Five years ago, we designed the Women’s Rights After War (WRAW) Project. At its core, we wanted to know more about how women experience war and whether (and how) efforts to foster peace and support gender equality afterwards were working. We became interested in understanding the ways women pursue justice, restore power, and reclaim their lives in war’s aftermath.

To investigate these questions, we convened a team of feminist researchers who shared our commitments and were interested in answering similar questions. We designed a 5-year long project to gather qualitative and quantitative data to help us understand the impacts of gender reforms in six war-affected contexts: Nepal, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, Colombia, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. As one of the final outcomes of the project, this zine summarizes what we have learned during this period from those impacted by war and its aftermaths.

We worked on this project while our universities required us to carry on as normal during overlapping crises such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and Israel’s escalated genocide of Palestinians from October 2023. These events remind us that, as US- and UK-based academics, we are also often implicated in the same structures that contribute to the problems we think about. We created this zine to relay our learning in a way that acknowledges the violence of academic knowledge production. Alongside formal academic outputs from the project, we hope this zine can better highlight the remarkable creativity and power of those who live through war and its aftermath as well as the lessons we can learn from them.