Beyond a survivor-centred approach' to conflict-related sexual violence?

In Resolution 2467 (2019), the most recent addition to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, the UN Security Council embraced the idea of a 'survivor-centred approach' to preventing and responding to conflict-related sexual violence. While this terminology is now widely used in international policy circles, the general lack of critical reflection on the concept of survivor-centrism is striking. Addressing this gap, this interdisciplinary article seeks to demonstrate that a survivor-centred approach, by itself, is too narrow. It utilizes the ecological concept of connectivity-which refers to connections that enable and facilitate vital ecological processes-and repurposes it in a social science context to develop the article's core argument: that survivor-centred discourse marginalizes, or neglects, the fundamental webs of connectivity in which the everyday lives of those who have suffered conflict-related sexual violence are intricately interwoven. The article draws on qualitative interviews with victims/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda to empirically develop two particular 'connectivity critiques' of survivorcentred discourse, focused on resources and health respectively. Ultimately, it is not advocating the abandonment of a survivor-centred approach, but, rather, a social-ecological reframing of it. It presents connectivity as a new conceptual approach for thinking about and dealing with conflict-related sexual violence.