Rania Harrara (she/her) is an undergraduate student at Georgetown University in Qatar majoring in International Politics, whose work focuses on advancing gender justice, legal accountability, and human rights in contexts of conflict, occupation, and colonialism. She is dedicated to creating survivor-centered, trauma-informed, and intersectional programs and campaigns. As co-founder of Climate Sirens SWANA, she develops initiatives empowering women affected by war and environmental crises, and through Young SWANA Feminists, she amplifies the political leadership and advocacy of young women across the region. Rania’s research spans Kosovo, Haiti, and refugee rights in the SWANA region, critically examining wartime sexual violence, reparations, and systemic injustice. Her work combines rigorous scholarship with activist strategies, seeking to translate research into transformative, justice-driven action.
Sexual Violence as Settler-Colonial Governance: Feminist Legal Limits and Decolonial Pathways to Justice
This research investigates how sexual violence operates not as an aberration of war but as a structural mechanism of settler-colonial governance in Palestine. Building upon my honors thesis, the project argues that Israel’s occupation deploys sexual violence as a form of necropolitics—where state power dictates the terms of life and death—sustaining colonial domination through gendered control. While international law increasingly recognizes sexual violence as a crime against humanity, it remains ill-equipped to address its structural role in colonial contexts. Liberal feminist frameworks, by individualizing harm and seeking carceral justice, often depoliticize sexual violence and obscure the systems that enable it. This project instead adopts a decolonial feminist methodology that centers Palestinian testimonies, feminist legal critique, and archival materials to reframe sexual violence as a tool of governance. Through analysis of documentation from Palestinian human rights organizations, UN reports, and feminist scholarship, I seek to expose how gendered violence functions as an ongoing form of occupation. Comparative insights from Indigenous struggles in North America further reveal how sexual violence sustains settler sovereignty across contexts. The project contributes to broader debates in feminist legal theory by challenging the limits of international criminal law and foregrounding resistance frameworks rooted in decolonization. It envisions justice not through punishment but through the dismantling of colonial structures that normalize and sustain sexual domination.