Dr Sabrina White

Profile

I completed my ESRC-funded PhD in 2023 on victim-centred approaches to accountability for sexual exploitation and sexual abuse (SEA) perpetrated by United Nations Peacekeeping troops and related personnel. This research involved a collaborative partnership with the United Nations Association UK (UNA-UK), more specifically on their Mission Justice campaign for peacekeeping abuses.

Thesis abstract: Feminist international relations and legal scholarship tend to view accountability from a legal perspective, but accountability can mean more than liability. Accountability is also a political matter and a power relation. The concept of accountability has received little engagement in the scholarship and there is only nascent research on victim-centred approaches. I bring in the accountability literature from public administration to explore the changes that have emerged in the UN’s approach to accountability following the adoption of the victim-centred approach in 2017. Drawing on the concepts of legitimacy, integrity and transparency and adapting Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice, I conduct frame analysis of 215 documents produced by the UN between 1992 and 2021, interviews and quantitative analysis of the UN’s database of allegations to determine how the accountability has been framed and how relationships with victims have been constituted over time. I find that the victim-centred approach is an emergent aspect of the accountability space on sexual exploitation and sexual abuse. Discursively it suggests a reframing of accountability relationships, but in practice it sustains inequalities and marginalises victims. I argue that the victim-centred approach should constitute relationships with victims in which victims and survivors are subjects of answerability in accountability relationships. These findings make an empirical contribution to understanding the status of integrity systems in field missions. It also makes an analytical contribution to studies on victim-centred approaches by offering a framework for analysing the emergence of these accountability agendas that are increasingly adopted by governance institutions. This research demonstrates that the accountability relationships constituted in these approaches are key to critical engagement with the normative implications of victimcentred approaches to sexual and gender-based violence that are increasingly gaining popularity among international and non-governmental organisations and transitional justice processes.

Selected publications: 

White, S., 2024. Accountability advocates: representing victims. In Westendorf, Jasmine-Kim, Bys, Carolyn, and Dolan-Evans, Elliot, Sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping and aid: critiquing the past, plotting the future.  Bristol: Bristol University Press. [forthcoming in July 2024].

White. S. and Nyambeki, L., 2024.Victims’ rights and remedial action. In Westendorf, Jasmine-Kim, Bys, Carolyn, and Dolan-Evans, Elliot, Sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping and aid: critiquing the past, plotting the future.  Bristol: Bristol University Press. [forthcoming in July 2024].

White, S., 2023. Accountability for sexual exploitation and sexual abuse: rethinking relationships. In Gilder, A., Curran, D., and Holmes, G., eds., Multidisciplinary futures of UN Peace Operations. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 197- 221.

Holmes, G. and White, S., 2023. Nation branding and feminist diplomacy after crisis: France’s response to SEA allegations in Central African Republic. European Journal of International Security, 1-18.

White, S., 2020. Centering gender in conflict: R2P, WPS and the importance of the ‘everyday’. Civil Wars, 22(1), pp.137-153.

Research interests

Feminist theory, peacekeeping, sexual and gender-based violence, anti-corruption, integrity systems, gender justice, defence and security sectors.

To contact me, please email: S.L.White@leeds.ac.uk 

Qualifications

• PhD Politics and International Studies
• MA Social Research, Interdisciplinary