Short Abstract

This panel addresses how intersecting global crises, including democratic erosion and climate crisis, reshape gendered vulnerabilities and intensify Gender-Based Violence (GBV). Moving past documentation, it highlights innovative research and praxis to build resilience and just, sustainable futures.

Description

Responding to the “interregnum” of the current global context, marked by intersecting crises, this panel examines how geopolitical shifts, the erosion of multilateralism, democratic backsliding, and the accelerating impacts of climate change are not gender-neutral phenomena. These developments destabilize established normative frameworks and create new arenas of vulnerability, intensifying the realities of Gender-Based Violence (GBV). We conceptualise GBV as encompassing a range of types and locations of violence that both underpin and reproduce gender inequality (UNGA 2006). In the current turbulent context, understanding and combating GBV is an urgent task for those committed to charting just and sustainable development futures.

Moving beyond documenting the scale of the crisis, this panel seeks to explore critical next steps in the field, showcasing innovative methods, presenting novel empirical findings, and interrogating their practical implications. We argue that renewed, methodologically rigorous focus on GBV offers concrete pathways forward.

We invite contributions engaging with the most complex drivers of GBV, including its bidirectional relationship with poverty, and findings on social norm change and how such approaches can build the "consensus and community" needed for lasting transformation. We welcome papers demonstrating methodological pluralism, experimental, quantitative, qualitative, and participatory.

The panel will critically examine changing policy and legal frameworks, interrogating how legislative tools are adapting, or failing to adapt, to the current interregnum, where rising authoritarianism threatens to roll back hard-won protections. We contend that a multi-faceted, evidence-based approach to ending GBV is essential to advance cooperation, consensus, and community.

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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