Change in practice: a framework for analysing the transformation of post-conflict masculinities

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article addresses two shortcomings in the existing research on masculinities during or after armed conflict: a strong focus on violent masculinities and a lack of approaches to analysing the transformation of masculinities, especially in the context of peace processes. We suggest understanding masculinities through context-specific masculinity practices and differentiate between societal, institutional, and individual practices. Based on this, we reconceptualize militarized, military, and hypermasculinity as concepts that capture violent masculinity practices at different analytical levels. This offers an intriguing way of grasping masculinities, both violence-centred ones and those that are more conducive to peace, without essentialising them and allows for the fine-grained analysis of even small-scale changes in those practices and the masculinities they perform. For this, we synthesize the existing literature and suggest a way of ordering it as part of an analytical framework. This framework conceptualizes violence-centred masculinities and their peace-conducive counterparts through the masculinity practices performed in societies, security sector institutions, and by individuals. We then identify examples of those masculinity practices and cluster them according to their shared meaning in what we call continua of practices. We thus offer a framework for structuring the plethora of potentially observable masculinity practices in post-conflict contexts. Furthermore, this framework facilitates analysing the transformation of post-conflict masculinities, allowing to situate observed practices somewhere on the continua we identified. As a result, we transcend the understanding of masculinities as static, violent and inherently problematic.