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Dr Georgina Holmes

Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies
  • Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
  • School of Social Sciences & Global Studies
  • Politics
  • georgina.holmes

Professional biography

Dr Georgina Holmes is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies and joined the Department in September 2022. She also lectures in Politics at Imperial College London and is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She has previously lectured at the University of Reading, University of Portsmouth, Royal Holloway, London, SOAS and the National University of Rwanda. Dr Holmes’s research focuses on gender and global security governance, peacekeeping and security sector reform; organisational change processes in international organisations and political communication.  She holds a BA and MA in interdisciplinary gender studies from the University of Warwick and a PhD in International Relations from SOAS. Her previous career in strategic and organisational change communications, including five years in the British government, informs her theoretical work.

Research interests

Georgina is currently writing up the research findings from a five-year comparative research project funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust (2016-2021) which investigates how small and middle powers train and deploy female and male tactical-level peacekeepers to facilitate gender responsive peacekeeping. She has conducted extensive in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with Ghana Armed Forces, the Rwanda Defence Force and the British Army. Theoretically, Georgina’s research advances understandings of how the UN’s equality, diversity and violence prevention norms are implemented as institutional practices at the national level in peacekeeping, taking account of intersecting logics of power and emphasising the agency of marginalised institutional actors. As part of this project, she was awarded runner up of the University of Reading’s Early Career Research Impact Prize 2021 for her journal article ‘Situating agency, embodied practices and norm implementation in peacekeeping training’, published in International Peacekeeping.

A second research project investigates how organisational change processes take effect in international bureaucracies. She is Principal Investigator for a project supported by UN Women which examines men and women’s experiences of working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), working in collaboration with NGO sector consultant and leadership coach, Sarah Newnham. A third research interest concerns how states (UK, France and Rwanda) address gender and global security governance issues in their foreign policy and international political communications practices to build legitimacy and manage reputational crises.

Teaching interests

  • Module Co-Chair, DD 313: International relations: continuity and change in global politics
  • Module Team Member, D818 (currently in production)
  • Module Team Member, D828, MA International Relations (currently in production)

Phd supervision

Georgina is happy to supervise PhDs on any topic related to: Feminist International Relations; Gender, security and global governance; peacekeeping; Critical military studies; Political communication and the Media; International organisations and IO bureaucracies. 

Impact and engagement

Georgina is a Trustee and Executive team member of the British International Studies Association (2021-2024) and conference programme chair for BISA’s annual international conference in 2022 and 2023. She is a founding member and former co-chair of the BISA Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group and served as an editor for Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal between 2020 and 2022. She is an academic advisor to the British Army on the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda and pre-deployment training and regularly engages with policymakers and practitioners on projects related to gender and peacekeeping.

Publications

Digital peacekeeping, cyborg soldiers and militarised masculinities: a posthuman critique (2024)
Holmes, Georgina
Peacebuilding, 12(4) (pp. 483-501)

Business continuity, bureaucratic resilience and the limitations of neoliberal survival logics in international organisations (2024)
Holmes, Georgina and Newnham, Sarah
Review of International Studies ((Early access))

Nation branding and feminist diplomacy after crisis: France’s response to SEA allegations in Central African Republic (2023)
Holmes, Georgina and White, Sabrina
European Journal of International Studies, 9(2) (pp. 281-298)

Strengthening UK support for gender responsive, people-centred peacekeeping in Africa (2020)
Holmes, Georgina
RUSI Journal, 165(5-6) (pp. 36-45)

Situating Agency, Embodied Practices and Norm Implementation in Peacekeeping Training (2019-01)
Holmes, Georgina
International Peacekeeping, 26(1) (pp. 55-84)

Feminist experiences of 'studying up': encounters with international institutions (2019)
Holmes, Georgina; Wright, Katharine A. M.; Basu, Soumita; Hurley, Matthew; de Almagro, Maria Martin; Guerrina, Roberta and Cheng, Christine
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47(2) (pp. 210-230)

The masculine logic of DDR and SSR in the Rwanda Defence Force (2019)
Duriesmith, David and Holmes, Georgina
Security Dialogue, 50(4) (pp. 361-379)

Teaching the United Nations, gender and critical pedagogy (2018)
Holmes, Georgina
Peace Review, 30(3) (pp. 285-294)

[Book Review] Handbook on Gender and War, edited by Simona Sharoni, Julia Welland, Linda Steiner, and Jennifer Pedersen (2018)
Holmes, Georgina
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20(3) (pp. 466-468)

The Commonwealth, gender and peacekeeping (2017)
Holmes, Georgina
The Roundtable: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, 106(4) (pp. 403-419)

Gendering the Rwanda Defence Force: A Critical Assessment (2014)
Holmes, Georgina
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 8(4) (pp. 321-333)

‘Living on Gold Should be a Blessing; Instead it is a Curse’. Mass Rape and Genocide by Attrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2012)
Holmes, Georgina
The RUSI Journal, 157(6) (pp. 62-66)

Did Newsnight Miss the Story? A Survey of How the BBC's “Flagship Political Current Affairs Program” Reported Genocide and War in Rwanda between April and July 1994 (2011-08)
Holmes, Georgina
Genocide Studies and Prevention, 6(2) (pp. 174-192)

Rwanda and the Commonwealth: The Evolution of the BBC's Institutional Narrative on the 1994 Rwandan Genocide (2011)
Holmes, Georgina
The Round Table, 100(416) (pp. 519-530)

The Postcolonial Politics of Militarizing Rwandan Women: An Analysis of the Extremist Magazine Kangura and the Gendering of a Genocidal Nation-state (2008-09)
Holmes, Georgina
Minerva Journal of Women and War, 2(2) (pp. 44-63)

Women and War in Rwanda: Gender, Media and the Representation of Genocide (2013-10-25)
Holmes, Georgina
ISBN : 9780857734617 | Publisher : I.B. Taurus, Bloomsbury Publishing

Feminist approaches (2023)
Holmes, Georgina
In: Badache, Fanny; Kimber, Leah R. and Maertens, Lucile eds. International Organizations and Research Methods: An Introduction (pp. 333-340)
ISBN : 9780472076222 | Publisher : University of Michigan Press

The Future Trajectory of UN Peace Operations (2023)
Gilder, Alex; Curran, David; Holmes, Georgina and Edu-Afful, Fiifi
In: Gilder, Alex; Curran, David; Holmes, Georgina and Edu-Afful, Fiifi eds. Multidisciplinary Futures of UN Peace Operations. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies (pp. 1-17)
ISBN : 978-3-031-38595-7 | Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan | Published : London

Feminist institutionalism (2020-08)
Holmes, G.
In: Oksamytna, K. and Karlsrud, J. eds. United Nations Peace Operations and International Relations Theory
ISBN : 9781526148872 | Publisher : Manchester University Press | Published : Manchester

Rebranding Rwanda's peacekeeping identity during post-conflict transition (2019-06)
Holmes, G. and Buscaglia, I.
In: Grayson, H. and Hitchcott, N. eds. Rwanda Since 1994: Stories of Change. Francophone Postcolonial Studies (10) (pp. 104-124)
Publisher : Liverpool University Press | Published : Liverpool

Enhancing operational effectiveness? Pre-deployment training for tactical-level Rwandan female military peacekeepers (2019-05-13)
Holmes, Georgina
In: Brown, David; Murray, Donette; Riemann, Malte; Rossi, Norma and Smith, Martin A. eds. War Amongst the People: Critical Assessments. Sandhurst Trends in International Conflict Series
ISBN : 9781912440023 | Publisher : Howgate Publishing | Published : Havant

Gender and the military in post-genocide Rwanda (2018-04)
Holmes, Georgina
In: Bemporad, Elissa and Warren, Joyce W. eds. Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators
ISBN : 9780253032768 | Publisher : Indiana University Press | Published : Bloomington

Negotiating narratives of human rights abuses: image management in conflicts in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (2015-05-01)
Holmes, Georgina
In: Gallagher, Julia ed. Images of Africa: Creation, negotiation and subversion (pp. 144-166)
ISBN : 9780719091469 | Publisher : Manchester University Press

Multidisciplinary Futures of UN Peace Operations (2023)
Gilder, Alexander; Curran, David; Holmes, Georgina and Edu-Afful, Fiifi eds.
Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies (RCS)
ISBN : 9783031385957 | Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

The politics of silence, voice and the in-between: exploring gender, race and insecurity from the margins (2023)
Khalid, Aliya; Holmes, Georgina and Parpart, Jane eds.
ISBN : 9781032394831 | Publisher : Routledge

Peacekeeping after Brexit. RUSI Conference Report, December 2018 (2018-12-12)
Curran, David; Holmes, Georgina and Cunliffe, Philip
Royal United Services Institute