Helena Ratte

My planned dissertation explores the paradoxes and frictions of a transnational movement for women’s rights in and after conflict through an ethnographic study of NGO in and beyond Southeast Europe. Conscripts of a global movement for women’s rights in and after conflict, Bosnian and Serbian activists find space to maneuver in this movement’s interstices, engaging archives of Yugoslav feminist internationalism and nonalignment imaginatively and practically in their work. I examine how WPS organizes channels of cooperation and exchange between ex-Yugoslav feminists and activists in other “conflict-affected” countries worldwide in relation to forms of solidarity that predate them. Tracing evolving conversations between global partners, I ask: how does contemporary transnational movement building structured in a liberal humanitarian idiom serve as a site of encounters that resonate historically—an umbrella under which individuals find cover to pursue a variety of political projects? How does the construal of likeness serve as actionable grounds for transnational solidarity? When and to what strategic ends do activists engage in a politics of anachronism? Finally, how do projects of international movement-building reposition polities and people in a shifting 21st-century global political geography?