ABSTRACT
This chapter pays tribute to the extensive body of scholarship created over more than three decades by Ragnhild Lund. The gender-and-development literature, pioneered by scholars such as Lund (1993), has been transformed in places such as Sri Lanka, where it helps to account for the context of conflict that has characterized much of the last three decades. Lund’s own published research traces this trajectory, first in the context of macrodevelopment in the Mahaweli Dam and Maduru Oya Projects (Lund 1979, 2000), and more recently in the light of the ongoing conflict and the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami (Brun and Lund 2008, Blaikie and Lund 2010). In arguing for an explicitly feminist approach to complex humanitarian crises, I am not saying anything entirely new. In many ways, Lund’s work foreshadowed this argument. In 1988, she presented a feminist study of women in the Mahaweli area at the Centre for Women’s Research (CENWOR) Women’s Convention in Colombo. 1 At that time, feminist analysis had not yet come to replace ‘women’ or even a singular gender analysis. Such an assessment was a radical contribution to gender and development.
