Roxani Krystalli, Ph.D.
rk70@st-andrews.ac.uk
Associate Professor
University of St Andrews
Year of PhD: 2020
Country: United Kingdom (Scotland)
About Me:
Dr Roxani Krystalli is a Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her research and teaching focus on feminist peace and conflict studies, as well as on the politics of nature and place. A central question animating Roxani's work within and beyond the academy is what sustains life in the face of loss.Roxani is currently the co-Principal Investigator of a research project on the role of love and care in remaking worlds after loss, including violence, grief, and ecological losses. The project is carried out collaboratively with Dr Philipp Schulz at the University of Bremen, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).For over a decade, Roxani has worked at the intersection of gender and peace-building as an academic researcher and humanitarian practitioner. Roxani has partnered with several international and community-based organizations, including Oxfam GB, Mercy Corps, the Feinstein International Center, various UN agencies, Beyond Borders, and more, to understand the experiences of conflict-affected communities. Her work has particularly focused on developing ethical and rigorous methodologies for documenting gendered harms. Roxani regularly advises international organizations and NGOs on various aspects of gender, justice, and peace-building. Roxani's first book, Good Victims: The Political as a Feminist Question (Oxford University Press, 2024), is based on in-depth engagement in Colombia over the course of a decade. In it, Roxani argues for the possibilities of politics through, rather than in opposition to, the status of "victim," and shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war. Good Victims also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when contemplating the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms. Roxani's research on the politics and hierarchies of victimhood in Colombia received the Peter Ackerman Award at The Fletcher School in 2020. In the same year, her article on the ethics and methods of narrating victimhood was the runner-up for the Cynthia Enloe prize at the International Feminist Journal of Politics. In 2023, the British International Studies Association awarded Roxani the Early Career Excellence in Teaching International Studies Prize. Her class on the Politics of Nature and Place received the Golden Dandelion award, "in recognition of considerable contribution to education for sustainable development." Through her feminist pedagogy, Roxani is committed to fostering a critical curiosity about power, an experiential education grounded in place, and an imagination of more just worlds. Roxani's research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Scotland's Future Series, the United States Institute of Peace, the National Science Foundation, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the Social Science Research Council, the Henry J. Leir Institute, and the World Peace Foundation. Her blog received the Best Blog award at the International Studies Association in 2019. Roxani holds a PhD and MA from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, as well as a BA from Harvard University. She was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece.
Research Interests
Gender and Politics
Transitional Justice
Victims' Rights
Humanitarianism
Colombian Peace Process
Love And Care
Feminist Methodologies
Countries of Interest
Colombia
Greece
Publications:
Journal Articles:
While research on armed conflict focuses primarily on violence and suffering, this article explores the practices of love and care that sit alongside these experiences of harm. Motivated by our omissions to pay sufficient attention to love and care in our research to date, we ask: How can centering practices of love and care illuminate different pathways for understanding the remaking of worlds in the wake of violence? Building on interdisciplinary literature, we conceptualize love and care as practices and potential sites of politics that shape how people survive and make sense of violence as well as imagine and enact lives in its wake. Drawing from our respective research in Colombia and Uganda, we argue that paying attention to love and care expands scholarly understandings of the sites associated with remaking a world, draws attention to the simultaneity of harms and care, sheds light on the textured meanings of politics and political work, and highlights ethical and narrative dilemmas regarding how to capture these political meanings without reducing their intricacies. For each of the pillars of our argument, we propose a set of questions and avenues that can shape emergent research agendas on taking love and care seriously in contexts of armed conflict.
“As we go forward in the twenty-first century,” Cynthia Enloe writes, “feminists inside and outside academia need to be on our guard against a cynical form of knowing. We need to send the roots of our curiosity down even deeper." In this conversation, we have endeavored to do just that. In August 2019, we exchanged several emails about the politics of seriousness, the meanings of politics, and the different ways in which we have understood ourselves and our feminist work over time. We wanted to turn the usual curi- osity that we orient toward our questions on international politics toward the topics of identity, writing, academia, failure, and joy. These, too, are feminist questions, not only because they prompt reflections on power but also because they invite us to take seriously the issues of joy, well-being, and the meaning that we each find in how we do our work. A lightly edited version of this conversation can be found below.
Books Written:
As of 2023, over nine million Colombians have secured official recognition as victims of an armed conflict that has lasted decades. The category of "victim" is not a mere description of having suffered harm, but a political status and a potential site of power. In Good Victims, Roxani Krystalli investigates the politics of victimhood as a feminist question. Based on in-depth engagement in Colombia over the course of a decade, Krystalli argues for the possibilities of politics through, rather than in opposition to, the status of "victim." Encompassing acts of care, agency, and haunting, the politics of victimhood entangle people who identify as victims, researchers, and transitional justice professionals. Krystalli shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war, and of bringing a vision of that state into being through bureaucratic encounters. Good Victims also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when contemplating the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms.
Book Chapters:
In this chapter of The Companion to Peace and Conflict Fieldwork, I examine what and whom we imagine to be protecting when we use the language of ethics and transparency to describe research. How does the imagination of humans as data inform different approaches to transparency and ethics in research? I draw from my experiences in negotiating about data transparency with a funding agency to reflect on how different temporalities and spaces of research and violence alike inform interpretations of our responsibilities toward research interlocutors. The goal of the chapter is to synthesize recent research to advance an alternate orientation of transparency, away from a conceptualization informed by liability or “checkbox” compliance and toward a practice of reflexive openness.
In this chapter, I explore how what we know about violence changes when we take narratives seriously. To do so, I draw from a growing feminist tradition of narrative research – and I ask what is feminist about these approaches. I argue that engaging with narratives is not only a methodological choice, but also an ethical posture: a curiosity about knowledge and an orientation towards power.
A gender-analytical approach to DDR is three-pronged: It involves using gender analyses to improve the standards of support for women in DDR programs, prioritizes parallel programs and funding for women, and involves demilitarizing masculinity and femininity among ex-combatants. In this chapter, we explore why, despite increasing attention to gender and DDR, institutions and policy makers still find it so difficult to align DDR conceptually, logistically, and programmatically for women. We argue this is due to four challenges in the conceptions of women and DDR, and gender and DDR. First, despite extensive advocacy for a rights-based approach that would emphasize women’s right to participate in DDR, these programs often remain inaccessible to female combatants and females associated with fighting forces due to conceptual and implementation barriers. Second, for the women who are able to access them, the content of DDR often does not reflect their wartime experiences or post-demobilization needs. Third, it is important to consider alternatives to current forms of DDR, as well as look outside and beyond the traditional DDR framework to address the reality that a formal DDR program may not be suitable or desirable for many women who have been combatants. Finally, DDR programs fall short of taking on the violent, militarized masculinities of male combatants, which contribute to continued violence in public and private spaces in the post-conflict.
Book Reviews:
In this powerful edited volume, Jane Parpart and Swati Parashar “explore the power of silence in a world where voice is too often privileged as the ultimate sign of power." Contributors challenge the silence-versus-speech dichotomy, whereby silence is synonymous with passivity, and speech with politics, agency, or power. The authors pay attention to the adjectives that lend silence its qualities, exploring strategic, performative, necessary, structural, gendered, and productive silences. Silence becomes an adjective too: silent refusal, silent witness, silent resistance.
Other:
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.
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.