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Fireside Peace Chats: Peaceful Nation, Violent Homes? with Elizabeth Molloy
6 October @ 17:30 - 19:00
Join us for a dialogue on Household Conflict, Polygamy, and the Limits of Malawi’s Peaceful Reputation.
Peace and conflict studies has traditionally organised itself around conflict between states, ethnic groups, or religions, with the household treated as a separate, private sphere outside its scope (Cockburn, 2004). Malawi is often cited internationally as a model of peaceful democratic transition, particularly after its 2019 election was annulled for fraud and a peaceful rerun brought the opposition to power in 2020, an episode praised by donors and observers as a rare African success story. But can a reputation of peace abroad diametrically obscure or enable violence behind closed doors?
In this edition of Fireside Peace Chats, our guest, Elizabeth Molloy, argues that such a national reputation for peace can mask high rates of violence within the household, shaped by cultural norms, economic systems, family structures, religion, and marriage practices including polygamy. We will examine how cultural and structural factors combine to produce intra-household conflict that a country’s peaceful international image can obscure.
About the Speaker:
Elizabeth Molloy is a gender and development specialist with 20 years of professional experience, 14 of them in the gender sector. She has been director of C12 Consultants, a research, evaluation, and social and environmental consulting firm, for over a decade, and has led gender-based violence research, formative studies on masculinities, and gender analyses of cash transfer and livelihoods programmes across Malawi and sub-Saharan Africa. She brings a gender lens to strategic evaluations for global climate-focused organisations, and has designed gender and social inclusion strategies for major donor-funded programmes. Her research has also fed directly into practice through social safeguards work on renewable energy, infrastructure, and extractives projects across Malawi. She holds an MA in Education, Gender and International Development from UCL.
What are the Fireside Peace Chats?
The Fireside Peace Chats aim to create a space where practice, research, and policy in the field of peacebuilding come together in an informal way through the experiences of people on the ground. By sharing personal stories from peacebuilders and other figures with extensive experience in conflict areas, we want to contribute to a locally informed paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding.
The Fireside Peace Chats originally emerged as a joint initiative of Leiden University College (LUC) This link opens in a new tab, the Knowledge Platform Security and Rule of Law (KPSRL) This link opens in a new tab, and The Hague Humanity Hub (THHH) This link opens in a new tab. Read more about previous editions here. This link opens in a new tab
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