Roads, Transportation, Mobility & Gender

The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights created this bibliography to provide a guide to the landscape of gendered research on roads, transportation, and mobility. Our goal is to bring together sources useful in thinking about how to rebuild physical infrastructure in postwar countries in ways that will contribute to gender-just sustainable peace. Because the literature explicitly linking gender analysis of roads, transportation, and mobility with postwar settings is still quite sparse, this bibliography casts a wider net.

The sources we have chosen explore issues we think are important to address as part of postwar reconstruction, even though the authors are frequently not focused on postwar contexts at all. Thus, the research herein addresses issues related to: difficulties that women and children face when they live in communities that are inaccessible by main roads and highways; the ways that transportation infrastructure projects are affected by the inclusion or exclusion of gender considerations; and the impacts of policy, culture, and safety on women’s mobility.

Although Consortium bibliographies are primarily focused on academic research, in this case we have decided to include sections for non-academic resources, including newspaper articles, blog posts, and reports from non-governmental and human rights organizations. Thus, the bibliography is divided into three core topics—roads, transportation, and mobility—and within each, there are separate sections for academic and non-academic sources.

This bibliography was created by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, as part of our Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet (FRSPP) project. The FRSPP focuses on the transnational economic actors and processes that tend to deepen the inequalities that underlie armed conflicts and to undermine the prospects for peace that is both politically and environmentally sustainable. Its goal is to provide: forward-looking expert knowledge of those processes; analyses of their impacts on gender relations and other structural inequalities underlying armed conflicts; and recommendations for how to engage and modify those processes to be more supportive of the societal transformations critical to building gender-equitable, sustainable peace. Topics addressed in the FRSPP include, inter alia: the economic recovery policy prescriptions of international financial institutions; extractive industries and natural resource policy; land rights, large scale land acquisition and land grabbing; infrastructure reconstruction; and climate disruption.