Roxani Krystalli, Ph.D. Candidate

roxanne.krystalli@post.harvard.edu

The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Country: United Kingdom (Scotland)

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About Me:

Roxani Krystalli is a Program Manager at the Feinstein International Center in Boston, MA. She is a humanitarian practitioner and researcher, who works on issues of gender, war, and peace-building. Her current research project examines the politics and hierarchies of victimhood in Colombia. Roxani is particularly interested in the ethics of storytelling about violence. She has spent a decade focusing on understanding people’s experiences of violence and justice in the aftermath of armed conflict, including working with former combatants, refugees, victims and survivors of violence throughout Latin America, the Mediterranean, and East Africa. For her work, Roxani has been recognized with the Presidential Award for Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. She has also been recognized as a United States Institute of Peace ‘Peace Scholar’, a Social Science Research Council Fellow, a Henry J. Leir Institute for Human Security Fellow, and a recipient of a National Science Foundation research grant. Her work has appeared or been cited in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Disasters, The International Feminist Journal of Politics, Open Democracy, and on numerous blogs and podcasts, including on her own blog, Stories of Conflict and Love. She holds a BA from Harvard University, an MA from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and she is currently completing a PhD at The Fletcher School while being a Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. 

Research Interests

Gender and Politics

Conflict Processes & War

Human Rights

Political Violence

Refugees

Transitional Justice

Victims' Rights

Humanitarianism

Gender And War

Colombian Peace Process

Countries of Interest

Colombia

Greece

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2018) ‘I followed the flood’: a gender analysis of the moral and financial economies of forced migration, Disasters

What would a gender analysis of refugee crises reveal if one expanded the focus beyond female refugees, and acts of physical violence? This paper draws on qualitative research conducted in Denmark, Greece, Jordan, and Turkey in July and August 2016 to spotlight the gendered kinship, hierarchies, networks, and transactions that affect refugees. The coping strategies of groups often overlooked in the gender conversation are examined throughout this study, including those of male refugees and those making crossings outside of the context of a family unit. The analysis is theoretically situated at the intersection of critical humanitarianism and the politics of vulnerability, and rooted in debates about the feminisation of refugees and corresponding protection agendas. A key contribution of this work is the ethnographic tracing of how refugees embody these politics along their journeys. In closing, the paper sketches out some implications of the findings for humanitarian practice and identifies avenues for further research.

Other:

(2016) The Colombian peace agreement has a big emphasis on the lives of women. Here’s how., Washington Post

In 2014, the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced a new sub-commission on gender in the peace process, tasked with ensuring that the agreements had an “adequate gender focus.” In July, the sub-commission presented the results of its work to the assembled peace delegations in Havana, as well as to U.N. officials and representatives of Colombian civil society groups. While not all of the agreement’s documents are final or publicly available, here is what we know from the available summaries and public statements.

(2016) Here is how attention to gender affected Colombia's peace process, Washington Post

On Friday, October 7, 2016, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to negotiate and sign peace accords with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerillas, after 52 years of violent conflict. The award came just five days after Colombians rejected the deal in a national plebiscite, albeit by a very narrow margin, leaving the peace process in limbo. Observers have been commenting on the shock of the defeat and on the added twist of the Nobel. But few in the English-language media have discussed how the attention of the peace accords to sexuality and women’s experiences of the conflict may have affected views during the plebiscite. Here’s what we know.