Contents:

1. What is coercive control? Why study it in armed conflict settings
2. Research objectives: What we aim to explore
3. Research methodology: Phenomenology in the study of armed violence

What is coercive control? Why study it in armed conflict settings?

‘Coercive control’ is an invisible yet insidious harm – it is the aggregation of intentional and abusive behaviours that aim to control and compel compliance (Stark 2007). It is the humiliation, isolation, intimidation, or deprivation of basic liberties that push one into a corner, with little outlook for recourse.  Coercive control has gained increasing legal and criminological recognition as a specific form of harm, particularly in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV).

International Criminal trials have recognised that coercion is a key element of crimes committed during conflict. This includes its role in the perpetration of sexualised violence and in how the presence of militarised actors creates a context of coercion that enables those crimes.

In conflict and peacebuilding contexts, the simple presence of armed actors can generate a diffuse backdrop of implicit threat, a feeling of knowing what they are capable of. A seemingly invisible hand brings people and whole communities into compliance, sometimes even without the direct use of physical violence.  It is a coercive environment that entire communities live their lives around and in which women will experience continuing endemic, as well as conflict-related gendered violence.

Coercive control as a specific harm, as well as a lens for understanding women’s experiences of coercive contexts of warfare, has been absent from scholarship and global policy. Understanding of the gendered nature of coercion and of social control dynamics created by armed actors has also been absent.

This project addresses these gaps and asks:  How does coercive control manifest and work in conflict-affected contexts? How is coercive control experienced and understood by women and communities where non-state actors are present?

How does conflict-related coercive control influence societal changes during peace processes or in transitional justice? Do international justice processes give enough recognition to the gendered nature of coercion in conflict settings, or to the specific harm of coercive control arising from armed conflict? What would the legal capture of coercive control as an international crime look like?

And importantly, how can we develop ways to empirically, theoretically and legally bring understanding and recognition to  conflict-related coercive control?

Research objectives: What we aim to explore

Coercive In/Justice research project makes imperceptible harms discoverable. The project works to:

1. Generate unique empirical knowledge of coercive control as a ‘harm’ of armed conflict,
2. Establish a new conceptual framework for understanding its characteristics relative to conflict.
3. Explore the potential significance of coercive control as a crime of international legal significance, including with accountability and transitional justice processes.
4. Develop the methodological, empirical and theoretical basis for the expansion of a sub-field of study of the gendered phenomenon of conflict-related coercive control.

Research methodology: Phenomenology in the study of armed violence

This is the first transnational and empirically-driven study of conflict-related coercive control. The research is based on comparative, qualitative case study in conflict-affected communities. We develop a feminist phenomenological methodology to render the gendered phenomenon of coercive control more discoverable and relevant to the study and understanding of conflict-related violence.

Phenomenological approaches enable capture of lived experience, of lived space and of lived phenomena. We develop a methodology that makes possible a deep understanding of harm by tending to the subject’s own lived experience of the world and how that structures an embodied meaning and adaptation to it (Dolezal and Petherbridge, 2017; Marion Young, 2005; Merleau-Ponty, 2013). We recognise that conflict, coloniality and knowledge of histories of conflict violence inform and structure present experience (Agathangelou, 2016; Burke et al., 2022; Caruth, 2016).

Our feminist phenomenology helps to make visible the more-than-physical harms that women experience during conflict, and allows us to study how these harms in turn impact dynamics of conflict, justice and transitions.