People
Dr. Elizabeth Mesok
Project Leader
Dr. Elizabeth Mesok, the Principal Investigator and project lead, holds a Swiss National Science Foundation PRIMA grant at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel. She runs the Gender, War and Security Research Group, which, in addition to the main SNF project on gender and P/CVE, consists of PhD students working on topics such as the incel movement and far-right extremism as well as women’s political participation in North East Syria. A postdoctoral fellow, Yuliia Mieriemova, has also been a part of our group since 2022, as part of the SNF’s Scholars at Risk program, working on women’s role in the war in Ukraine. More about Dr. Mesok’s research, teaching, and publications can be found here.
Darja Schildknecht
Doctoral Researcher in Political Science
Darja Schildknecht is a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science at the University of Basel and part of the Gender, War and Security Research Group. She also works as Gender Advisor (GENAD) for the Swiss Armed Forces and serves on the board of Women in International Security (WIIS) Switzerland. Her research critically engages with the agenda of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) and its intersection to gender, focusing specifically on the private security industry. In 2014, she graduated from the London School of Economics (LSE) with a Master’s degree in Development Studies and subsequently worked in various fields, including research, peacekeeping and administration. From 2018 to 2020, she was the Deputy Executive Director of the think tank foraus.
As one of two PhD researchers on the “Gendered Security Strategies” research project, Darja focuses on the private security industry. While a lot of attention has been given to the global war on terror and its hard security measures relying heavily on private security contractors, there is a striking lack of research about the intersection of P/CVE and private security. With P/CVE increasingly taking space and resources within the counterterrorism regime, investigating the materialization of soft approaches within the security industry is crucial in understanding security strategies. To address this gap, Darja’s dissertation examines gendered and racialized institutional mechanisms and knowledge structures of the security sector, focusing particularly on the in-between spaces of the public-private binary. Situated within an understanding of a continuum of hard and soft security approaches, the dissertation analyzes the connection of neoliberal market logics to British militarism, by scrutinizing embodied practices of gendered security strategies. For this purpose, the present research investigates Kenya as an in-depth study, examining the private security industry in conversation with the public security sector and investigating the organization of military violence and its relation to the ontologies, practices and performances of security as a meaningful whole.
Nora Naji
Doctoral Researcher in Political Science
Nora Naji is a Doctoral Researcher in Political Science at the University of Basel and a Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University. She holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Geneva and a MA in Culture and Politics from Leiden University in the Netherlands. Prior to joining the Gender, War, and Security Research Group, she was a Junior Project Manager at swissnex San Francisco. She also gained professional experience in the Human and Social Sciences Sector at UNESCO in Paris and at a human rights organization in Amman, Jordan. Her research interests include peacebuilding, human rights, gendered security strategies, urban conflict, humanitarian innovation, and design. She is committed to the advancement of racial, environmental, and social justice.
Building on the securitization premise, Nora’s research discusses the political economy of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) and its impact on local peacebuilding, humanitarian, and human rights CSOs in Kenya. She investigates the structural changes in the aid industry and programmatic consequences for aid recipients as a result of P/CVE. On a structural level, encouraged through a donor market that favors security-relevant programming in an age of funding scarcity, P/CVE leads not only to a securitization and technocratization, but to a commodification of peace. On a programmatic level, the dissertation discusses P/CVE as a form of “intimate warfare” in the service of the neoliberal security state. She is interested in the politics of care that lie at the center of P/CVE approaches, investigating how discourses of collective care and self-care shape P/CVE programs on the local level, thereby generating resilient and docile citizens in the name of prevention. P/CVE is therefore a biopolitical tool to govern “ungovernable” spaces at the margins where the welfare state is absent. The research investigates how P/CVE has depoliticized social justice demands and structural government neglect throughout different spaces. Finally, Nora’s dissertation discusses local agency and resistance against the securitization of peacebuilding, and strategic negotiation of national and international security agendas within the civil society space in Kenya.