From Conflict Zones to State Budgets

In many countries across the region, violence does not end with the cessation of conflict or the decline of confrontations; rather, it is reconstituted within economic and social structures that appear neutral yet reproduce harm in quieter and more enduring ways. Debt and austerity are among the most significant mechanisms through which violence shifts from its overt forms into long-term structural violence. These policies, often presented as economic reforms or pathways toward stability, create an environment of institutionalized scarcity in which the distribution of essential resources is reorganized in ways that disproportionately impact women.
The violence produced by debt and austerity is cumulative. It exerts its effects day after day through the erosion of essential services, rising living costs, and the retreat of the state from its social responsibilities. These policies reshape the very boundaries of what life can be, constraining women’s ability to access healthcare, employment, mobility, and economic security. As the state withdraws from the provision of social goods, the burden of care is shifted into the private sphere, where unpaid care work, largely performed by women, expands in scope and intensity. This process places increasing pressure on women’s time, bodies, and capacity to maintain economic and personal autonomy.
When debt servicing outpaces public spending on health, education, and social protection, fiscal policy becomes a mechanism for distributing scarcity unevenly. Under such conditions, access to adequate food diminishes as the gap between prices and income widens, healthcare and mobility become contingent on economic means, and living standards gradually erode with the breakdown of public safety nets and the absence of viable alternatives. These shifts do not merely constitute secondary effects of crisis; they form part of a governance structure that generates layered forms of deprivation, with the heaviest burden falling on women due to their position within the social economy of care.
In post-conflict contexts or in countries experiencing protracted crises, economic violence becomes a continuation of military violence through different means. Even in moments that are framed as “stability,” the economic consequences of conflict, rising inflation, unemployment, and the collapse of public services create conditions of heightened vulnerability that make access to resources, protection, and dignified living far more precarious for women. This transforms violence from a direct assault on the body into a sustained assault on the conditions that make life livable.
Debt and austerity thus reproduce gendered inequalities over time by intensifying the burden of unpaid care, weakening women’s participation in the labor market, exacerbating their economic precarity, and shifting survival from a collective responsibility to an individual one borne almost exclusively by women. It is, in effect, a reconfiguration of life itself, where societies are rebuilt upon fragile structures that place women at the center of bearing the cost and the weight of systemic deterioration.