Conflict and Covid-19: exploring the effects on women

Abstract

What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee camps and population flows are but some of the characteristics of conflict-affected societies rendering them vulnerable to pandemics such as Covid-19. Importantly, societal crises are deeply gendered; women and men experience conflicts and are affected by them in profoundly different ways. Focusing on the ‘first wave’ of Covid-19 in 2020, I map out the gendered impacts of Covid-19 in conflict-affected societies with particular focus on women. I situate their experience of the dual crisis in the context of ‘vulnerability multipliers’ that limit the ability of individuals to manage societal crises. I find that the pandemic and policy responses to it exacerbated multiple forms of gendered insecurity. They include physical, economic and health insecurities as well as increasing political marginalisation. All this points to multiple, overlapping insecurities operating simultaneously, leading to ‘layered violence’ whereby the pre-existing violence against women and girls escalates, subjecting them to more intense forms of harm.