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About

The WICZNET is housed at York University, jointly situated at the Centre for Feminist Research and the Centre for Refugee Studies.

The Women in Conflict Zones Network began its research on gender and militarization in 1996. One of the principle goals of the Network has been to find ways of reaching across institutional-academic-activist boundaries to develop spaces that allow for dialogue concerning theory, empirical knowledge and policy development in the area of gender and militarized conflict. The Network is comprised of international feminist scholars, activists and staff working in humanitarian and human rights agencies who are interested in nationalism and gender relations, globalization and war, violence and women's rights, women's empowerment in war, and gender and citizenship. Countries of focus have included Sri Lanka, the Post Yugoslav States, Sudan, Burma, Israel/Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guatemala. This new phase of the WICZNET will bring together present Network members, along with other scholars and activists in this field, to re-examine and re-conceptualize some of the issues that we addressed in the late 1990s concerning the effects of gender and militarization on women, men, children and their communities. We will situate these issues within the current geo-political and policy contexts.

The focus of our activity has been the development of exchanges and collaborative research. The two major WICZNET publications, Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War Zones (Between the Lines, 2003) and Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (University of California Press, 2004) have been used extensively by feminist activists and academics working on these issues around the world. Feminists Under Fire brings together the experience of activists in Sri Lanka and the former Yugoslavia and Sites of Violence has made major theoretical contributions to the field. A third publication was Women in Conflict Zones (A special Issue of Canadian Women’s Studies, 2000). For more information on these publications, please click on these links: 

Sites of Violence
Feminists Under Fire
A special Issue of Canadian Women’s Studies, 2000

Present Partners
The International Development Research Centre
The Open Society Institute
Heinrich Boll Foundation