'Innocent Women and Children'

Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians

R. Charli Carpenter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317116585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Le genre et la loi

Examining the influence of gender constructs on the international regime protecting war-affected civilians, R. Charli Carpenter examines how in practice belligerents, advocates and humanitarian players interpret civilian immunity so as to leave adult civilian men and older boys at grave risk in conflict zones. Providing a wealth of ground-breaking case studies, the author argues that in order to understand the way in which laws of war are implemented and promoted in international society we must understand how gender ideas affect the principle of civilian immunity. Each case study demonstrates the importance of assumptions about gender relations in shaping international politics, and in developing a framework for incorporating an attention to gender into the often gender-blind scholarship on international norms. As such, this book will be of interest to international relations theorists and to human rights scholars, students and activists alike.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians

DOI: 10.4324/9781315588582-1

Children, women and the elderly are innocent victims who deserve and demand vigorous protection.

– Costa Rican Delegate to the UN Security Council, February 22, 1999

In early July, 1995, the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) overran the city of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina. After forcing the civilian women, children and elderly onto buses, BSA fighters systematically slaughtered nearly 8,000 adult men and older boys (Rhode 1998). Two years before the massacre, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had evacuated several thousand civilians from the besieged city. Women, children, the elderly and the sick were allowed on the convoys; adult civilian men were told to stay behind (Hollingworth 1996). Four years after the fall of Srebrenica, the United Nations (UN) Security Council met to discuss its obligation to protect war-affected civilians. While military-age males were being massacred in Kosovo (Danner 2000), delegates to the meeting asserted that “civilians, particularly women, children, the elderly and the sick have been victimized” and that “civilians, in particular women and children, have the right to receive humanitarian assistance” (United Nations 1999a, 9 and 1999b, 8).

This book examines the influence of gender ideas on the international regime protecting war-affected civilians. It asks: why did BSA fighters execute civilian males while allowing women and children to flee Srebrenica, and then claim to have complied with the civilian immunity norm? Why did international agencies mandated with the protection of civilians in the former Yugoslavia leave civilian men and older boys in the enclaves, while evacuating besieged women and younger children? Why, while the international community still agonized over Srebrenica, did delegates to the Security Council invoke the protection of every category of civilian except “adult male” in their moral discourse? I argue that to understand the way in which the laws of war are implemented and promoted in international society, we must understand how gender ideas affect and, I argue, ultimately undermine the principle of civilian immunity.

Most commentators claim that civilian immunity forms the bedrock of the laws regulating war (Sandoz et al. 1987, 586). Although the targeting of civilian populations has been a feature of international politics throughout history (Carr 2002; Chalk and Jonassohn 1990; Rummel 1994), international actors have long agreed that, in principle, the uninvolved should be shielded from the effects of armed conflict (McKeogh 2002). Only in the post-Cold War period, however, has the “protection of civilians” emerged as a prominent issue on the global security agenda (Roberts 2001). In recent years, the international community has aimed to protect civilians through a variety of pro-active means: advocacy groups lobby warring parties; states condemn atrocity and refine international agreements; and international organizations attempt to feed, safeguard, and prevent the massacre of non-combatants in armed conflicts worldwide (Jones and Cater 2001).

In the chapters that follow, I demonstrate that the “innocent civilian” is invoked through the use of gender essentialisms (Smith 2001): political actors typically associate women and children, but not adult men, with civilian status. This practice contradicts the spirit and letter of the very norm such actors intend to strengthen. According to the laws of war, “civilians” whose lives must be spared are to be distinguished from “combatants,” who may legitimately be killed, according to whether or not they participate directly in hostilities (McKeogh 2002; Palmer-Fernandez 1998). In other words, fighters are to distinguish civilians from combatants according to an assessment of what they are actually doing, rather than assuming their “innocence” based on who they are (AP 1 1977, 51:3; AP 2 1977, 13:3). ¹ In reality, however, “distinction” is often accomplished instead through the use of sex and age as proxy variables for “civilian/combatant.”

1 Article 50:1 of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions also states that “in case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.” A number of political theorists have problematized the concept of moral innocence as a basis for the civilian/combatant distinction. See Anscombe 1970; Fullenwider 1985; Johnson 1999; McKeogh 2002; Norman 1995.

This makes a difference because the category “women and children” is not empirically interchangeable with “the civilian population,” nor are all men “combatants.” Although a majority of women and children are civilians, this is also true of most men in contemporary wars, many of which are fought by fringe nationalist elements rather than through mass mobilization (Mueller 2000). Moreover, both women and older children may also be combatants and perpetrators in armed conflict (Dombrowski 1999; Goodwin-Gill and Cohn 1994; Moser and Clark 2001; Turshen and Twagiramariya 1998). The category “women and children” conflates infants, who are indeed both innocent and vulnerable, with adult women and adolescents who may be neither (Bennett, Bexley and Warnock 1995; Enloe 1993; Hamilton 2002; Lindsey 2001). ² It also suggests that battle-age men are neither vulnerable nor innocent, whether or not they are actually combatants (Jones 2000).

2 The stereotype is problematic in other ways with which I do not deal fully here. For example, it assumes a harmony of interests between women and children that may not exist, and it fails to treat fathering as central to the protection of children’s human rights in armed conflict.

Insofar as these essentialist assumptions are incorrect, they undermine the moral logic of the civilian immunity norm itself. Using sex and age as proxies for civilian/combatant involves doing precisely the opposite of what the doctrine of “distinction” requires: that legitimate targets be identified by an objective assessment of who actually poses an immediate and direct military threat in a given situation. In short, gender beliefs can trump the regime’s broader normative principles. This has important implications for the protection of civilian populations, as well as for theories about the role of morality in world politics. In the following chapters, I make this case by demonstrating how gender influences the activities of three sets of actors with respect to civilian protection: states and belligerent forces, transnational advocacy networks, and humanitarian practitioners.

First, gender beliefs are embedded in the principles of the civilian protection regime and directly affect belligerents’ compliance with the key regime norm, protecting some civilians but putting others at greater risk. Belligerents are less likely to target women than men in armed conflict, and they are less likely to attempt to justify their behavior when they do so. Moreover, third parties’ condemnations of atrocity or justifications for intervention on behalf of civilians are related to the age and sex of civilian victims.

Second, these gender constructions affect and are reproduced in the representations that transnational advocacy networks use to frame atrocity and draw attention to war-affected civilians. These actors seek to align their metaphors of persuasion with the imagery most resonant to the transnational publics and statespersons on whom they rely for resources and whose views and behaviors they hope to affect. They draw strategically on gender constructs in pre-existing cultural discourses to press their claims. Insofar as they have been successful at placing the issue of civilians on the UN agenda, it has emerged as a profoundly gendered discourse: essentialist assumptions are embedded in both the category “innocent civilian” and the category “especially vulnerable.”

Third, this construction of innocence and vulnerability according to gender essentialisms has affected the actual “protection of civilians” by humanitarian organizations. I show how this turned out to be tragically true during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Emphasizing humanitarian evacuation as a protection mechanism, and looking at the 1993 evacuation of Srebrenica in depth, I argue that gender assumptions exerted regulative effects on the behavior of humanitarian actors as well as constitutive effects on the language they use. Moreover, these effects operated so as to leave adult male civilians at grave risk of humanitarian law violations.

These chapters demonstrate that international norms are not simple, static constructs but may be buttressed or distorted by implicit moral frames that “piggy-back” on or “stow-away” inside the norm in question, often contradicting it. Actors engaged in norm emergence, dissemination, implementation and change in world politics must negotiate these contradictions. And self-proclaimed social constructivist international relations (IR) scholars, exploring the effects of ideas on world politics, must pay close attention to these implicit schemas – such as gender – in order to understand the dynamics of the broader normative landscape in which they are interested.

Gender, Social Constructivism and International Relations Theory

The main explanatory argument made in this book is that gender – “interpretations of behavior culturally associated with sex differences” (Peterson 1992, 17) – shapes the implementation of international norms – “collective expectations for actors with a given identity” (Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein 1996). From this follows the conclusion that international relations scholarship, particularly that dealing with international norms, is impoverished without an understanding of such gender effects.

Of course, this argument is nothing new: IR feminist literature has demonstrated the causal and constitutive effects of gender on a wide variety of international phenomena including armed conflict (Elshtain 1987; Enloe 2000; Zalewski 1995), nationalism (Mertus 1994; True 1993; Yuval-Davis 1997), international political economy (Enloe 1989; Marchand and Runyan 2000), globalization (Hooper 2001; Kelly et al. 2001; Turpin and Lorentzen 1996) and international organizations (Meyer and Prugl, 1999; Steinstra 1994; Whitworth 1994 and 2004; Baines 2004). Moreover, many of these scholars have been encouraging the wider discipline to engage with gender as a mode of analysis for over a decade (Grant and Newland 1991; Hooper 2001; Peterson, 1992a rid="ref536" ref-type="bibr">; Prugl 1999; Sylvester, 2002; Tickner 1997; Zalewski 1996).

Unfortunately conventional constructivism, like most other mainstream theories of international relations, has been slow to explore the effects of gender ideas on the norms and identities that they claim structure and shape political outcomes. For example, scholarship on international security norms has proliferated (Barnett 2002; Finnemore 1996b and 1999; Katzenstein 1996; Nadelmann 1990; Price 1998; Tannenwald 1999; Thomas 2001; Wendt 1992; Zacher 2001), but this literature has very seldom incorporated the insights of the vast feminist literature on how gender hierarchies affect international security in theory (Cooke and Woolacott 1993; Tickner 2001; Zalewski 1995) and in practice (Cohn 1993; Elshtain 1987; Enloe 2000; Orford 1996; Steihm 1982; Whitworth, 2004). Constructivist scholars thus miss an important element regarding how the norms they discuss are constituted, as well as the ways in which they are implemented and enacted. In particular, conventional constructivists have trouble accounting for gaps between theory and practice that are often naturalized by gender, because without conducting a gender analysis they are unlikely to even identify these gaps (Prugl 1999).

Yet as I have argued elsewhere (Carpenter 2002a; 2003b), one reason for the mainstream neglect is precisely the fact that gender analyses in international relations have traditionally been associated with IR feminism, itself a discourse archetypically defined in relation to, rather than as part of, the conventional discipline of IR (Caprioli 2004; Keohane 1991, 45; Peterson 1992b, 1; Whitworth 1994, 39; Zalewski 1995, 341). ³ Driven by a concern with overcoming gender inequality on a global scale, a major contribution of “IR feminism” has been to problematize the traditional research agenda of international relations in the interest of recovering women’s concerns and promoting a politics of emancipation (Enloe 2000; Peterson 1992b; Steans 1998, 26). ⁴ Additionally, IR feminism has historically been skeptical of conventional epistemologies and methodologies in IR because they accept existing power structures. While not all feminist theory is post-positivi...