Short Abstract

What changes when gender becomes a prism for understanding climate and conflict in Africa? This panel brings diverse perspectives into conversation to rethink causality, masculinities and femininities, agency, adaptation and possibilities for peace and security.

Long Abstract

Climate change, gender and conflict are increasingly brought together in research and Africa-centred policy debates. Yet the relationships between them are frequently reduced to familiar narratives: climate change produces scarcity and conflict; women are vulnerable; men become perpetrators; and adaptation offers a route towards resilience. This panel asks what becomes visible—and what is obscured—when we examine these relationships through different gendered prisms?

Bringing scholars working across different African contexts into conversation, the panel moves beyond searching for a singular climate–conflict relationship. Instead, it explores how environmental change intersects with historically and geographically constituted inequalities, political marginalisation and social vulnerability, gender norms and identities, resource governance, violence and everyday struggles over livelihoods and security. Attention will be given to masculinities and femininities, and to the ways environmental pressures can destabilise gender roles while simultaneously creating possibilities for their renegotiation. Research in eastern DRC, for example, demonstrates how environmental insecurity can reshape gender relations and armed mobilisation without constituting a direct cause of conflict. Research on adaptation in Kenya similarly reveals how climate pressures interact with restrictive gender norms and struggles over equitable access to resources and decision-making.

Through presentations followed by moderated discussion, panel contributors are invited to consider how particular theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, framed in relation to empirical studies from different geographical contexts, produce different understandings of the gender–climate–conflict nexus. The panel ultimately asks how might African-centred and/or gender-transformative perspectives enable us to move beyond vulnerability and deterministic causality towards questions of power, agency, justice, transformation and peace?

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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