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About Dr. Priscyll Anctil Avoine

Priscyll Anctil Avoine is a researcher in Feminist Security Studies and an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of War Studies at the Swedish Defence University (Sweden). Previously, she was a Vinnova/Marie Curie/SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Lund University’s Department of Political Science (Sweden), and she completed her Ph.D. with excellence at the Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada, 2022) in Political Science and Feminist Studies. Her work focuses on women’s political militancy in leftist insurgencies and post-war settings, which has been published in journals such as Security Dialogue, Journal of Gender Studies, Conflict, Security & Development, among others.

Priscyll is also actively involved in the activities of the Fundación Lüvo collective (Colombia, Canada), which is committed to the formulation of feminist and anti-racist projects and the publication of the Revista Lüvo. She has more than 10 years of experience in research and gender consultancy with NGOs, civil society organizations, universities, and feminist and women’s collectives.

Dissertation: “Between Two Worlds: Body, Emotions, And Militancy in the Reincorporation of Farianas in Northeastern Colombia” Université du Québec à Montréal”

Dr. Priscyll Anctil Avoine’s exceptional dissertation examines former women combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) and their experiences of reincorporation into civilian life through a Feminist Security Studies theoretical framework that analyzes the place of the body in armed conflict as well as the role of women in insurgent groups and post-peace agreement scenarios. Dr. Anctil Avoine’s dissertation is impressive in its ambition and scope. It engages thoroughly with the feminist literature in peace and conflict studies to examine the disarmament of "farianas" (former female FARC combatants) after the signing of the peace accords in Colombia.

Employing a feminist methodological approach including several novel data collection techniques, the author shows the various ways in which the reincorporation into civilian society occurs through embodied and emotional ruptures. As such, the thesis makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature. It brings a feminist perspective to the study of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) processes and it points to possible theoretical and empirical paths for an embodied-affective and militant approach to study reincorporation.