Dr Georgina Holmes is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies. Previously, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the University of Reading. She is a founder and co-chair of the BISA Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group and serves as an editor for Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal.

She is an academic advisor to the British Army on the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda and pre-deployment training and regularly engages with policymakers and practitioners on projects related to gender and peacekeeping. She holds an BA and MA in interdisciplinary gender studies from the University of Warwick and a PhD in International Relations from SOAS.

Dr Holmes was recently awarded runner up of the University of Reading’s Early Career Research Impact Prize 2021 for her journal article ‘Situating agency, embodied practices and norm implementation in peacekeeping training’, published in International Peacekeeping. Her previous career in strategic and organisational change communications, including five years in the British government, informs her theoretical work.

 

Research interests

• Gender and global security governance
• Peacekeeping
• Gender and the military
• Norms and practices
• Foreign policy analysis
• Qualitative methodologies and feminist organisational ethnography

Dr Holmes’s research focuses on gender and global security governance, peacekeeping and security sector reform. She is Principal Investigator for a five-year comparative research project funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust which investigates how small and middle powers train and deploy female and male tactical-level peacekeepers to facilitate gender responsive peacekeeping, and has conducted in-depth fieldwork with Ghana Armed Forces, the Rwanda Defence Force and the British Army.

Theoretically, the project advances understandings of how the UN’s equality, diversity and violence prevention norms are implemented as institutional practices at the national level in peacekeeping, taking account of intersecting logics of power and emphasising the agency of marginalised institutional actors. A second research interest concerns how states (UK, France and Rwanda) address gender and global security governance issues in their foreign policy and international political communications practices to build legitimacy and manage reputational crises.

 

Latest Publications

Book

• Georgina Holmes. Women and War in Rwanda: Gender, Media and the Representation of Genocide (I.B. Tauris, 2013; paperback 2020)

Journal articles

• Georgina Holmes, ‘Strengthening the UK’s support for gender responsive, people-centred peacekeeping in Africa’, The RUSI Journal (2020).
• Georgina Holmes. ‘Situating agency, embodied practices and norm implementation in peacekeeping training’, International Peacekeeping, 26:1 (2019), pp. 55-84.
• David Duriesmith and Georgina Holmes. ‘The masculine Logic of DDR an SSR in Rwanda’, Security Dialogue, 50:4, August (2019), 361-379.
• Georgina Holmes, Katharine A.M. Wright, Soumita Basu, Matthew Hurley, Maria Martin de Almagro, Christine Cheng. ‘Feminist experiences of ‘studying up’: encounters with international institutions’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies. 47:2 (2018), 210-230.
• Georgina Holmes. ‘Teaching the United Nations, Gender, and Critical Pedagogy’, Peace Review, 30:3 (2018), 285-294.
• Georgina Holmes. ‘Gendering the Rwanda Defence Force: A Critical Assessment’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8:4, (December, 2014): 1–13.

Book chapters

• Georgina Holmes. ‘Feminist Institutionalism’ in United Nations Peace Operations and International Relations Theory, ed. by Kseniya Oksamytna and John Karlsrud, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
• Georgina Holmes and Ilaria Buscaglia. ‘Rebranding Rwanda’s peacekeeping identity during post-conflict transition’, Rwanda After 1994: Stories of Change, edited by Hannah Grayson and Nicki Hitchcott, (Liverpool University Press, 2019).
• Georgina Holmes. ‘Gender and the Military in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, in Women and Genocide: Victims, Perpetrators, Survivors, edited by Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

Reports

• David Curran; Georgina Holmes and Philip Cunliffe. ‘Peacekeeping after Brexit’, RUSI conference report, 2018.