Our Team
Dr. Ewa K. Strzelecka
Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Principal Investigator for the Peace Women Project. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Social Science from the University of Granada (Spain). Her main research interests focus on women's movements, human rights, revolutions, transnational politics, and the complexity of social and political change in the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Women in the Arab Spring: the Construction of a Political Culture of Feminist Resistance in Yemen (Mujeres en la Primavera Árabe: construcción de una cultura política de resistencia feminista en Yemen, CSIC, 2017).
Dr. Marina de Regt
Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She holds a PhD degree in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests focus on gender and migration in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, and she is very passionate about feminist methodologies and collaborative research. She is the author of Pioneers or Pawns? Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen (Syracuse University Press, 2007) and co-author of Adolescent Girls Migration in the Global South: Transitions into Adulthood (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
Dr. Marie-Christine Heinze
President of CARPO- Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient. She holds a master in Near and Middle Eastern Studies, Political Science, and International and European Law from the University of Bonn and a master in Peace and Security Studies from the University of Hamburg. Her PhD thesis on material culture and socio-political change focusing on the dagger (janbiya) in Yemen in the field of social anthropology at the University of Bielefeld was completed with summa cum laude in 2015. Since 2008, she has also regularly worked as a consultant on development, peacebuilding and political change in Yemen. She is the editor of Yemen and the Search for Stability: Power, Politics and Society After the Arab Spring (I.B. Tauris, 2018).
Interns and collaborators
Aletta Koopmans
MA student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, VU Amsterdam. She is named after the most influential feminist of The Netherlands: Aletta Jacobs. Aiming to follow in her footsteps, Aletta's goal is to increase the rights, opportunities, and freedoms of women and girls all around the world.
Her Bachelor and Master's degree in Political Science from UVA taught her more on the institutional structures and power dynamics of the current day society. Her master in Social and Cultural Anthropology teaches her the mobility of ideas and people, and how cultures are manifested within our rapidly globalising world. Her work within the Peace Women Project focuses on exploring the position of Yemeni female activists’ effort to increase representation.
Pia Kristine Raahauge Beiermann
Former research assistant to Peace Women Project. Devoted student of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has previously studied Philosophy and Spanish at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and her academic interests lay in feminist research, motherhood, art, spirituality, and religion.
Yemeni collaborators
This research project would not be possible without Yemeni participants, collaborators and translators.
Names cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality and privacy, but we want to thank you all for your collaboration and support.