Conflict, Control, and Care: Reproductive Rights and Humanitarian Aid in War

This thesis investigates the systematic neglect of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in conflict-related humanitarian responses. Rather than approaching this neglect as a logistical failure, it argues that SRHR exclusion is a structural feature of humanitarian governance shaped by patriarchal, racialised, and (neo)colonial hierarchies. Through a comparative case study of Ukraine and Palestine, with Sudan as a shadow case, the research explores how aid systems govern reproductive life – through care, neglect, and active obstruction - according to biopolitical and necropolitical logics. The theoretical framework integrates four concepts: biopolitics, necropolitics, intersectionality, and decolonial feminism. This layered approach enables a critical reading of how reproductive life and death are managed across geopolitical contexts. The thesis employs qualitative document analysis to trace how SRHR is framed, funded, and operationalised across the three cases. Ukraine...Show moreThis thesis investigates the systematic neglect of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) in conflict-related humanitarian responses. Rather than approaching this neglect as a logistical failure, it argues that SRHR exclusion is a structural feature of humanitarian governance shaped by patriarchal, racialised, and (neo)colonial hierarchies. Through a comparative case study of Ukraine and Palestine, with Sudan as a shadow case, the research explores how aid systems govern reproductive life – through care, neglect, and active obstruction - according to biopolitical and necropolitical logics. The theoretical framework integrates four concepts: biopolitics, necropolitics, intersectionality, and decolonial feminism. This layered approach enables a critical reading of how reproductive life and death are managed across geopolitical contexts. The thesis employs qualitative document analysis to trace how SRHR is framed, funded, and operationalised across the three cases. Ukraine illustrates how reproductive care is deprioritised even in well-funded, politically backed settings. Palestine reveals necropolitical abandonment, where SRHR is actively obstructed through settler-colonial control and infrastructural targeting. Sudan underscores that such patterns persist in contexts of extreme invisibility, especially where racial and geopolitical hierarchies converge. Across cases, the thesis shows that SRHR neglect is not an exception of war, but a consequence of how humanitarian aid is structured. Addressing this injustice requires more than improved programming; it demands a fundamental rethinking of which lives are considered worthy of saving, and which are allowed to be forgotten in crisis.Show less

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Conflict, Control, and Care: Reproductive Rights and Humanitarian Aid in War