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Meet Erik Melander: Exploring The Feminist Gap And Stripping War Of Its Glory
Erik Melander is a professor within the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. He has spent his career researching the construction and relation between gender, politics, and violence.
You never forget your first interview, and I was delighted to do mine with Erik. As I had attended his lectures during my student days at Uppsala, I was familiar with his position on the destructive role masculinity can play within society and how it might pose a critical obstacle to achieving sustainable peace — and I was looking forward to delving deeper.
We had planned to discuss his recent paper, which examined the relationship between gender equality and peaceful attitudes. It compared China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and the USA, and argued why collective feminist values might have a core role in securing lasting peace.
Erik greeted me warmly from his cosy Swedish office. And we immediately begin differentiating between the gender gap and the feminist gap, and their separate roles regarding long-lasting peace.
“There is a tendency, if you ask men and women about their views on foreign policy, defence spending and various other views on violence and militarism; then you usually find that women tend to have more peaceful…
