Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

This project involved interviewing women in conflict-affected areas in Vietnam, Somaliland, Uganda, India, Sri Lanka, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Tigray, Croatia and Bosnia and Liberia. The project was designed to increase understanding of women’s actual and potential roles within communities both during and after conflict, and was conceived in response to the fact that development activities were increasingly being affected by civil unrest, war and its aftermath. There was a particular desire to understand more about the impacts on women, and their responses to conflict. This reflected the increasing recognition of women’s crucial role - social and economic - in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of families and societies. This project sought to complement existing texts by gathering material which was personal, wide-ranging, and based on first-hand experience. The testimonies reveal the views and experiences of women as fighters, participants, refugees, victims caught between warring factions, organisers for peace and rehabilitation, carers, mothers, relatives and partners of the dead and disappeared. The collection comprises 189 interview transcripts, 49 interview summaries, 8 indexes of themes and 1 glossary. The text of the transcripts have not been altered or corrected. Twenty-six are in Spanish.

Main Topics:

Women; war; conflict; victims of war; civil war; terrorism; refugees; politics; peace; death; families; households; communities; violence; mothers; children; health.

Purposive selection/case studies

Face-to-face interview