Conflict and Covid-19: exploring the effects on women

Abstract

What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee camps and population flows are but some of the characteristics of conflict-affected societies rendering them vulnerable to pandemics such as Covid-19. Importantly, societal crises are deeply gendered; women and men experience conflicts and are affected by them in profoundly different ways. Focusing on the ‘first wave’ of Covid-19 in 2020, I map out the gendered impacts of Covid-19 in conflict-affected societies with particular focus on women. I situate their experience of the dual crisis in the context of ‘vulnerability multipliers’ that limit the ability of individuals to manage societal crises. I find that the pandemic and policy responses to it exacerbated multiple forms of gendered insecurity. They include physical, economic and health insecurities as well as increasing political marginalisation. All this points to multiple, overlapping insecurities operating simultaneously, leading to ‘layered violence’ whereby the pre-existing violence against women and girls escalates, subjecting them to more intense forms of harm.

Introduction

While the coronavirus outbreak caused world-wide economic, political and social disruption, it did little to quell armed conflicts around the world. Despite the call for a global ceasefire by the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council in 2020, wars have continued unabated in conflict-affected societies. The effects of the pandemic on conflicts has varied. In some cases, such as Tigray in Ethiopia, coronavirus-related delay in elections triggered violence between government forces and militias, ¹ while in other cases, armed groups, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, ² were able to capitalise on the government’s preoccupation with Covid-19 response and launch attacks to gain further territory. These and other impacts of the pandemic on conflicts have not only affected the dynamics of violence but have had implications on civilians, caught up in increasing levels of insecurity. Importantly, these impacts are gendered; women, girls, men and boys experience conflicts and are affected by them in profoundly different ways. While societal upheavals can provide opportunities for marginalised groups as traditional gender structures and roles shift, the dual crisis of armed conflict and Covid-19 has become a humanitarian crisis as noted by the UN Secretary General, with ‘disproportionate negative impact on women and girls’. ³

Against this backdrop, this paper maps out the gendered impact of Covid-19 in conflict-affected societies in the first few months of the pandemic, with particular focus on women. What were the effects of the dual crisis on women? While gender is not synonymous to women, I focus on women who are disproportionally affected by both armed conflicts ⁴ and public health crises, ⁵ making them some of the most vulnerable groups in societies undergoing multiple crises. Importantly, I situate their experiences in the context of vulnerability multipliers (restrictive gender norms, gendered division of labour and lack of access to resources) that limit the ability of individuals to manage societal crises. I find that multiple and overlapping forms of gendered insecurity and marginalisation – physical, economic, health, political – emerge from the intersection of conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic.

This line of enquiry is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, the existing research on violence, gender and Covid-19 has largely focused on ‘private’ gendered violence. ⁶ Various analyses of the ‘shadow pandemic’ have identified a rise in domestic violence around the world as a consequence of Covid-19. ⁷ Intimate partner violence, however, sits in a broader spectrum of violence spanning across private, public, physical and economic modes of violence and insecurity. ⁸ The intention of this analysis is to go beyond the focus on domestic violence and identify other types of gendered insecurity that emerged from the dual crisis of armed conflict and Covid-19. In doing so, the analysis extends recent research exploring gender, collective violence and Covid-19. ⁹ Such knowledge will further our understanding of the intersections of gender, security and disease pandemics, a line of inquiry pioneered by Colleen O’Manique and others. ¹⁰ In adopting feminist and gender-based approaches to interrogating global health governance and international security, they have not only exposed the ‘invisibility’ of women in efforts to address pandemics ¹¹ but have also challenged traditional assumptions underwriting global health security. ¹² My analysis speaks to this body of scholarship by seeking to identify variety of gendered violences and insecurities that stem from the conflict/pandemic nexus across cases. It will also provide a framework (vulnerability multipliers) for exploring gendered effects of multiple crises that may facilitate further analyses of the gender, conflict and pandemics nexus.

Secondly, conflict-affected societies represent some of the most vulnerable contexts for pandemics such as Covid-19. Health systems are at best overwhelmed and at worst destroyed in the course of conflict. Previous research on pandemics such as Ebola and Zika ¹³ in humanitarian settings provide us important insights on the gendered effects of pandemics but in contrast to local or regional outbreaks, the Covid-19 pandemic represented a public health crisis of a global scale that undermined the provision of humanitarian aid to conflict-affected societies as well as diplomatic efforts to end violence. This provides an opportunity to interrogate the intersection of conflict, gender and pandemic in the context of an outbreak with a global reach and in doing so, contribute to discussions about appropriate policy measures.

The discussion is meant as a first reading of patterns and trends across conflict-affected societies in the first few months of the pandemic rather than as an exhaustive analysis. It represents a snapshot in time, focusing on the ‘first wave’ in 2020 and is based on evidence reported by civil society groups. It is important to acknowledge that all societies, including those not considered conflict-affected, experience forms of conflict and violence, often manifested in ‘slow’ ¹⁴ or structural violence. Feminist scholars have produced important insights into the continuities between different modalities of violence and conflict that manifest in most modern societies. ¹⁵ For the purposes of this analysis – investigating the intersection between health pandemic and war – conflict-affected society is used as a shorthand for a country that is experiencing collective armed violence between two or more governmental and/or non-governmental actors or transitioning from collective armed violence to post-settlement phase. According to estimates, during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, there were around 50 armed conflicts around the world. ¹⁶ As an initial analysis, and one constrained by data limitations, my discussion focuses on cases where research material is accessible online. ¹⁷

The analysis draws on country-specific surveys and reports by human rights and women’s rights organisations operating in conflict settings, such as UN Women, Oxfam and CARE. This corpus of research material, consisting of over 30 reports, offers a glimpse of the gendered experience of living through the dual crisis of conflict and pandemic by documenting the experiences of individuals, families and civil society organisations in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020. Majority of the reports are based on survey and interview data, ¹⁸ some conducted via telephone ¹⁹ and others in-person, through local partner organisations. ²⁰ While some reports have a broader focus on the humanitarian impact of Covid-19, the vast majority of the reports are gender specific surveys on the impact of Covid-19. The material was analysed inductively by coding the key themes emerging from it. The initial round of open coding entailed establishing nodes from the research material and looking for patterns among them. The next round of analysis entailed ‘theoretical sampling’, where further research material is collected on the basis of the leads generated by the initial round of coding. ²¹ A careful analysis of the nodes pointed towards a reoccurring theme emerging from the dual crisis of armed conflict and Covid-19; a set of interconnected gendered insecurities ranging from increasing physical violence to economic and health insecurities, alongside increasing political marginalisation. In the final round of analysis, the interrelations between the core nodes were analysed and the nodes were organised into a narrative.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. The first section provides a brief overview of the intersection between armed conflict and pandemics, alongside with key findings from existing research. The second section turns to the gendered context within which the dual crisis of conflict and pandemics occur. I argue that the effects on women should be understood in the context of vulnerability multipliers that limit the ability of many women to manage the effects of the interlocking crises. I do not suggest that women should be viewed as victims with no agency but instead, seek to foreground the structural and normative environment within which many, if not all, women seek to negotiate the crises. In the subsequent sections, I move onto tracing the various forms of gendered insecurity that flow from the intersection of Covid-19 and conflict. This review points towards significant physical, economic and health insecurities, alongside increasing political marginalisation. The following section suggests that the above insecurities overlap and intersect in important ways, compelling those subjected to them to adopt coping mechanisms that further increase their vulnerability.

The pandemic-conflict nexus

What happens when conflicts collide with major disease pandemics? ²² Weak or fragmented institutions, contested legitimacy of and deep-seated mistrust in the authorities, overstretched or destroyed health sector, crowded refugee camps and population flows are but some of the characteristics of conflict-affected societies rendering them vulnerable to pandemics such as Covid-19. At the same time, health policy is deeply embedded in the politics of armed conflicts. In Iraq, for example, armed groups have placed strategic priority on medical facilities as controlling health and social services is seen as means for controlling the population. ²³ In many conflict zones, parts of the territory are controlled by armed groups or other rival political institutions which further complicates policy responses in health crises. Despite these challenges, Covid-19 responses by governments in conflict-affected societies by and large mirrored those deployed by governments around the world in 2020. According to the University of Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker, authorities in Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, Sudan, the DRC, Syria, Central African Republic, Myanmar, South Sudan opted for varying levels of school and workplace closures, restrictions on public gatherings, stay-at-home orders, restrictions on internal movement and controls on international travel ranging from border closures to quarantines of travellers from high-risk regions. As argued later, the gender-blind nature of these policies contributed to the emergence of multiple, interconnected insecurities.

Existing research provides important clues for thinking about the conflict-pandemic nexus. Literature on health security, for one, has outlined the impact of health crises on state capacity and security. ²⁴ While some of its more alarmist arguments have not withstood empirical scrutiny, ²⁵ it is commonly accepted that pandemics are likely to shape conflict dynamics in complex ways. ²⁶ A body of research that has studied this complexity in detail is the scholarship on natural disasters. ²⁷ This line of enquiry has identified multiple ways in which biologic, geophysical and climate-related disasters affect armed conflicts. Studies on the impact of disasters on armed conflicts have identified a range of effects; in some cases, disasters have increased the likelihood of armed conflict ²⁸ while in other conflict settings disasters have reduced the risk of conflict. ²⁹ In summarising the above and related empirical findings, Katie Harris, David Keen and Tom Mitchell ³⁰ suggest that natural disasters intensify existing conflicts by contributing to the key conflict drivers, including economic opportunities, grievances and conflict feasibility. They argue that disasters may create economic opportunities for conflict actors and incentivise individuals to join armed groups. At the same time, where disasters exacerbate resource scarcity or marginalisation of communities, grievances are likely to increase. Finally, disasters may shape the feasibility of conflict and political opportunities for violence by, for example, providing a pretext for deploying troops in a politically sensitive area.

Emerging research on Covid-19 and armed conflicts aligns with the above findings. ³¹ More specifically, it suggests that while the coronavirus pandemic did not trigger conflicts, ³² it shaped the feasibility of conflicts in important ways. Tobias Ide, in one of the first analyses of the effects of Covid-19 on armed conflict, argues that the Covid-19 shifted the strategic calculus of conflict actors by providing opportunities for violence and, in some cases, by shoring up the legitimacy of non-state actors as service providers. ³³ The pandemic also provided a justification for using force against political opponents. In this regard, Dorothea Hilhorst and Rodrigo Mena’s ³⁴ analysis suggests that governments securitised the pandemic, providing a pretext for suppressing social protest. Importantly for this analysis, these changing conflict dynamics have implications that extend well beyond the conflict actors. Being attentive to the implications of the changing conflict dynamics to those not bearing arms brings to the fore an array of insecurities that go beyond physical violence.

Vulnerability multipliers

While the above research provides an important entry point into thinking about the dynamics between armed conflict and disease pandemics, locating women in the dual crisis of conflict and Covid-19 requires readjusting the analytical lens to the bottom-up experience of Covid-19 in conflict zones. In more concrete terms, this means broadening the analytical focus beyond the experiences and interests of conflict actors and narrow conceptions of insecurity. It requires shifting the focus away from how the pandemic affects opportunities and grievances of warring parties to the implications of the changing conflict dynamics on women. How do escalating or de-escalating conflict levels (as a result of the pandemic) impact women? To reflect on the above questions, it is necessary to situate the effects of the pandemic-conflict nexus on women within broader socio-economic structures that shape their ability to manage compounding crises. These structures, or ‘vulnerability multipliers’, are grounded in deeply embedded gender hierarchies and inequalities ³⁵ whereby the feminine is devalued. This is not to argue that women have no agency in addressing the dual crisis. In many conflict settings, such as South Sudan, Libya and Central African Republic, women’s civil society organisations quickly transformed into first responders to the pandemic, disseminating information and medical supplies. Yet, ‘people’s ability to recover from shocks’, as Judy El Bushra ³⁶ notes, ‘is at least partly determined by their position in the evolving power structures’. Given the gendered hierarchies that underwrite structures of power, where women and those considered ‘feminine’ are seen as subordinate to men and context-specific masculinities, ‘women are more likely than men to have to struggle to survive’, in the face of societal shocks. ³⁷ While not all women are equally affected by the vulnerability multipliers, they are critical in shaping the gendered experience of the pandemic in conflict zones and critically, affect individuals’ ability to manage the increasing violence and insecurities generated by the collision of conflict with Covid-19. The primary vulnerability multipliers in conflict-contexts are restrictive gender norms, ³⁸ gendered division of labour ³⁹ and lack of access to resources. ⁴⁰

When it comes to restrictive gender norms, many conflict-affected societies are characterised by the prevalence of hypermasculinity. This type of masculinity prioritises aggressiveness and physical strength, while devalorising the feminine and homosexuality. ⁴¹ Hypermasculinity is not exclusively associated with conflict-affected societies nor do all men in conflict settings subscribe to it. Yet, in the context of war the traditional gender roles that depict men as protectors ready to use violence to protect ‘their’ women and women as vulnerable subjects of protection, become heightened. If anything, the coronavirus pandemic intensified the masculine protector logic as the virus was frequently framed as an ‘enemy’ and efforts to contain it as ‘war’. These securitised framings of the pandemic were also deployed by political actors in countries not affected by collective armed conflict, but in conflict-affected societies the securitisation of the virus tapped on a pre-existing hypermasculinity. This reinforced a protection bargain whereby women, seen as weak and vulnerable, exchange their autonomy for protection. ⁴² The ability of men to live up to the role of the protector in the context of the dual crisis has been limited, however, resulting in frustration and in some cases, violence.

One of the key manifestations of this masculine protector dynamic is restricting women’s mobility. While framed as an act of protection, mobility limitations undermine the ability of women to engage in paid employment or education outside the home, thus reproducing dependency on men. During the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic, mobility restrictions limited women’s access to healthcare as they needed male relatives to accompany them to medical facilities. Similarly, civil society groups in Iraq ⁴³ and Palestine ⁴⁴ reported of cases where women were not allowed to stay in quarantine facilities unaccompanied, raising concerns about increasing familial and community spread of the virus. Moreover, the combined restrictions on women’s movement stemming from the hypermasculine gender norms and Covid-19 prevention measures further reduced women’s ability to engage in income generating activities or employment outside home, thus reducing their independence and financial capability to weather the dual crisis of armed conflict and Covid-19.

An upshot of hierarchical gender norms is the gendered division of labour. Women undertake the majority of unpaid domestic labour and if they do enter the workforce outside the home, their remuneration is lower than men in aggregate. While armed conflicts provide opportunities for women to enter paid employment because of the shortage of male labour, the type of employment available to them is often in ‘unprotected’ sectors where they have few state-mandated protections of their rights. Lack of access to productive resources such as land, jobs, education, credit and technology ⁴⁵ is another key vulnerability multiplier. In many conflict-affected societies women are systematically excluded from owning or accessing such assets. According to estimates, in conflict-affected societies girls are two and half times more likely than boys to not attend primary school and adolescent girls are 90% more likely not to be attending secondary school compared to boys. ⁴⁶ The resulting lack of human capital renders women dependent upon men and further ‘feminisation of poverty’, leaving girls and women vulnerable to exploitation. ⁴⁷ Gendered barriers to owning or inhering land is of equal importance in conflict-affected societies. Women are not allowed to own or inherit land in some societies, based on the assumption that women are unable to manage land or that such assets will be ‘lost to another family’ when women marry. ⁴⁸ This compounds the lack of autonomy and economic insecurity. Access to another important resource, communications technology, is deeply gendered in conflict contexts. According to estimates, boys are one and a half times more likely to own a phone than girls and women, ⁴⁹ young people and those living in urban areas are more likely to have a mobile phone and access to social media. ⁵⁰ These inequalities not only sustain women’s economic dependency but became particularly pronounced during the Covid-19 pandemic as education, work and politics moved online.

Exploring the impact of the dual crisis of armed conflict and disease pandemic on women through the above framing provides an analytical tool for tracing the effects of the sudden social, political and economic disruption that the coronavirus pandemic and its related policies inflicted on conflict-affected societies. Critically, situating the effects of the dual crisis and attempts to manage the subsequent insecurities in the context of the vulnerability multipliers outlined above can yield a better understanding of the intersections of gender, armed conflict and disease pandemic. The next section explores the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on conflict dynamics and its consequences to women in conflict-settings in the early stages of the pandemic. It outlines the various gendered insecurities- physical, economic, health and political – intensified by the dual crisis of global health and pandemic and conflict. While some of these insecurities also manifest in societies not affected by collective armed conflict, they are multiplied in conflict settings where the ability of governments to address them in gender-sensitive way is often low or non-existent. ⁵¹ The analysis commences with a discussion of changing conflict dynamics and the ensuing changes in physical violence from a gender perspective, followed by economic and health insecurities and political marginalisation.

Physical insecurities

Commentaries on Covid-19 attentive to gender have documented the rise of domestic violence during the Covid-19 pandemic across the globe. Conflict-affected societies represent no exception to this trend. ⁵² The pandemic exacerbated the already high rates of domestic violence in conflict-zones caused by militarisation, the prevalence of hyper-masculinity, mental health problems and substance abuse. In conflict contexts the ‘shadow pandemic’ of domestic violence has been compounded by exposure to or threat of violence in the public sphere. Indeed, whereas some types of violent disorder decreased after the onset of the pandemic, ⁵³ violence against civilians, communal violence and state repression increased globally during the pandemic. ⁵⁴ For example, fighting escalated in Afghanistan, ⁵⁵ Yemen ⁵⁶ and the DRC ⁵⁷ in 2020. In Western Africa violent acts perpetrated by militias were up by 50% from the average monthly number of incidents ⁵⁸ and in Myanmar the military increased attacks on minority groups in Karen, Kachin, Shan and Rakhine states. In April 2020, 32 civilians – most of whom were women and children – were killed in the fighting between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army, Rakhine rebel group. ⁵⁹ In Libya, armed groups shelled residential areas where civilians were in Covid-lockdown and shelled hospitals treating Covid-19 patients. ⁶⁰ While increasing levels of collective violence generally results in more men and boys killed in fighting, it also results in further displacement of women, forced to flee to camps where they are vulnerable to sexual abuse and unhygienic conditions. The Global Protection Cluster observed a rise in sex and gender-based violence in 90% of humanitarian contexts where it operated in 2020. ⁶¹ Increase in physical insecurity was highly uneven, however. Socio-economic status, age, geographical location, community ties, among other factors, shaped the physical insecurities women, girls, men and boys.

Militarisation of government responses to the pandemic further compounded the physical insecurity. Not only did the framing of the pandemic as a war run the risk of legitimising deaths from the virus as ‘heroic sacrifices’ ⁶² and reinforcing hypermasculinity, but such measures went hand in hand with the deployment of security forces to monitor lockdowns and curfews. Police used fatal violence in enforcing coronavirus measures in Nepal, Mali, Colombia, Burundi, Kenya, Central African Republic, Uganda and Nigeria. ⁶³ People with non-binary identities and the LGBTQ+ communities were particularly vulnerable to abuse of power by security forces. The police in Uganda, for example, raided an LGBT shelter and made arrests on the grounds of failure to adhere to social distancing rules. ⁶⁴

At the same time, armed non-state groups violently enforced Covid-19 prevention measures. In Colombia, the National Liberation Army reportedly killed and abused civilians violating such measures. ⁶⁵ Excessive use of force had particular implications to the most marginalised in the society. In South Sudan, for example, security forces assaulted IDPs seeking to leave their camp to obtain food and other basic supplies. ⁶⁶ Civil society groups in Mozambique and east Africa were reporting sexual and gender-based violence by security forces enforcing Covid-19 prevention measures. ⁶⁷

The gendered implications of the increasing violence were far-reaching. Attacks on hospitals and schools, in Mozambique, ⁶⁸ Libya and Afghanistan, directly placed women, as the majority of health care providers and teachers, in the ‘front line’ of the conflict. The effects of violence were uneven and shaped by intersecting inequalities; in Colombia, for example, violent attacks on Afro-Colombians and Indigenous populations increased sharply in the early stages of the pandemic. ⁶⁹ As noted earlier, increase in conflict results in further displacement ⁷⁰ which is deeply gendered. In Myanmar, for example, 77% of internally displaced populations (IDPs) are women and children. ⁷¹ According to estimates, more than three out of four displaced people in conflict zones lost incomes due to the pandemic. ⁷² At the same time, lack of personal identification documents hindered IDPs access to health care in Libya, Iraq and Myanmar ⁷³ and the delivery of humanitarian aid to camps was severely restricted by the pandemic-related travel restrictions. Furthermore, border closures and tightened migration policies by host states complicated efforts to migrate or seek asylum by those residing in IDP and refugee camps.

The above trends suggest that in many conflict-affected societies, Covid-19 contributed to escalation of armed violence by providing new opportunities for use of force. This translated into further displacement and intensification of physical insecurities. ‘Militarisation’ of coronavirus measures further reinforced hypermasculinity and restrictive gender roles and undermined women’s ability to manage the insecurities stemming from the dual crisis.

Economic insecurities

Major societal crises have varied impacts on women’s economic activities. Conflicts, for example, often increase women’s paid employment where men are conscripted to armies or recruited to militias to fight. ⁷⁴ In Libya many women have started small businesses operating from home as a way to support their families. Similarly, prior to the US withdrawal in 2021, in certain areas of Afghanistan many women had jobs outside home or engaged in activities such as selling goods at markets. Although women’s paid employment may not directly translate into greater gender equality, it marks a shift away from traditional gender roles that depict women as homemakers rather than breadwinners. Employment or income generating activities outside the home provide a degree of independence.

Responses to the pandemic, however, severely undermined women’s livelihoods. Many households in conflict areas are led by women and loss of livelihoods, coupled with limited access to resources such as land or credit, posed a major risk of deepening poverty. A survey found that in humanitarian contexts 52% of women reported loss of livelihood due to the pandemic, in comparison to 34% of men. ⁷⁵ Owing to one of the key vulnerability multipliers, the gendered division of labour, the pandemic hit jobs dominated by women particularly hard. Women are overrepresented in insecure and informal jobs that have few social protections. ⁷⁶ In Myanmar, an estimated 90% of women who work outside the home are employed in informal jobs, such as street vendors, farm workers and sex workers. ⁷⁷ There were reports that Myanmar garment factories, where the vast majority of employees are migrant women and girls, used the pandemic as a pretext for dismissing employees belonging to unions. ⁷⁸ At the same time, many jobs and income generating activities dominated by women offer no opportunities to save money as families rely on the daily wage. While women’s lack of access to resources further intensified their vulnerability to the economic disruption caused by the pandemic, remittances from overseas were down by 20% by some estimates in 2020. ⁷⁹ Although these dynamics are not unique to conflict-affected societies, armed conflicts limit the state’s capacity to respond to the economic shock in a gender-sensitive way. ⁸⁰

As elsewhere in the world, women in conflict contexts took on additional care duties at home in line with the gendered division of labour, limiting their ability to earn an income outside the home. For some, stay-at-home orders or disruption to public transport (in Syria and Libya, for example) due to the pandemic translated into a significant loss of income. In many cases men were subject to the same Covid-19 travel restrictions but were reportedly more able to flout such restrictions. In Iraq, for example, men defied travel restrictions by using backroads, an option not available to many women due to personal safety concerns. ⁸¹ Similar trends were evident in Palestine where a survey found that 91% of women indicated that mobility restrictions, since the onset of the pandemic, ‘prevented access to goods and resources’ while 57% of men found movement restrictions rendering goods and sources inaccessible. ⁸²

To summarise, armed violence, compounded with Covid-lockdowns, had disastrous effects on livelihoods as people were unable to leave their houses to earn an income. This affected women in particular as conflict zones are characterised by significant number of female-led households whose vulnerability is multiplied by lack of access to credit. Importantly, economic insecurities are linked to women’s physical insecurity in conflict-zones as loss of livelihoods leaves women susceptible to sexual exploitation. For example, women who are dependent upon humanitarian aid may face demands for sexual favours in return for aid. ⁸³ There are also reports that the diminishing economic opportunities were driving recruitment into non-state armed groups. Anecdotal evidence suggests that men and boys were enlisting into armed groups as a coping mechanism in Syria, Colombia, Yemen and Burkina Faso. ⁸⁴ Other coping strategies, namely child marriage and child labour, were also on the increase in 2020. ⁸⁵ Marrying girls off at a young age is seen as a way to protect girls from sexual violence, while simultaneously reducing household consumption. At the same time, child labour around the world increased in 2020 for the first time since 2000. In Myanmar and Syria, boys reportedly dropped out of school in order to engage in casual labour to boost family incomes. ⁸⁶

Health insecurity

While the multifaceted impacts of disease pandemics on the gendered health needs are well-documented, ⁸⁷ those living in conflict zones face additional obstacles. Health sectors are destroyed by the fighting, overstretched beyond their capacities or harnessed for strategic purposes. Moreover, in some cases, health officials in conflict settings are dealing with other disease outbreaks directly related to the conflict, as the cholera epidemic in Yemen and Ebola in the DRC suggest. Services such as maternal, reproductive and post-natal care critical to the wellbeing of women and girls are often severely limited; major disease pandemics reduce further the availability and access to such services as resources are directed to the pandemic at hand.

A related and reoccurring theme in the review of the gendered effects of Covid-19 on conflict dynamics is the exacerbation of food insecurity. For example, prior to the pandemic, 2.4 million Afghans had no secure access to food; Covid-19 lockdowns further exacerbated the problem by restricting the delivery of humanitarian aid, increasing the number of Afghans affected by food insecurity to 3.3 million. ⁸⁸ Similarly, in the Sahel, the number of food insecure people rose by 1 million since the start of the pandemic in early 2020. ⁸⁹ While food prices increased sharply in many conflict-affected societies, ⁹⁰ in Somalia the Covid-19-related spikes in food insecurity were compounded by a locust infestation that destroyed crops. Not only is food insecurity closely linked to physical violence, ⁹¹ it also has distinctly gendered effects. Women and girls in particular are at risk because of the expectation in some cultures that women ‘eat last and least’. ⁹²

The rise in food insecurity in conflict affected societies in 2020 forced many families to turn to coping strategies that exacerbate health insecurities. According to a survey of displaced and conflict-affected populations in 14 countries, 73% of respondents reported having reduced their meal intake during the first wave of the pandemic. ⁹³ Another survey found that in Afghanistan 81% of survey respondents resorted to limiting household food consumption. ⁹⁴ In Iraq, in turn, 74% of respondents indicated reduced food intake as a strategy for coping with the hardship caused by the intersection of conflict and the pandemic response. ⁹⁵ Surveys in Libya, Palestine and Iraq found similar patterns. ⁹⁶ Another way to cope with lack of access to food was enlisting to an armed group, as mentioned previously. In Colombia, civil society groups reported an increase in the recruitment of child soldiers (majority of whom are boys) by non-state armed groups. ⁹⁷ They note that while some children were forcefully recruited, others joined voluntarily to get access to regular meals. Similar dynamics were evident in Mali and Mozambique. ⁹⁸

Political marginalisation

Compounding the above gendered insecurities was the increasing political marginalisation of women, that can be viewed as ‘violence of exclusion’, ‘indivisible from women’s political, social, cultural and economic disempowerment’. ⁹⁹ Women in conflict-affected societies were significantly under-represented in decision-making structures relating to the coronavirus. Ad hoc committees tasked with developing pandemic strategies were by and large replicating the unequal gender balance in governance structures, evident in the exclusion of women and marginalised communities. In Ukraine, for example, less than 20% of members of committees developing the country’s Covid-19 response in 2020 were women. ¹⁰⁰ Similar patterns are evident in the Middle East. ¹⁰¹ This is despite the fact that the majority of healthcare workers in most conflict zones are women. Even where women were included in the pandemic response, additional care duties at home due to school closures limited women’s ability to participate in decision-making.

Beyond the under-representation of women in formulating coronavirus policies, the pandemic has further increased women’s exclusion from peace processes that, in many cases, continued despite the pandemic. ¹⁰² While women’s mobility is often limited in conflict settings, the coronavirus related restrictions further hindered women’s ability to travel to peace talks. Where peace processes moved to virtual spaces, women’s participation was largely limited to individuals and groups who have access to the internet, reinforcing inequalities among women.

Another trend emerging from the intersection between conflict and pandemic is the shrinking space for civil society. This has significant gendered implications as in most conflict-affected societies, women’s political action is channelled through civil society activism as their access to the formal political structures is limited. While civil society organisations took an active role in disseminating health information and protective gear, governments and other conflict actors used the pandemic as a pretext to limit civil society activism. Civil society groups in Yemen, Nigeria and South Sudan, for example, reported increasing restrictions, justified as a response to the coronavirus. These restrictions limited the right to protest and freedom of speech and enabled detentions of civil society activists on tenuous charges. ¹⁰³ In Colombia, armed groups intensified violent attacks against human rights defenders, many of whom are women from the indigenous or Afro-Colombian communities. ¹⁰⁴ In Iraq, civil society activists were subjected to increasing levels of kidnappings and assassinations in the early stages of the pandemic. ¹⁰⁵

Overlapping insecurities

This initial overview on the effects of the pandemic in conflict zones points towards a set of overlapping and compounding insecurities – physical, economic and political – that have particularly devastating impact on women and girls. The insecurities emerging out of this initial analysis overlap and intersect in multiple ways. An increase in physical insecurity results in further displacement which can, in turn, intensify health insecurity as a consequence of living in a refugee or IDP camp. Increasing physical insecurities tend to also result in further mobility restrictions, reducing access to economic opportunities. The nexus between economic and food insecurity is equally important to understanding the overlapping and intersecting insecurities. As noted previously, food insecurity has particular effects on women and girls due to gendered societal expectations and is likely to be felt most acutely among the most marginalised in the society. While armed violence, disease pandemic and economic disruption drive food insecurity, food shortages often fuel physical violence. At the same time, marginalisation of women from decision-making, as Agnieszka Fal-Dutra Santos and Panthea Pourmalek note, ‘not only aggravates other forms of violence. . .but can be experienced as a distinct form of violence itself’. ¹⁰⁶ All this points to multiple, overlapping insecurities operating simultaneously, leading to ‘layered violence’ whereby the pre-existing violence against women and girls escalates, subjecting them to more intense forms of harm. ¹⁰⁷

It is notable that gender-blind government policies in conflict affected societies exacerbated the above insecurities. For example, in central and southern Asia, only 15% of economic measures addressed the gendered effects of the pandemic. ¹⁰⁸ Other regions of the world reflect similar patterns. In northern Africa, Western Asia and sub-Saharan Africa less than 20% of economic measures were gender sensitive, according to an assessment by the UN Women. ¹⁰⁹ Some conflict-affected countries fared slightly better in addressing the increase in sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). Setting up helplines (such as South Sudan, Nepal, Haiti, Lebanon) and shelters (Afghanistan, Nepal, Colombia) to assist survivors of SGBV represent common government responses. Yet, on the whole, gender-sensitive Covid-19 measures made up a mere ‘a fraction’ of policies, according to the UN Women. ¹¹⁰ These policies exacerbated gendered insecurities. Use of security forces to enforce Covid-19 measures went hand in hand with increasing reports of sexual violence and harassment of civil society groups. ¹¹¹ Lockdowns and travel restrictions without gender-sensitive economic support measures, in turn, significantly reduced economic opportunities for women in conflict settings, many of whom are the breadwinners in their families.

While foregrounding the above insecurities, it is important to be attentive to women’s efforts to negotiate the intersection of armed conflict and disease pandemic. Far from succumbing to essentialised gender roles depicting women as weak and defenceless, individual women and women’s groups across conflict-affected societies engaged in service provision, information campaigns and other activities to support communities. For example, in Afghanistan women’s associations raised funds to re-employ women who lost their jobs due to the pandemic to sew masks. ¹¹² In Yemen, women’s groups provided legal support for girls forced to early marriages, ¹¹³ while in Libya women’s groups raised awareness of the virus and distributed masks. ¹¹⁴ Yet, while women have sought to negotiate the range of insecurities flowing from the dual crisis of conflict and Covid-19, their ability to successfully do so is often undermined by the vulnerability multipliers. Restrictive gender norms have subjected women and girls to malnourishment and limited their access to healthcare, while gendered division of labour rendered women responsible for additional coronavirus-related care duties at home. Lack of access to resources in the face of severe economic disruption have compelled many female-led households to turn to coping strategies that further increase their vulnerability. These coping strategies may offer immediate physical or economic security but have adverse long-term effects on peoples’ security, health and economic prospects.

Conclusion

This paper set out to cast an initial eye on the effects of the collision between armed conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic on women. While most countries are emerging out of Covid-19 related restrictions, the patterns of insecurity documented in this discussion provide insights for responding to future crises, whether pandemics or environmental disasters. The analysis highlights the need to address the vulnerability multipliers that have exposed women and girls to the double crises of conflict and disease pandemic. Short-term measures could include, for example, supporting income generating activities by female-led households through small grants. This may help to reduce economic insecurity and the associated coping strategies such as early marriage and child labour. The focus should be specifically on home-based activities that can be undertaken during lockdowns. Another measure could be to provide increased support for women’s groups who have access to, and provide services to, the most vulnerable populations in conflict-affected societies.

As noted in the introduction, this analysis marks the beginning rather than the end of the inquiry. There are a number of important issues that merit further research. For example, it has been shown that responses to disease pandemics result in worse public health outcomes as resources are redirected away from the treatment of other health conditions. ¹¹⁵ What were the broader health impacts of Covid-19 in conflict affected societies and how did they intersect with gender, class, race and sexuality? How were LGBTQ+ communities in conflict settings affected by the pandemic? At the same time, more research is required to document the experience of Covid-19 in areas controlled by non-government armed groups. What were the gendered dynamics of conflict and access to health in contested territories? In what way can external actors, such as the WHO, provide aid and build capacity in areas controlled by non-state groups without undermining the de jure sovereignty of the country’s government? ¹¹⁶ These are but some lines of research that are needed to generate a more refined understanding of the interplay between conflict, pandemics and gender and facilitate the process of ‘building back better’.