting collectively can be threats stalking violence murder displacement threat to children do women decide to assume this risk anyway next slide please and so the question that the thing that kind of became immediately clear when I was when I began this research in different parts of Colombia which I'm going to talk about the case studies in a minute is that it is a case that when these women mobilize they do expose themselves to higher risk for violence and for retribution so in contesting the violent dynamics and going out and mobilizing and joining community groups and joining organizations and making demands on the state and on the armed groups and on the communities in which they live the women are exposing themselves to various forms of violence and threats and I have here that the threats are twofold but in I actually think that it's threefold I should update the side firstly the women are daring to disturb imposed social order by mobilizing against armed groups in the first place so basically in these towns and territories where armed groups come in and impose control over the land and can impose control over the communities anyone who dares to work towards social cohesion or who dares to make demands or or go back or push back against that control puts them itself at risk of violence the second layer or second kind of you know pillar of violence to expose themselves is the fact that they are women who are doing this this making these demands through engaging in this mobilization and that they're they're going against and they're transgressing the socially acceptable gender norms that are imposed by the communities themselves often and also these armed groups who operate under logics of really heightened and militarized masculinity where there are very specific roles for men and women and women's roles are not to be out in the streets they're not to be out in kind of the public space making demands and pushing back against these verses of violence and then the third layer I would say which I had put into the second bullet but I do think that it's a separate one is that not only are if anyone pushing back against this imposed order not only are women doing it and transgressing transgressing or challenging gender norms but also they're making demands for women's rights and gender justice which is sort of the icing on the cake when it comes to to really pushing back and and engage in transgressive behavior in these contexts which are controlled by different kinds of armed groups during during Kalandhi's armed conflicts in its aftermath next slide please and so the question becomes in this question of what I call the high in high risk feminism high risk feminism for me is this ability and this way to understand the why and the how of women of why and how women are willing to take on mobilization and collective action and engage in these behaviors when the risks are so high and so in order to understand the why and the how we have to put a gender lens on high risk collective action and one of the things that immediately became clear in the case studies I was working in is that leadership is critical when it comes to convincing a specific population in this case women many of whom are actually in fact all of them have different kinds of conflicts related gendered violence when it came to convincing them to mobilize that it was worth their while that doing something that at face value seemed very risky actually was going to be valuable for them and so what I saw is that charismatic leaders specific kinds of charismatic leaders can come into these communities and frame the comparative benefits of mobilization to those who are operating in the domain of losses here I borrow from behavioral economics and I look at the prospect theory which I'm not going to get into in detail today but effectively what these leaders are able to do is they're able to say to the women who they start to gather and they start to organize you know think about it this way being a person in your town just being a woman in your town is dangerous in and all of itself so even if you don't mobilize even if you don't engage in this action nonaction doesn't guarantee your safety and you can see that because all of these women before they had even mobilized before they joined the groups had suffered different kinds of violence it's simply for being women and gendered citizens in these towns and territories and villages where they live and so the leaders can then say absolutely joining a group is going to bring with it more risk picking your neck out making demands is going to shine a light on you and on our organization for further targeting and for retributional targeting but that being said when you compare the differences when you compare that differential between just being a citizen and the risk of just being a citizen in a territory controlled by these violent actors and then mobilizing which absolutely does increase your risk profile the difference that differential is actually smaller than perhaps you would have thought at base value nonaction doesn't guarantee safety and therefore the risk the risk differential or the comparative risk of mobilizing versus not mobilizing is much smaller and then what they say is and that comparative difference that differential in the risk assessment can be offset by the potential benefits of membership and participation in these groups which only comes to those who do participate and these benefits are both material and non-material so beginning with the non-material they can look like building a collective identity making women feel that they are part of a group letting women know that what they suffered in terms of the various violence as they suffered wasn't something individual it was something that was strategic and collective and that they didn't take on or they didn't experience because of something personal belonging to them or something personal that they did and so what we see there is that women can then come together they can begin to talk about their experiences they can begin to accept to share in exchange what they suffered and in doing so that creates these non-material benefits of healing of membership of identity that are incredibly valuable in these these contexts of ongoing and and chronic violence and chronic conflicts and then the material benefits that one can gain from joining one of these high risk feminist organizations are related to obviously material benefits so being able to come together as a collective and apply for projects and get money and resources for example in the case of the Liga to build a city to build their own houses or in the case of Avra Mopas who also talk about to apply as collective supplies for collective reparations in the country's transitional justice program which means that not only can women get their individual payouts for the violence as they suffer but also that as a group they can apply for things that will support them as a group and that allows them to build economic projects productive projects the ability to generate income the ability to create safe spaces the ability to have additional healing programs for example and all of this is contingent on joining a group so this charismatic leader forms what's called a charismatic bond with the particular women in her community and can can convince them by doing the strategic framing of saying the risks need to be assessed comparatively and in comparison or in relation to the potential benefits that we see women saying yeah I understand that it's more dangerous for me to live in this town and participate in a women's organization but the benefits make it justifiable or make it worthwhile next slide please and so I also won't get into the exact how strategies because I've gone through many of them but what the what the charismatic leader does and and really gets the members on board and so the members originally are bonding with a charismatic leader but then over time they're bonding with each other they operate in these conditions of violence and they strategically engage with four pillars of action which are building collective identity which is creating social capital out social capital both bonding and bridging and so bonding within the group bridging with other organizations so for example funders or international organizations who can provide resources and the third pillar looks at strategic framing so saying and finding ways to frame and use the language the legal language of the state and its very developed laws and out those in constitutional court hearings and documents and to frame the experiences that they have suffered in terms of this legal language creating a a shared way of talking about these experiences that then highlights the responsibilities that the government or other organizations do owe to these women as victims of the armed conflict and then finally the final pillar certification which is engaging in public expressions of legitimacy so going out and marching or protesting or taking over various government offices or even holding kind of cultural fairs or cultural activities which say and promote outwardly to outward access that these organizations are legitimate they have legitimate demands and that they need to be taken seriously so the women come together and they contest their violence surroundings actively demanding a more gender just society they turn their fear into anger and resistance which shifts this perspective on risk taking under the guidance of a charismatic leader next slide please so that's sort of the theoretical chapter of the book it had explained the why and the how of of women's willingness to engage in this high-risk feminism or this high-risk collective action that's pushing and demanding gender justice and what I did in the in my field work is I engaged with four different communities to understand how this took shape on the ground and as as we will have heard in the beginning I used the stories and the voices and I really took them seriously and included them in the book to to bring and highlight these grassroots women's organizations who aren't always featured in aren't always featured when it comes to the high-level conversations or the high-level peace negotiations I wanted to take insights and to learn from them and their experiences so the first case is in Turbaco Bolívar and it's this is Angela's case so this is the the Liga de mujeres deslazada this is an organization of women and it was a group of women actually who were completely displaced from all over the Caribbean coast here in Colombia and they arrived in Cartagena in the slums of Cartagena often newly widowed usually with multiple children this completely displaced from these towns that they were living in which were suffering extreme violence and massacres and in arriving to El Pozon this this slum in Cartagena they continued to suffer ongoing violence is because these areas were gang controlled but initially some of the women started to come together really informally to make a soup so that they could feed their children so one woman would bring the potato the other woman brings a piece of meat the other woman brings the carrot and they put the food together so that they could start feeding their children collectively and then they started you know as they were together meeting these very practical needs they started to chat more about their experiences and at this point a woman called Patricia Guerrero arrived and she was a lawyer and she had a lot of experience in the women's movement and she met this really informal group of women and started to talk to them about things they'd never heard before so about women's rights and about victims' rights and about the fact that the experiences they'd suffered in the conflict weren't because of them individually or anything they'd done but these were part of a large strategy that armed groups used to control women bodies and to control women's lives as a one of the strategies of social control in these territories and so as they began to grow and learn about these strategic interests that they had they started to to organize to have meetings to think about how they could frame their demands and the way that this culminated within the early 2000s they decided that what they really wanted was to have their homes back they've been kicked out of their homes they've been displaced from their farms and their towns and they wanted their homes and they wanted the titles and the deeds to their homes so their big project was to come together to build what they call their when you they would have you know their dream of a dignified life and Patricia Guerrero was able to through her connections get resources from a U.S. senator um financial resources and they were able to come together and build this city of women in Turbaco and Bolivar they were able to put the money together and find out how to make bricks and how to level out the ground and how to put together this little neighborhood um with around a hundred houses that belong to the women and could give them a home when that had been taken away from them and that for them was part of their vision of what a more gendered just society would look like however even in building this city and in living there today they continued to face ongoing violence um at the time when they were building it this area was heavily controlled by different paramilitary groups who didn't want organizations of women coming in and making demands and organizing and creating community and social cohesion so during the process of building the city um there were ongoing murders there were ongoing threats there was ongoing stalking and harassment of these women and even today I haven't spoken to them in a little while today this part of the country very much is experiencing ongoing harassment um stalking murders of social leaders threats and violence and again particularly against those people who are most visible who in this case in this neighborhood happens to be the Liga de Monjeres de Salas who not only have mobilized in a territory where the paramilitary group didn't want mobilization but also are women and are doing that um engaging in that that transgression of what women's roles are supposed to be according to those those armed groups and next slide please so the next uh our the next group of women I worked with we're in Bogota it was called After Mubas and it was an organization of women who um live in who live in Utsme and the very south of Bogota but they have all been displaced from the pacific coast which was another territory which featured and continues to feature the process of multiple armed groups who are vying and clashing for control um with civilians being at the kind of in the in the crossfire so these women were displaced from the pacific coast they started arriving in in Bogota some of them via other areas that they they arrived and they didn't know what to do they didn't know where to go they were new in a big cold city and uh race isn't absolutely was another factor in another layer in the question of After Mubas because these are all Afro-Colombian women and so not only are they women but also they're black women and so the different vulnerabilities they experience both because of gender because of location their rural location and because of race were all interlocking and intersecting um and in this context there was a woman Maria Ojenia Orutia who had organizational experience back at Holman she started to notice that women these Afro women had really specific needs but they were very isolated and they were operating as little atoms and so she wanted to bring them together in an organization that eventually uh she formed after Mubas and the women started to engage in these healing processes they they drew on traditional and ancestral winsons and knowledges to build a 14 step healing process so that they could overcome the violence as they'd suffered in their home territories they also applied for collective reparations eventually to the Transitional Justice Institute they also were coming together to build a safe space they had a like a meeting house where there was an industrial kitchen where the women could cook and make different beauty products and could sew and could sell these products so that they could earn some level of a wage which wasn't something that they were able to do by themselves and so they came together making these demands about what they wanted in terms of reparations but also what they wanted in terms of redignifying themselves in the context of having suffered this these violences and and making demands not only on the state but also on different international organizations on the community to take them seriously and to help them build these safe spaces for themselves but again this was not a safe space to be operating in and actually in 2010 Maria Okinia and her assistant were kidnapped from the house were taken out by the city were horrifically abused as a way to punish them and to make an example of them so that the other women of abnormal class wouldn't continue and would be kind of scared into not engaging in this collective action anymore because it was upsetting the ability of the different paramilitary groups operating in the area to recruit children to sell drugs to engage in trafficking to continue their grip on this community as as the controllers and so Maria Okinia and her assistant continued after this horrible experience they decided to continue to mobilize to continue to engage in this collective action making demands for gender justice and today actually since I worked with them they've moved now into a new space that they got which is their own home and their own headquarters and they're continuing to support other women who have suffered or who did suffer violence during the armed conflict they're only now coming to terms with that and wanting to heal and next slide I'm going to really quickly very quickly talk about this side because I'm looking at the time and I know we started a little bit late I'm really excited to hear Yelki's comments but the next slide is a community of women who didn't mobilize in the same way it's in the place called La Faleira which is not actually its real name I would ask not to use the real name in a province called La Guajira which is on the border with Venezuela in the very north of the country and I was looking for a community of really similar women demographically so women who ethnically and racially and socioeconomically and religiously and educational level Lee were really similar and yet who didn't mobilize and in the research design process finding this negative case which doesn't you know kind of have normative value or normative judgment it's just negative in terms of not seeing the same phenomenon happen can also tell us about when when higher feminism does happen and so this is a case where there was a group of women there was a nominally a leader but they weren't really getting engaging in any kind of high-risk collective action they would meet they would sit they would chat they would talk they very much were a support group for each other but when it came to actually you know strategically thinking about framing their resistance framing their action in terms of resistance and anger in terms of fear this is not something that their local leader was able to do she also didn't have the ability to engage in any kind of bridging social capital creation there were never any resources there were never any projects and so while this group was a you know a supportive group and a nice group they weren't really engaging in this high-risk feminism because there was still a feeling of fear and and there was no charismatic leader there was a lovely leader but she wasn't charismatic in terms of that ability to really frame how women can justify increasing their exposure to risk through the potential for material and non-material benefits next slide please and so the very final case I did and this was after the phc had ended I was doing some other postdoctoral work and really highlights this question of of the temporality of the the continual violence as it exists over time so this organization I was working with this is Sandra story the alianza and is an organization in the south of the country in a place that was hit incredibly hard by paramilitary extreme violence particularly in the late 90s and early 2000s and this group the alianza came together they began to work on women's empowerment on making demands on denouncing crimes of gendered violence through the different mechanisms they had available to them and then as the peace process came into play the situation their context in their community became a lot safer and they were really encouraged in fact by various actors who were pushing the women's peace and security agenda to go out and build peace in their community to be you know weavers of life to regenerate social cohesion but shortly after the peace process was signed as I mentioned earlier violence began to return and violent actors began to return to these territories looking for new social control after the FARC had left and so in this part of the country in Pudumayo in particular the women who had really been very strong very active and very visible community leaders began to be targeted not only again to have it again not only because they were out there as community leaders but also because they were women and they were being punished publicly and violently for engaging in this community work I have actually a separate article which looks at what I call patriarchal backlash in these post-conflict moments or nominally post-conflict moments and I really engage with what it means to have gone through conflict context mobilization really you know leaning in and investing in what's a post-conflict moment and that reconstruction that post-conflict reconstruction and then what it means to be targeted for doing so we can go to the next side and so what um all of this is a kind of shape in the book which is now available it's I'm really excited to hear uh yelki thoughts but also if others are interested um I do have a discount code so let me know if you if that would be useful for you and I can share that um but all in all this book what it does is it asks questions about uh this continuum of violence so it asks questions around when is war actually over for women it also challenges our assumptions that women perhaps because they're seen as weaker or they're seen as having fewer resources or they're seen as being more vulnerable are just passive victims in these contexts of conflict because we can see that they actually do go out and make challenges and make demands on society particularly for gender justice and so the book comes together to understand how they formulate how they think about how they justify how they organize this high-risk feminism in these ongoing contexts of violence and right now here in Colombia we're right in the middle of at the election season and Francia Marquez who is herself a social leader actually from the area that I'm in right now and she has come and gone into party politics and she is now the vice presidential candidate for a party which has a very good chance of winning the elections and she you know has engaged in this high-risk feminism for years and years and years and she lately has been repeating this quote which isn't actually her another indigenous leader who was killed a few years ago but what she says and what Christina Bautista this other indigenous leader had said really sums up what the heart of this book is which is they say if we're silent they'll kill us if we speak out they'll kill us so we may as well speak out and for me that is the heart and the soul of high-risk feminism and I think there's one more slide which is the kind of exciting news which is that the book is also or has also been translated into Spanish and is going to be coming out now that we're in June I'm not sure that it's actually going to be August but it will be coming out soon later this summer and I'm really excited to to present it not only here in Colombia but also to others who are more comfortable reading in Spanish so thank you so much again for coming today thank you for bearing with me as I'm not showing my video thank you to Amanda for doing the slides and I really look forward at your comments. Thank you so much Julia that was wonderful and I'm assuming that everybody can hear me otherwise you will tell me if it's not clear yeah okay great um I can't see you no that's correct your video is not on or am I doing so no my video my video no it's not on it's because of the phone internet odyssey but I am here no problem okay thank you so much for your wonderful presentation and more than anything for for the book itself and it's wonderful to see the cover on the slide and the cover of the Spanish version as well which is wonderful it's great that you can publish more or less parallel the Spanish version to the English version which is really important for the the conversation and to to have that conversation with a Colombian audience obviously and within Colombian feminism as well so I look forward to hear about that conversation at some future date as well know how the feminists in suits as as some of your participants call them respond to to this book and I really look forward to hear about that as well I think one of the things that your book does so well and what what I find really important is is this question of how and when do women turn fear into resistance no I'm very interested in and have always been interested in this idea of how do you turn trauma into resistance no in in thinking about sort of the post-conflict moment how women in in in their activism use the trauma of the past to actually not only ask for reparations but to look at the future and what they might want for the future because there is this link between contemporary so-called peace time violence and their memories of political violence as you so clearly outline as well and there isn't really necessarily a very clear transition from conflict to peace for many women and and how they live and and the context in which they live so I think that it's really important to think through these what allows women to turn that fear into resistance and you do it really well and and and really systematically rather than going into that framework which which you know you do really well I just have a couple of sort of comments and questions that draw from my own knowledge and work to sort of think through some of these themes that you that you touch upon one of the things you know women resisting violence is I think in the Latin American context increasingly a topic that we can touch upon and highlight because and learn from particularly because of the failure of the state and the international system to address systemic and persistent violence against women in peace time and in conflict time you know so despite all the policy frameworks and activism at high levels around conflict related sexual violence it's going on and on and on and it doesn't have a preventative effect at all as we now see in the context of the war in Ukraine for example but also in the context of continuous feminists feminicides in throughout Latin America so looking at how and why and in what context women organized mobilized to resist such everyday violence both in a context of of political conflict and domestic or criminal conflict or neighborhood conflict everyday conflict that women live through is really important so one of the things that so thinking through this sort of women resisting violence and one of the things that I feel is very present in your case studies as well is that a lot of women's resistance tends to start with organizing around basic needs or at least the organizing around basic needs is one of the motivations that women start collective action no around water and electricity around neighborhood organizing around housing around food for children no and this is something that of course has a long history in Latin America in the 1970s 80s 90s women's throughout Latin America organized against continuing economic crisis the famous soup kitchens neighborhoods housing projects and indeed lobbying the state for food distributions or for for for rights what Maxine Molina would call practical rights that then very clearly turned into more strategic rights claims that you also discuss so clearly so to a certain extent many of these predecessors of your high risk feminism these so the soup kitchen comedores popularist clues the malice clues the damas depending on where you look improve was those three mainly they might have had slightly different names in the Colombian context but I'm sure that they also exist particularly in urban areas and they existed elsewhere in Chile and Argentina and in Ecuador as well of course so I guess that I guess one of my questions would be how does your framework or how do these predecessors perhaps fit in the framework of high risk feminism and vice versa no how does high risk feminism perhaps apply to these previous movements not taking into account with many of these organizations and mobilizations that mobilized around practical needs if you wish were in the end very much concerned with women's rights and violence against women particularly in the 1990s so these organizations evolved from something that was really concerned with basic needs into something that was much more concerned with women's rights and that was also out of necessity you know it is the necessity to protect each other against husbands that didn't allow women to come together in in neighborhood community spaces and so on no so where and how do you do you see this connection between one and the other with the predecessors as I will call it for now no now obviously one big difference between the 1970s 80s 90s and the context in which you study these particular mobilizations is political violence no but we saw the same in the Peruvian context as well where in the 1980s the 1990s which are in the past started its popular war against the states how these soup kitchens and the Clues de Damus and Clues de Males turned into something much more political than that they were intended to when they started in the late 1970s when they were really directed at feeding the populations and taking care of children no so very very very quickly but not very explicitly these grassroots organizations did did become beacons of resistance to political violence and for peace and women's rights so but perhaps considering the context that you describe and the specific feminist organizing that you describe in this high risk context of violence I also started wondering and this connected to the broader sort of the the emergence of more attention for women's resistance to violence and women's organizing throughout the world but particularly Latin America what not what is the tipping as you asked what is the tipping point what allows women to organize against violence but actually what would the tipping point be for women to take up arms to defend themselves isn't there this is completely hypothetical question but at the same time I you know the levels of violence against women are so high that I do sometimes wonder at what point the resistance becomes also more violent and why doesn't it and that then relates to the question of how you see the relationship between organizations that you have studied and framework that you have drawn up around high risk feminism how you see that related to female combatants for example no which is another perhaps unexpected element that has sort of transgressed gendered stereotypes and gendered social norms or in relation to what others have called insurgent feminism no so can you perhaps say a little bit more about how you where you see your grassroots organizing and high risk feminism in relation to these more violent forms of women's organization and and where you situate the these different forms of resistance and mobilization perhaps now as a last point I wanted to draw on on a point that you make so well in your book about where you discuss your methodology and this is really important for all of us who come from wealthy countries and do field work in less wealthy countries and so you write about your own positionality and how that might have shaped your research really important for all of us of course and you write about how sometimes the influences of external well-meaning people and organizations are seen sometimes as problematic as potentially colonial and obviously as always unequal and you have clearly taken that into account in your work by doing participative immersive research while constantly reflecting on the potential dangers of being that outsider no and you do that really very ethically and very well taking into account what you can and cannot ask making sure that you don't re-traumatize and that you take a place you sort of carve out your own place in your own space within the possibilities of that unequal relationships that is simply inevitable but at the same time the organizing and in particular in the leadership that you discuss some of the words that the women use that particularly these these these leaders use you see that there is also constructive a fruitful cross-fertilization that seems to be triggered through participation in networks that beyond the local and the regional no so there's a learning across borders going on which is not a colonial learning but it is a it is cross borders and you see that despite this the contextual constraints and and and the inequality of many of these relations that women and particularly women leaders do adopt the idioms that allow them to not only articulate their concerns and demands but that they can articulate those concerns and demands in a manner that allows them to speak to multiple audiences no they it allows them to talk to to local to their peers to the mill peers to the authorities at a national and a local level but also at an international level and one of the I mean so I'm talking about terminologies for example the term racialized racialized doesn't mean no the experience of racism is obviously not new or but the terminology that is used to indicate what that means does have a certain resonance that is not necessarily local but that is this that that seems to me to be the product of this learning across borders and and I wonder if that is something that you have that you have picked up on that you have looked at in more detail and if if there is also cross border learning in relation to you to women's rights to say though the if you feel that these women's organizations can actually appropriate some of these international protocols and and agreements in order to make claims on the state and the world around them and I actually am related to that and and this is more something that that something that you've just said and perhaps even one of the images that you showed in the PowerPoint I was wondering to what extent you feel that women are are bargaining with patriarchy to make it you know so they need to negotiate the resistance to male violence but also the protection of male violence no the protection from violence by men you know which is a bargaining with patriarchy which must be inevitable in some of these communities so I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about that I'll leave that that Julia many thanks for your wonderful book and your wonderful presentation and I look forward to to talk a little bit more about your work thanks so much yeah okay I'm going to try and turn my camera on at the last few minutes and hope the data doesn't run out Julia sorry yes yeah hi would you we have a question from the audience uh Laura has raised her hand would you mind if we hear her question and then you can answer everything and give like some like your final your final words sure I will okay I'll turn off again but go ahead sure uh Laura go ahead hello everyone can you hear me yes yes perfect okay well um thank you so much Julia for this for the extremely impressive um research that you're doing and um I wish that my question wouldn't be the first from the audience because it actually centres allies more than the women themselves um and um my question is about solidarity in terms of allyship and in the context of high-risk feminism and in your experience as a researcher are people who don't belong to this core group of feminist activists and who perhaps do not share their traumatic experiences how likely are they to express solidarity and what forms does their solidarity and allyship take and what forms can it take so does the high risk that characterizes this kind of feminist activism also extends to people who solidar solidarize um so I personally imagine it it does perhaps um I would imagine that it that there is a kind of coloration correlation say when you do let's say like let's use the concept like maybe lower risk feminism and maybe solidarizing and that's expressing allyship also carries a lower risk with it so um so and also who who does solidarize say um Dr. Jakob Besten has touched on um on maybe international responses and a case that is high risk feminism the feminism I'm more interested in the local and regional ones say perhaps regarding male family members if they are any children siblings uh complete strangers maybe neighbors or um students like how is them the echo in the and student communities um yeah maybe you could speak to this a little bit um yeah thank you so much thank you Laura and thank you again Yelka okay in like three minutes I'm going to try and answer all of those questions which are all in themselves a kind of a tough project um but maybe I won't do but someone else should take up um and I think that there is a lot of work to draw on so at the beginning Yelka you are asking about kind of why in the Colombian context these originally practical needs and then search for practical rights or practical interests transferred into the strategic place and I think I mean I think one perhaps going back and and re-looking at history as you suggested maybe we could see it I'm sure that we can identify instances of high risk feminism that perhaps we wouldn't have called or framed at that point in time but I do think that there's a lot of learning from these different experiences in the other day I was speaking to a woman um she's part of a victim strike organization in Mexico and she was telling me how as a as a younger woman she read about the Madre de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and she was inspired by them and so I think that what we see is we do see this kind of cross fertilization and this goes parallel with the development of laws and the international frameworks you were you were referencing as a way to give shape to language and rights so for example in Argentina at that point in time or in Chile at that point in time it wouldn't have made sense to talk legally or to try frame women's rights claims in terms of the Women's Peace and Security Agenda because it didn't exist and so as I think as these different mechanisms have developed as these different understandings that women suffer conflicts differently because of their agenda that women's roles in peace negotiations and in post-complete reconstruction is vital we always knew that but putting the kind of architecture on it and putting that policy putting those policy frameworks into place I mean if we think about Beijing if we think about Fidov we think about Women's Peace and Security these all went developing or were developing over time giving away I think and this is kind of the legal framing element of the strategies that the women in Colombia use a way to use a language that isn't just describing what's happening but also saying like and there are responsibilities and there are implications of these kinds of you know conventions that you Colombian government have signed on to and using that really strategically to be speaking the same language but I do think that there's a development so you know the Patricia Guerrero for example would talk to me about other women and other women's organizations she's seen I think that there is this kind of understanding that that the organizations don't come out of nothing and that they're looking always to other and this kind of goes the solidarity piece you were talking about and then it's in it's more in the article I referenced before about patriarchal backlash but the organization the Allianza in Tuzumayo is very keen that in what I call they're either strategically visible or strategically invisible and these are ways they protect themselves so for them strategic invisibility is when they're going between different towns you know they'll take different buses they have phone lines they are like phone trees to check in with each other they'll change their clothes so that they don't get picked up on or seen by violent armed actors and that's the way of protecting themselves but at the other on the other side they love to talk to academics and journalists and be on tv and be in newspaper articles they love this because for this for them it's almost doing like a kind of tech and sticking boomerang effect whereby they know that just appealing to local authorities isn't going to take care of them probably appealing to national authorities isn't going to protect them but when they have international folks talking to them writing about them highlighting them aware and pendiente that they exist and that they're in these contexts and that we as academics or you know advocates or different embassies different international organizations are talking back to our government they're talking back to our communities that then boomerang backs to put pressure on the national and local governments that otherwise they maybe wouldn't be able to achieve so i think that that can actually be really strategic too and in terms of solidarity laura if you're interested there's a book actually about wuzumayo and it's about the human rights defenders in columbia it's not it doesn't have a gender focus but it really digs into that question of international solidarity and what it looks like at the height of the arms conflict that's by winner for the tape she's an anthropologist out of colby college and i really recommend it it's it's fantastic um and she really digs into what that solidarity can look like and i do think that here in columbia or yeah i'm in columbia today i just jive um here in columbia there is this very developed kind of more formalized more institutionalized feminist network at the national level women in cities like bogota and meridin over the years very much have been engaging and following trajectories that we've seen through other parts of latin america um kind of even some of the what sonia alvarez might call the NGO isation of the feminist organizations whether or not that's you know necessarily a positive it's up for debate but we see that developing in parallel and organizations like la ruta pacífica and here in the different networks at the national level do reach out to these more rural isolated grassroots organizations as well and have been working really closely to give them technical support to put them in conversation with others and other power people who are making decisions people decision makers and power holders at the national level women did go and women were able to go through lobbying to cuba which is where the piece of court were negotiated and so i think that's really interesting but to go back to what you're saying is i definitely do think that over the years and seeing other experiences and being in communication with national level women's organizations and also women's organizations in other countries and you know our phones and our ability to be on social media and to chat with each other and to learn um from the internet is another real accelerator catalyst of taking that language finding new words that perhaps they have been using in a different way to describe what they know is happening in their lives but oh if i call this or if i say you know this is my right as a victim which is a very political term in clandia or you know i have rights to you know whatever that using that language gets them the ears in the audience and it's more difficult for those who are in positions of power to negate or deny them because they're then challenging the laws and saying what what exists in these laws and in these legal frameworks on paper has to exist in practice that gives a real kind of lever or leverage or bargaining tool and i think women are very the women i work with are very strategic about doing that and then your final question um this is very funny because i was thinking about this yesterday i was at a cafe speaking to a woman um who who currently is living in a different town because she can't live at home because she's under such um such threats of violence for her her leadership in the community and she was saying you know knows like the the here in columbia the national protection unit which a scry or gives body guards and um trucks and protection and there are different levels to social leaders who can demonstrate that they're at risk she's saying it doesn't work it's horrible i don't like it like it doesn't represent me it's a very patriarchal way of thinking about protection it doesn't factor in my actual risk and then when we left she got into the into the car with a body guard from the UN from the national protection unit i thought like okay well clearly you know there is some bargaining there i know that she's going to speak to me and say this isn't good this isn't what i want this isn't how it works um i this and she has a very clear list of what protection and what security in the context specific changing shifting and very gendered context in which she lives she knows what that looks like and she's like rallying and lobbying for that but at the same time she is taking what little protection does exist and kind of making do so i think that you can hold both things in your hand you can say this system doesn't work for me this system is machista the system is frustrating and doesn't reflect my realities but on the other side i can challenge that as much as i want i can lobby for it and i can also agree and see that the the local realities do require that i engage with it and then i think that that's a bigger question in feminism and in the feminist world more broadly do we negotiate with patriarchy or do we just blow the whole thing up and and say we're going to start again and it would look better this way and i would suggest that most of what the the women i'm working with um are doing both things at the same time they're being critical they are making their demands heard but they're also engaging with what exists um on a kind of functional day-to-day level um i hope that that condenses your questions into one somewhat cohesive answer but i have so many more thoughts and and yeah okay i hope we can connect at the conferences that are coming up in the next year or two as as they're real and same with you Amanda and everyone here um thank you so much for coming thank you for bearing with me with this horrible internet connection um and and thank you so much for the invitation to share my work i really appreciate uh not only kind of having written the book but also being able to tell these stories which i feel very privileged to to have you know witnessed and and shared and and learn from the women i work with so thank you thank you so much Julia yeah okay and everyone who participated we did have another question in the chat Julia but i see that you're you're sharing your email and your contact information so maybe people can contact you for further questions uh thank you for all who participated and for bearing with us with all the technical difficulties we also we're going to have another global voices seminar series next week we're going to be talking about COVID-19 health workers and who care for the carers so make sure to follow the link that uh we sent earlier earlier in the chat to register for other series and thank you so much for all of your your presence and thank you once again Julia and Yelke for wonderful comments and stories thank you so much thank you thank you Julia lovely to see you till next time you too i hope to see you soon yeah okay till next time goodbye everyone