Dr. Sandra Iman Pertek is a ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is a gender and social development specialist with over a decade’s experience in humanitarian, development, and migration settings. Her research integrates intersectional and ecological approaches for developing religious engagement with the continuum of violence in forced migration. In this conversation, we discuss her recent policy brief on the relevance of religion as both a potential factor of vulnerability and a source of resilience in settings of conflict. For additional resources see: Pertek, S., Block, K., Goodson, L., Hassan, P., Hourani, J. and Phillimore, J. (2023) Gender-based violence, religion and forced displacement: protective and risk factors. Frontiers in Human Dynamics (5):1058822. Pertek, S.I. (2022) God Helped Us: Resilience, Religion and Experiences of Gender-Based Violence and Trafficking among African Forced Migrant Women. Social Sciences. 11 (5): 201. doi:10.3390/socsci11050201 Shah, Rebecca, Timothy Shah, Nathan Berkeley, Jeremy Barker, and Samuel Basden. “Guidance Note: Protecting Vulnerable Religious Minorities in Conflict and Crisis Settings.” Religious Freedom Institute, 2020. Sabates-Wheeler, R., & Barker, J. P. (2024). The place of religious inequalities within international development and humanitarian response frameworks: Lessons from Iraq. World Development, 173(106417), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106417 The Middle East File podcast is a publication of the Religious Freedom Institute's Middle East Action Team.
