Beyond Vulnerability: Exploring the Political Agency of Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence

• Applicant: Dr. Philipp Schulz
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 426849903

Although conflict-related sexual violence against men occurs more frequently than assumed, these crimes remain consistently under-researched. The few existing studies primarily focus on the gendered harms and vulnerabilities as experienced by male survivors. As a result, wartime sexual violence against men, and male survivors' lived realities, have thus far exclusively been examined through the frame of vulnerabilities, portraying male survivors as passive, humiliated and stripped of their gender identities. However, how in spite of their gendered vulnerabilities, male sexual violence survivors also actively engage with and respond to their conflict-related experiences and gendered harms, and thereby exercise myriad forms of political agency, has not yet been explored. To address this lacuna in the literature, this project asks: What are the different forms of and conditions for male sexual violence survivors' political agency? This analysis is of scholarly significance, as it paints a more holistic and nuanced empirically-grounded picture of the gender dynamics of armed conflict and wartime sexual violence generally, and of male survivors' experiences specifically. These empirically-grounded insights thereby also foster an in-depth understanding regarding the long-lasting effects of conflict on civilians and war-affected communities more broadly. Utilizing Northern Uganda and Sri Lanka as explorative case studies, the comparative analysis thereby moves beyond previous research that has focused either on the gendered vulnerabilities of male survivors or the political agency of women in warzones. Novel empirical data will be collected through interpretative and ethnographic qualitative methods, including key-informant interviews, group-based story-telling sessions and life story oral history interviews with male survivors. Elucidating the seldom-heard voices of male sexual violence survivors, the project thus paints a different kind of war story with academic and political significance. By examining the lived realities of male sexual violence survivors with attention to agency, the project will make novel empirical and theoretical contributions to intersecting bodies of scholarship on international relations, peace and conflict research and gender studies. Specifically, the project ventures into research to significantly advance scholarship on wartime sexual violence, thereby moving forward the frontiers of knowledge on gendered examinations of conflict.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants