Women in conflict situations:

a brief look at the war in Ukraine

Abstract

The use of "gender curiosity", placed on the horizon of International Security by feminist authors, generates constant tension in the discipline of International Relations. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is an example of the need to observe wars based on gender lenses that question the social roles of women and men in these processes that deteriorate social fabrics. The IARAS, Gender Studies Centre of the Defense and International Security Studies Group (IARAS-GEDES), presents here a collective effort to reflect on the various narratives on women in conflict situations, highlighting feminist contributions on international security. The question is: where are the women in the Russian-Ukrainian war? serves as a guide to analyze the complexities of the conflict, its particularities and the identification of the social roles that women and men, as announced by a vast literature, tend to play in situations of armed conflict. Among the images of victims and combatants, there is a wide spectrum of tasks and functions performed by women from both countries, actions that break the chains of gender stereotypes that shape the traditional views of the discipline.