My mother, Judy El-Bushra, who has died aged 73, was a bright star in the world of feminism, action research and development in east and central Africa and the Horn of Africa. Her long and varied work in gender and conflict studies has helped underpin peacebuilding in those regions. She worked on issues including community-based HIV/Aids response, micro-finance and pastoralism.
Her approach was to challenge assumptions such as “women are peace-loving” and “men are violent”, and recognise that women and men, girls and boys live with gender identities which are relational, and which are all subject to, and agents of, power relations. She firmly believed that violent conflict is anchored in an ordered, gendered structure, and that gender analysis expands our understanding of women and men, leading to improved conditions for all.
Judy was the eldest of four children of Katharine (nee Harris), a teacher, and the ceramicist David Ballantyne, who was a committed pacifist and conscientious objector during the second world war. As a teenager in rural Hampshire, Judy was chair of her youth CND unit and she went to study at Soas in London, just as the prosperity and optimism of the 60s was getting into full swing.
Her course in African studies took her in 1964 to Nigeria, to the courts of the emirs of Katsina and Kazaure and to Kano City. There she and her colleagues carried out the first survey of people with leprosy, when Kano was still a medieval, mud-walled citadel. While at Soas she had met a Sudanese student, Ahmed El-Bushra, who was studying for a master’s in Egyptology at University College London. At the age of 20, she travelled alone across West Africa to Sudan, to marry him.
Judy held positions as gender adviser with international development agencies including Acord (1982-2002), Oxfam (1988-92), Comic Relief (1990-98), DfID (2002-11), Unesco/Unicef (2006-11), the LSE (2011-13) and International Alert (2006-11).
She was the author and editor of numerous articles and books, including, with a co-editor Judith Gardner, Somalia: The Untold Story (2004). Her paper Why Does Armed Conflict Recur and What Has Gender Got to Do With It? was recently published by the LSE. She was planning to return for a second year as visiting professor to the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris.
Judy is survived by Ahmed, their children, Sarrah, Moy, Suhayla and me, and grandchildren, Jamal, Alya, Malik, Zaki and Molly.
