In this article, we nuance the relationships between political agency, victimhood, and gender during armed conflicts. Dominant narratives often spotlight individuals as either passive victims or active agents. These representations are especially pronounced for sexual violence against women in conflict, where gendered conceptions of victimhood and agency remain particularly salient. Recent scholarship challenges this dichotomized way of thinking, showing how victimhood and agency sit alongside each other. We extend this growing body of scholarship by proposing a relational conception of agency that helps us better understand exactly how victimhood and agency intersect and can even be co-constitutive. Specifically, we propose that conceptualizing agency as relational—to others, to contextual structures, to own vulnerabilities and prior victimization—is particularly well suited to overcome inadequate dichotomizations, and to illuminate the spectrum of political agency, ranging from formalized politicized spaces to more mundane forms of agency within the quotidian. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Colombia and Uganda, we empirically tease out these complex intersections in a context of (gendered) vulnerability.

中文翻译：

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武装冲突背景下的政治机构、受害者身份和性别：超越二分法

在本文中，我们对武装冲突期间政治机构、受害性和性别之间的关系进行了细致入微的分析。主导叙事通常将个人作为被动受害者或主动代理人突出显示。这些表述对于冲突中针对妇女的性暴力行为尤其明显，在这种情况下，受害和能动性的性别概念仍然特别突出。最近的学术研究挑战了这种二分法的思维方式，展示了受害者和代理如何并存。我们通过提出代理的关系概念来扩展这一不断增长的学术体系，这有助于我们更好地理解受害者和代理是如何相交的，甚至可以是共同构成的。具体来说，我们建议将代理概念化为与他人、与上下文结构、拥有脆弱性和先前的受害——特别适合克服不充分的二分法，并阐明政治代理的范围，从正式的政治化空间到日常生活中更平凡的代理形式。借鉴哥伦比亚和乌干达的定性实地调查，我们在（性别）脆弱性的背景下凭经验梳理出这些复杂的交叉点。