Cristal Downing

As Director of the Gender and Conflict Project, Cristal Downing leads the International Crisis Group’s work in analysing how conflict impacts people of different genders and their diverse roles in preventing and responding to conflict.

Previously, Cristal worked at the UN University Centre for Policy Research, where she collaborated with partners across the UN, in government and in civil society to assess effective support for individuals and communities transitioning away from conflict.

Prior to this, she was Senior Policy Adviser at the UK Mission to the UN, leading the UK’s Security Council work on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), Colombia, Venezuela and other country-specific and thematic files. Previous experience includes research, advocacy and programming work with NGOs and the UN, focused on reintegration of ex-combatants, access to education in conflict, and other topics related to international peace and security. Cristal holds a PhD in War Studies from King’s College London.

Cristal was profiled for ATLAS by Mélissa Cornet. You can read more about Mélissa at the end of the profile. Follow her @melissacornet_ on X.

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What made you want to focus on gender and conflict as a career? 

It happened quite organically. I actually started my career in the music industry, which is a good reminder that careers don’t have to be linear. Surprisingly, I’ve met a lot of people in this field who had a strong interest in music early in life – maybe creative minds are drawn to the problem-solving aspect of conflict resolution! After a couple of years, I realized a career in the music industry wasn’t what I wanted. I’d always been interested in social justice work, so I decided to restart my career.

I had studied Spanish (and Music) at undergraduate level, and Latin America seemed like an interesting place to start exploring a new career. I did an internship in Cochabamba, Bolivia, with an NGO working in prisons. They asked if I’d be interested in researching children living with their mothers in the women’s prison. That led me to spend more time in the women’s prison than in the four men’s prisons we were also working in, and I started delving into some of the gender dynamics, like why the children were staying with their mothers and not their fathers, and the implications of them living in the prison. The prison system in Bolivia requires inmates to pay to live there, so women with children faced additional pressure to earn money while incarcerated, to pay for their children’s food among other things. Working with inmates in all of the prisons also gave me insight on why people commit crimes – especially on how the drivers of crime can be related to a lack of income and other basic needs. That is an experience that stayed with me as I moved on to other roles.

Working in the prisons made me more aware of the gender dimensions of public policy, but I don’t think I fully realized it at the time, so I still wouldn’t have characterized my professional experience or interests as being gender-related. When I returned to New York, I applied to a lot of positions in social justice and got a job with a legal services NGO as a paralegal working on immigration and unemployment law. I had no legal experience whatsoever and I’m not sure I was particularly good at the unemployment part of the job, but they needed someone who spoke Spanish, which I did. Again, the work wasn’t explicitly gender-focused, but in the immigration practice we dealt largely with undocumented women who were victims of domestic violence. Many of these women had partners who used their immigration status against them as a form of control, exposing me to another way in which gender and violence can interact.

Part of the job involved collecting the victims’ testimonies about their journeys to the United States and the domestic violence they had experienced. These were stories of women being physically abused, not wanting to go to hospital in case their immigration status was exposed, partners threatening to turn them over to the authorities if they didn’t obey by their strict domestic rules – really harrowing accounts. As an interviewer it’s so important to give people the time and space to tell their stories as they choose to, and to balance the needs or purpose of the interview with the ethical principle of not retraumatizing the individual. Consequently, I built up an understanding of ethical interview skills in that job, especially with survivors of violence, among other skills that have stayed with me. And I’ll never forget some of the stories I heard – including the positive ones! I was once invited to the wedding of a woman who had survived life-threatening injuries and other tremendous abuse by her former partner. She said my boss and I had formed an important part of her life because we helped her stay in the US, so she wanted to share her wedding day with us.

From there, I became explicitly interested in conflict and violence. I did my Master’s in Latin American Studies, and then moved to Colombia, worked with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and sought opportunities to work on gender through both my career and my second Master’s, in Political Science. Initially, it was just a coincidence that I ended up working on gender issues, and I didn’t even see the work as being gender-focused at the time, but eventually, it became an explicit part of how I talked about my professional experience and goals.

How did you start working on gender in international organisations?

It happened when I moved to Colombia after my Master’s. I looked for a job there and spent a few years working on peacebuilding projects in which I could delve further into different gender dimensions of conflict, particularly in my work with IOM. That was during the peace process with FARC, and part of my work focused on gender aspects of Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR).

Later, I returned to New York and worked at the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, a group of UN agencies and NGOs focused on education in conflict zones. While it wasn’t a gender-specific role, my next job at the UK mission was. I was in the section of the mission that worked at the UN Security Council. Someone handling the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) file left, and I was asked if I wanted to take it on. At the same time, the Colombia file (on the same team as the WPS file) opened up, so I moved to that team. It was very much a case of being in the right place at the right time, but it became a key learning experience.

What was it like switching from NGOs to diplomacy?

By then, I had experience in local NGOs in Bolivia and New York, international organizations such as IOM, and on advocacy and research through the Global Coalition. The missing piece in my understanding of international affairs, and of gender within that sector, was policy.

 The change was an intense learning curve. It’s really hard to understand as an outsider how many priorities diplomats at the Security Council have to take into account when they are positioning themselves in negotiations or trying to show leadership in another way on a certain issue. It’s a constant balancing act. At the UK mission I pushed for progress on WPS at the Security Council, which required deep knowledge of resolutions, negotiations, and UK policy among other areas. I was also there at the beginning of the recent drop we’ve seen in international support for women’s rights – it wasn’t as precipitous as it is now, but it was marked and those of us working on WPS at the Security Council felt it daily. The role not only gave me direct experience of this but also showed me everything that is going on behind the scenes of policy work at the UN - even when publicly it seems like there is no movement on an area of the Council’s work, there is still so much happening behind closed doors.

How did you transition to Crisis Group?

There was a step in between—I worked at the UN University Centre for Policy Research (UNU-CPR) in New York, managing a research project on supporting people and communities transitioning away from conflict in Colombia. In addition to building on my prior experience at IOM and in other roles, that role supported my PhD work, as I needed to conduct fieldwork.

That UNU-CPR role was another good example of being in the right place at the right time. While I was still at the UK mission, I mentioned to a colleague from another mission while we were having coffee, that I was doing a PhD and was struggling to see how I would be able to combine PhD fieldwork in Colombia with my diplomatic role. He connected me with someone who was leading a project on a similar topic to my PhD thesis at UNU – she, in turn, happened to be interested in adding a Colombia case study to that project, and we figured out a way to make that happen. The UNU job was key to both my career and my PhD, and it would never have happened if I hadn’t gone for coffee that day!

After two and a half years, the Colombia project reached a natural inflection point and the vacancy at Crisis Group caught my eye. The role was perfect—it allowed me to continue research for a policy audience but with a cross-cutting, global scope – something I was ready for after having been focused only on Colombia for a few years. For the first time, my job was 100% gender-focused, which was a shift from previous roles where gender was one of many issues I worked on. Gender became the lens through which I could look at all conflicts.

Did you feel doing your PhD was a necessary step in your career?

The PhD has felt relevant for different reasons at different moments over the last few years. Ten years ago, I thought that if I wanted to pursue a career that revolved around research, I had to have a PhD. I don’t think that is true now – I was hired for my current role at Crisis Group before I’d finished my PhD, and I’ve worked with as many fabulous, inspiring researchers who don’t have PhDs as those that do, which makes me realise that the academic qualification is only one way to reach an impactful position producing high-quality research. But being able to work on my own research project (on the exclusion of former child soldiers from reintegration programmes in Colombia) for so long would probably not have been possible without the PhD. And I do think that a terminal degree in the social sciences gives you an understanding of research methods and ethics standards that would otherwise be hard – but not impossible - to acquire, so there are definitely benefits. I’m glad I did it.

How has the political climate affected gender work in peace and security?

Over the last decade, the international political outlook – namely the pushback against women’s rights - has provoked a shift among women’s rights advocates from advancing the agenda to holding the line. When I was at the UK mission from 2017 to 2020, this change was noticeable, especially at the Security Council—governments that used to push for progress started focusing on preventing backsliding instead, or even reversed their previously progressive positions on certain issues, like sexual and reproductive health. That dynamic still exists and is worsening as more conservative governments gain ground worldwide. The Security Council would not be able to agree on resolutions on WPS now that it was able to adopt in 2015. The world is a different place, in terms of both gender issues and multilateralism more broadly.

Research and analysis of gender and conflict issues are of course still relevant, but strategic messaging matters more than ever. For example, some governments will engage on women’s economic empowerment, but won’t support the full spectrum of reproductive rights. Others are open to women’s participation in formal politics but don’t want to ensure a supportive environment for civil society. It’s about tailoring messages to different audiences and being selective about your advocacy to call on the right stakeholder on the issue where they can be most useful to (and most interested in) enabling positive change.

Have you seen progress in integrating gender into broader conflict analysis?

Compared to ten or twenty years ago, yes. Gender is increasingly seen as part of conflict analysis rather than an add-on. But there are still challenges—many professionals in peace and security see it as a secondary issue rather than a core part of peace and security research.

One way I’ve found effective in making the case is to highlight how gender dynamics shape conflict. So for example, armed actors use gender-based violence to serve broad strategic goals. Social structures haven’t historically been set up to protect certain groups, like women, creating swathes of the population who can more easily be targeted without accountability or any other sort of response. This gives armed groups the ability to subjugate communities and gain territorial control. Similarly, in most countries men have traditionally held power through political institutions and processes, while women in politics represent a break from the norm and potentially a threat to the status quo that those in power enjoy. These imbalances have to be rectified to enable lasting peace. When framed this way, people who are skeptical of gender analysis often start to see its relevance.

And so, in this context, what keeps you motivated?

The stories of women facing immense challenges in conflict zones yet continuing to persevere. I was recently doing some background reading on Haiti - the staggering resilience of women mediating with gangs while enduring displacement, sexual violence, and caring for their children. If that doesn’t inspire action, what will?

Have there been specific moments where you saw real policy impact from your work?

One example was a Crisis Group report that briefly mentioned the importance of donor support to UN funds for women’s participation in Colombia’s peace processes. A week after publication, UN Women in Colombia contacted us—they had seen the recommendation and invited my colleague based in Bogotá to a meeting with the Women's Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF). That meeting influenced how WPHF structured its next round of funding. It was a small mention in a long report, but it had direct, tangible impact.

In another case, an article I wrote back in 2020 for UNU was used by a group of eight Security Council members to coordinate and solidify their positions on a WPS resolution that would have rolled back progress on women’s rights. They ended up refusing to adopt the resolution - the best possible outcome in that situation. A couple of them said my article had nudged them in the right direction, so again, a seemingly small thing that had a direct impact – something that is often difficult to trace in this field of work.

What challenges have you faced as a woman in this field?

People working on gender are often thought of as being in a sort of gender box – not “real” international peace and security specialists. It’s hard to move from gender-focused roles to broader security positions, and I think there is an assumption that women, especially, specialise in gender issues. We therefore face more challenges when moving between gender-focused and non-gender focused peace and security roles than men do – even though in actual fact, not all women are experts on gender and not all gender experts are women. And despite the fact that really everyone should be looking at gender as part of peace and security work, not just the gender specialists! Gender is not yet truly considered an integral, cross-cutting issue of international peace and security, rather than just a “women’s issue”.

On a personal level, balancing my PhD studies, a professional career, and a baby has also been a challenge in the last year or so. I swore I wouldn’t be one of those people with a dramatic story of submitting their thesis from the maternity ward—but that’s exactly what happened. So that’s another reason I’m glad the PhD part is over now and I can focus on the career and the baby – which is more than enough.

Do you have any advice for young women starting in this field?

Don’t stress about long-term career planning. Take opportunities that feel interesting at the time. You’ll find the thread that connects them later.

Relatedly, careers don’t have to be linear. You can move between sectors and still make it work! Looking back, you’ll be able to make sense of your career progression, even if not everything seems to fit together right now.

If possible, spend time in the field. No matter your focus—policy, research, advocacy—field experience will make your work stronger.

Mélissa Cornet is women’s rights researcher and writer specialised in Afghanistan, where she worked from 2018 to 2024.