Yazidis and ISIS: The Causes and Consequences of Sexual Violence in Conflict

This event launches the paper “Yazidis and ISIS: The Causes and Consequences of Sexual Violence in Conflict” published under the LSE Conflict Research Programme by Principal Investigator Dr. Zeynep Kaya. It has been five years since ISIS brought the Yazidi community in Iraq to the brink of destruction. Some women and children held by ISIS have been re-captured by criminal gangs to be trafficked or sold to their families. Those that managed to escape the brutal attacks have ended up in displacement camps scattered around Iraqi Kurdistan, with a small number relocating to Western countries as refugees. This report shows that preventing sexual violence in conflict is not possible without tackling the underlying structural factors that foster this form of violence. Militant radical groups such as ISIS use specific gender norms in connection with perceived religious/sectarian identities in order to morally justify and organise violence. ISIS’s attacks on the Yazidis showed again that gender (and gendered violence) is a key component of the politics of violence and cannot be reduced simply to an outcome of conflict. Therefore, gender is key not only to the prevention of conflict but also to how this is addressed in post-conflict periods. Zeynep Kaya is a Research Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. She is part of the UK DFID-Funded Conflict Research Programme and is leading projects on gendered drivers of conflict in Iraq, the impact of genocide on the Yazidi community, responses to internal displacement in Iraqi Kurdistan, WPS and displacement in the Middle East, and women’s political participation in Kuwait. She is also a Lecturer at the Pembroke-King’s Programme, University of Cambridge. Nazanin Shahrokni is an Associate Professor at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Prior to joining LSE, she held positions in various international settings such as Syracuse University, Lund University, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the American University of Beirut. Nazanin is currently on the Executive Board of the International Sociological Association, and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Middle Eastern Women's Studies. Her research interests fall at the intersection of gender politics, feminist geography, and ethnographies of the state in Iran, the Middle East, and beyond, bringing a critical lens and an ethnographic approach to the study of gendered public spaces and spheres, the reconstruction of gender difference in city spaces, and the complex gendered underpinnings of urban governance and political institutions. Join the conversation on Twitter using #LSEIraq Image: ©AFP/Safin Hamed