Marie Berry, Ph.D.
marie.berry@du.edu
University of Denver
About Me:
Dr. Marie Berry is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she is an affiliate of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy. She is also the Director of the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative (IGLI), an effort to catalyze research, education, and programming aimed at elevating and amplifying the work that women activists are doing at the grassroots to advance peace, justice, and human rights across the world. As a sociologist, her research focuses on violence, gender, and politics. Her first book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press 2018), examines the impact of war and genocide on women’s political mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia. Her second book project explores women’s participation in movements for social change across the world. Together with Dr. Milli Lake (LSE), she runs the Women’s Rights After War Project. Dr. Berry’s award-winning work has been published in places like Gender & Society, Democratization, Signs, New Political Economy, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, Foreign Policy, The Society Pages, The Monkey Cage, and Political Violence @ A Glance.
Research Interests
Political Violence
Gender and Politics
African Politics
Development
Human Rights
Countries of Interest
Rwanda
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Kenya
Argentina
Nepal
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Researchers have recently documented the unexpected opportunities war can present for women. While acknowledging the devastating effects of mass violence, this burgeoning field highlights war’s potential to catalyze grassroots mobilization and build more gender sensitive institutions and legal frameworks. Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina serve as important examples of this phenomenon, yet a closer examination of both cases reveals the limits on women’s capacity to take part in and benefit from these postwar shifts. This article makes two key contributions. First, it demonstrates how the postwar political settlement created hierarchies of victimhood that facilitated new social divisions and fractured women’s collective organizing. Second, it argues that while war creates certain opportunities for women, a revitalization of patriarchy in the aftermath can undermine these gains. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with women in both countries, this article ultimately questions the extent to which postwar mobilization can be maintained or harnessed for genuine gender emancipation.
Since the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has emerged as a global model for the promotion of women in society. Today, Rwanda has progressive gender-sensitive laws, more girls than boys in primary school, and the world’s highest percentage of women in parliament. But has this national-level progress manifested in an actual improvement in the lives of ordinary Rwandan women? If not, what has prevented these rights-based empowerment efforts from taking hold? Drawing from interviews with 152 women at all levels of Rwandan society, this article illustrates the contradictory and complicated nature of women’s empowerment efforts. It identifies three paradoxes that capture how efforts to promote women can be undermined by deeply rooted social processes. First, women are granted new rights but cannot access them unless they are married, which further reinforces their dependence on men. Second, policies aim to empower women through education, but have unintended consequences that create new forms of oppression. Third, in order to advance the image of a “modern Rwanda” the government restricts women’s labor, further entrenching their poverty. Each of these paradoxes suggests that efforts to remedy women’s subordination may actually end up reinforcing it.
Books Written:
Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war, and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.
Media Appearances:
TV Appearances:
Commentary on 25th commemoration of Rwandan genocide