High Risk Leadership in Latin America: Women's Pursuit of Gender Justice in Violent Contexts

Project Information

High Risk Leadership

Grant agreement ID: 838513

DOI

10.3030/838513

Project terminated on 30 June 2024

EC signature date 27 March 2019

Start date 1 March 2020

End date 29 October 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 234 254,40

EU contribution

€ 234 254,40

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - High Risk Leadership (High Risk Leadership in Latin America: Women's Pursuit of Gender Justice in Violent Contexts)

Reporting period: 2022-03-01 to 2023-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In contexts of chronic violence and armed conflict, we might expect women to shy away from activities that augment their exposure to harm. The Fellow’s previous research shows, however, that against all odds, women do engage in gendered high-risk collective action. These women transgress traditional gender barriers and thus expose themselves to the additional risks of high violence, including targeting by actors for sexualized and others violent forms of punishment. Not only are such women resisting violence, however, the Fellow’s research shows that their activism focuses on the pursuit of gender justice.

The objectives of this project are twofold:

1: To further document and explain women’s high-risk mobilisation in Latin America;
2: To comparatively study women’s leadership in high-risk social movements in the region.

Firstly, the project generated new research about women’s high-risk collective action in Mexico and El Salvador. Using qualitative methods, the Fellow has undertaken research with mothers searching for the disappeared in Veracruz, Mexico, with Indigenous women fighting against gender-based violence in Guerrero, Mexico, and feminist organizations under threat from both gangs and government forces around El Salvador.

Secondly, the project undertook novel research about women’s charismatic leadership in Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Brazil. The Fellow created a unique database including information on one hundred women’s experiences of leadership in violent contexts. This data is being analyzed to understand what motivates gendered high-risk leadership when there are no perceivable benefits for first movers.

The project has made contributions at the nexus of gender and conflict studies and social movement studies. It has already expanded understandings of “high-risk feminism” (Zulver, 2022), and is advancing understandings of women’s empowerment in restricted contexts more broadly. The Fellow widely disseminated the project’s results in both academic and policy spaces.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Fellow conducted 9 research trips (Veracruz, Mexico, March 2022 & May 2022; Guerrero, Mexico, April 2022; Cali and Cúcuta, Colombia, June 2022; Bogotá and Cúcuta, Colombia, December 2022; San Salvador, March 2023 & July 2023; Sonsonate, El Salvador, November 2023; Mexico City and Tepoztlan, Mexico, March & April 2024), interviewing over 100 individuals in organizations in Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia. She used 43 of the interviews to develop an interview guide and then created an online questionnaire, which was completed by (an additional) 113 women leaders in seven countries (Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela, and Ecuador). The Fellow now has a unique database that contains information about leadership factors, risk factors and protection needs, which will form the basis of a book (proposal under review).

The Fellow has published three peer-reviewed, open access articles in international journals. She has 2 additional articles awaiting decisions, and 4 more in the process of writing.
-Zulver, J. (2023). Complex Gendered Agency in Mexico: How Women Negotiate Hierarchies of Fear to Search for the Disappeared. European Journal of Gender and Politics.
-Stallone, K. & Zulver, J. (2024). The Gendered Risks of Defending Human Rights in Armed Conflict: Evidence from Colombia. Journal of Peace Research. [authors listed alphabetically].
-Zulver, J. M., Turiño, E., Córdova, E., Reyez López, A. M., & Zelmanovitz Axelrod, I. (2024). Connecting, Venting, and Doing the "Behind the Scenes" Work: Bringing Feminist and Decolonial Insights to a Comparative Digital Data Collection Project. Qualitative and Multi-method Research, 22(1), 41–52.

Furthermore, she has 1 forthcoming book chapter, 1 forthcoming book, and was a co-Editor for a forthcoming special issue in Global Studies Quarterly (in which she will also co-author the Introduction). Finally, she has a book proposal under review with Cambridge University Press.
-Zulver, J., and Stallone, K. (forthcoming). Brave Women: Fighting for Justice in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan.

The Fellow undertook a wide variety of dissemination activities, including at multiple international conference participation. She additionally organized multiple panels androundtables, where she also participated, as well as invited academic experts from around the world to join her. She also presented her research in nine book talks, eighteen guest lectures, eight podcasts, and one keynote lecture. She published summaries of her research in four prestigious academic blogs. She wrote ten opinions, analyses, commentaries that were published in world-renowned outlets. She organized a special event about Mexico and feminist politics at the UNAM, where she invited world-ranking academics to participate. She co-organized and ran a three-day conference at the UNAM that compared high-risk feminist organizing in global perspective, and which culminated with a high-level, policy side event with members of the Canadian and Mexican Governments. Finally, she held a four day workshop for 17 high-risk women leaders from 11 countries (+7 facilitators) in Tepoztlan and Mexico City.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Fellow has generated a corpus of knowledge about women’s high-risk mobilisation and leadership in comparative perspective. She collected a rich set of interviews that facilitate comparison about women’s motivations to become high-risk leaders across seven different Latin American countries. She has also gathered data that lends itself to important policy change; for example, her database includes data on women’s protection schemes, their own ways of embodying gendered protective agency, and their requests for national and international guarantees of protection as they carry out their work.

The project addressed societal needs in both Latin America, and in Europe. Since the Fellow wrote the project proposal in 2018, women human rights defenders in Latin America continue to be attacked and killed at some of the highest levels in the world. In Mexico, madres buscadoras (the mothers of the disappeared) have been murdered while they search for information and justice. In El Salvador, women’s rights organizations have had their offices ransacked and their members have been stalked and threatened in the context of the State of Exception. In Colombia, social leaders who support the peace process and the realization of various rights, continue to be murdered in the highest levels in the world. The research project thus built a body of vital knowledge about how and why these high-risk activists continue their struggles for justice around the region. It further focused on leadership, and what makes certain individuals take on high-profile, high-risk struggles. Through the dissemination of rigorous research and policy- oriented outputs with diverse audiences, the Fellow drew linkages between the experiences of high-risk women’s rights leaders and what they require in terms of guarantees of their protection. As women’s rights and human rights continue to be a high priority for Europe, the Fellow believes that her action-oriented research is making an important contribution to European efforts to find solutions to societal challenges and pursue societal resilience.

Women protest in Mexico City.