Gender and Civilian Victimization in War

Jessica L. Peet, Laura Sjoberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138290839
• eBook ISBN: 9781351968713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the role of gender in influencing war-fighting actors' strategies toward the attack or protection of civilians.

Traditional narratives suggest that killing civilians intentionally in wars happens infrequently and that the perpetration of civilian targeting is limited to aberrant actors. Recently, scholars have shown that both state and non-state actors target civilians, even while explicitly deferring to the civilian immunity principle. This book fills a gap in the accounts of how civilian targeting happens and shows that these actors are in large part targeting women rather than some gender-neutral understanding of civilians. It presents a history of civilian victimization in wars and conflicts and then lays out a feminist theoretical approach to understanding civilian victimization. It explores the British Blockade of Germany in World War I, the Soviet 'Rape of Berlin' in World War II, the Rwandan genocide, and the contemporary conflict in northeast Nigeria. Across these case studies, the authors lay out that gender is key to how war-fighting actors understand both themselves and their opponents and therefore plays a role in shaping strategic and tactical choices. It makes the argument that seeing women in nationalist and war narratives is crucial to understanding when and how civilians come to be targeted in wars, and how that targeting can be reduced.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security, gender studies, war studies, and International Relations in general.

1

INTRODUCTION

Benedicte, a Baoule woman in her forties in Cote d’Ivoire, told Amnesty International:

The attackers came to our home. They hit my husband and my son and they threatened to kill us if ever we cried … I cried a lot and one of them rushed at me and tore my skirt. They raped me in front of my husband and children. They pushed me to the ground; one held my arms and another was standing, forcing my legs apart with his own while another raped me.

(Amnesty International 2007)

Hasan Nohanovic, a survivor of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, told PBS:

I got stuck in Srebrenica with my family. We lived as refugees without any outside assistance. We almost died of starvation with thousands of other people …. I heard screams and shots. I was afraid, of course …. My parents knew what was going to happen …. They knew my brother was going to be killed, they knew they were going to be killed …. And that was the last time I saw my family.

(PBS 2006)

Sadly, while Benedicte’s and Hasan’s stories are the experiences of only two individuals, they are not unique, either in the wars in Cote d’Ivoire and Bosnia-Herzegovina or in other conflicts around the world. Rapes like Benedicte’s have occurred across wars and conflicts, across the world, and across history. Civilians like Hasan and his family are victimized intentionally in almost a third of conflicts where the fighting parties have the militarily capability of committing atrocities against them (Downes 2008).

Hasan and Benedicte were both victims of intentional civilian targeting. However, they are often distinguished not only by their different locations, different conflicts, and different contexts but also by the interpretation that Benedicte’s experience was fundamentally different because it was understood as sex-specific, and Hasan’s experience was tragic but perceived as gender-neutral.¹ In this book, we use a variety of sources of evidence to argue that intentional civilian victimization in war is inherently gendered, regardless of whether men or women are the victims.

Thinking about civilian victimization

Intentional victimization of civilians in war is neither new nor particularly rare. For example, during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Hasan lost his family, though estimates vary, it is documented that upward of 200,000 civilians were killed, at least 30,000 civilians were raped (MacKinnon 2006), and over 2 million civilians were displaced (Slim 2008). The conflict involved intentional civilian victimization in the form of forced displacement, siege, burning and looting of villages, massacres, mass rape, forced pregnancy, and torture. Civilians

bore the brunt of the war in Bosnia … a November 1995 unclassified CIA memorandum estimated 156,500 civilian deaths in the country … this figure for civilian deaths far exceeded the estimate in the same report of 81,500 troops killed.

(Burg and Shoup 1999: 170)

The war in Bosnia was not just a war with civilian victimization but a war of civilian victimization. Similarly, in the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire where Benedicte was raped, “raids targeted entire neighborhoods [of] northerners or non-Ivoirians” and “government forces have killed or arrested” thousands of civilians intentionally (Human Rights Watch 2002). More than a dozen ambushes of civilians were committed both by the government and by the rebels, and “sex attacks against women and girls and massacres [were] perpetrated by both government and rebel forces and by Liberian recruits and civilian militia allied to both sides” (Human Rights Watch 2002).

Evidence of intentional civilian victimization in these wars, and across the history of war, seems counterintuitive. It runs contrary to the rules of war that distinguish between combatant and non-combatant and also to conventional wisdom both within and among states that civilians should not be killed in wars. The very distinction between soldiers as ‘combatants’ and civilians as ‘non-combatants’ is premised on the idea that there are some people who are innocent of, and therefore should be protected from, wars. This conventional wisdom is at the heart of the ‘non-combatant,’ or ‘civilian,’ immunity principle in international law. The non-combatant immunity principle has been phrased in various ways with differing justifications, but the central premise is consistent: civilians are not to be killed in wars.² Yet, despite this widely agreed-upon premise and concurrent obligations in international law, civilians are frequently killed in wars. War has always been hard on civilians, and it remains so – an estimated 60% of 20th-century war deaths were of civilians. This runs counter to the ‘decline of violence’ thesis (e.g., Pinker 2011; Goldstein 2012), as well as to the general increase in attention given by governments and international organizations to civilian victims of war (see, for a critical appraisal, Kirby 2013).

The question of how non-combatants are treated in wars has interested scholars, policy-makers, advocates, and advocacy networks for centuries. Interest seems to be intensifying recently as the definitions of ‘civilians’ and the ‘immunity’ they merit remain contested.³ Most of this work, however, focuses on how to predict, prevent, minimize, and account for the accidental deaths of civilians in war. Accidental civilian deaths happen when war-fighting parties miss their targets, mistake civilians for soldiers, receive and/or use misinformation about where they are aiming, and/or have technological errors with military equipment.

While these are all relevant issues, many – in fact, probably most – civilian deaths in wars are not accidental or even understood and accepted as collateral damage. They are intentional. Some of those intentional civilian deaths are the work of rogue soldiers or employees of private military corporations (Humphreys and Weinstein 2006; Eckert 2016), but many are intended not only by those doing the killing but also by the governments and military commanders they report to, which is to say that civilians are targeted as a matter of strategy (e.g., Downes 2008; R. Wood 2010; R. Wood, Kathman, and Gent 2012). While strategically intended civilian deaths have often been ignored in evaluations of the effectiveness of the non-combatant immunity principle, recently, scholars have become interested in the question of when and why war-fighting parties deliberately disobey the non-combatant immunity principle, with its related international legal structures, and choose to target civilians on purpose. As Alexander Downes (2006: 152) relates, the “startling number of civilian casualties in wartime” seems paradoxical for two reasons:

First, belligerents often target non-combatants despite the widespread belief that killing innocent civilians is morally wrong …. Second, killing civilians in war is widely believed to be bad strategy: it rarely helps perpetrators achieve their goals, and it can be counterproductive by strengthening an adversary’s will to resist.

(Downes 2006: 152–153)

In these terms, we can only wonder – if targeting civilians is perceived as both wrong and ineffective, why do belligerents do it? And why do they do it in almost a third of all conflicts in which they have the military capacity?

Various arguments have been put forth by way of explanation. Some scholars have argued that democracies target civilians because they see it as a quick and cheap way to win wars (Reiter and Stam 2002). Others contend that democracies’ accountability to their citizens prevents them from committing war crimes, including targeting civilians (Rummel 1996; Merom 2003). Still others see intentional civilian victimization as the product of ethnic differences (Kalyvas 1999, 2008), or one belligerent seeing the other as barbarian (Salter 2002; Kinsella 2006). Another approach views intentional civilian victimization as a way to attract or punish a civilian audience (Kalyvas 1999; Pape 2003). Yet another argument relates intentional civilian victimization to states’ levels of willingness to be governed by international law (Valentino, Huth, and Croco 2006). There is a growing literature that frames belligerents’ decisions to target civilians strategically (e.g., Valentino 2004), as the most effective response to threatening guerilla groups (Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsey 2004), a tactic of desperation (Downes 2006, 2008), or a method of conquering territory (Downes 2006, 2008). Analyses of civilian victimization in intrastate wars point to inter-insurgent relations, insurgent-state relations, capacity variations, ethnicity, and the conditions of the war (R. Wood 2016; Asal et al. 2018).

As we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, we find these causal arguments about civilian victimization, both individually and collectively, interesting and important pieces of the ‘puzzle’ that is civilian victimization and how it is caused. Still, this book argues that scholars continue to neglect an important, indeed crucial, part of the puzzle. While the different explanations that have been offered for civilian victimization stem from various schools of thought in International Relations (IR), including realism, liberalism, and constructivism, and take account of both state and sub-state actors, they leave out the insights of gender analysis. We argue that the significance of gender in explaining intentional civilian victimization is the reason why a number of tests of existing accounts have found weak empirical results to date. This book puts forth the argument that, when war-fighting parties intentionally attack civilians, they are actually attacking women as symbols of their opponents’ state and nation. As a foundation for that argument, the next section of this introduction discusses what it means to look at global politics through gender lenses.

Thinking through gender lenses

As scholars, the “lenses” we use “foreground some things, and background others” in our research (V. Peterson and Runyan 1999). Our research questions start with the ideas, concepts, and variables we see as most important in global politics. For example, the scholars who have written on intentional civilian victimization have started with the ideas, concepts, and variables they see as most important in global politics, including regime type, international law, strategy, and culture. Like other scholars in IR, feminist work uses “lenses” to foreground variables of particular interest, specifically sex, gender, and sexuality; gender identity; and gender hierarchy, using “gender lenses” to view global politics (V. Peterson and Runyan 1999: 2). Looking through gender lenses is a way “to focus on gender as a particular kind of power relation, or to trace out the ways in which gender is central to understanding international processes” (Steans 1998: 5).

While women’s oppression is a primary concern for feminists, “the driving force of feminism is its attention to gender and not simply to women …. [T]he concept, nature and practice of gender are key” (Zalewski 1995). Feminists, then, “ask what assumptions about gender (and race, class, nationality, and sexuality) are necessary to make particular statements, policies, and actions meaningful” (Wilcox 2009). In our analysis of civilian victimization, we focus on how the concept, nature, and practice of gender influences states’ and other war-fighting parties’ decisions to target civilians and ask what assumptions about gender are necessary to make intentional civilian victimization appealing, despite the non-combatant immunity norm. With this focus, we also look at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationalism in constituting both the idea of the civilian and her vulnerability.

In order to fully grasp why those are important questions, we need to spend a little time understanding what feminists mean by ‘sex’ and by ‘gender’ in this context. Many people see sex as biology – male and female sex organs make people men or women.⁴ In the conventional wisdom, then, gender is directly related to, and maps onto, sex – men are masculine and women are feminine. However, feminist scholarship has “questioned the conventional assumption that gender differences (and subordination) are rooted in biological differences between women and men” (Scott 1987; Sjoberg 2006a: 32). Instead, feminist scholars suggest that the relation between sex and gender is presumed rather than natural, where masculinity and femininity are separable from maleness and femaleness. Masculine characteristics, like strength, protectiveness, rationality, aggressiveness, presence in public life, domination, and leadership, then, are perceived as related to maleness, while in reality they are not reserved for men. Conversely, traits associated with femininity, like weakness, vulnerability, emotion, passivity, privacy, submission, and care, are assumed to be the domain of women, while that is not always or even normally the case. Genderings can be read into and back onto sex, which is malleable rather than set, and co-constituted with gender (e.g., Butler 1990, 1993).

Applying this understanding, gender cannot be operationalized as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ (or ‘male’ or ‘female’ question), or as a matter of degree. It also cannot be accounted for by asking questions about ‘what women do’ differently than ‘what men do’ in global politics.⁵ Instead, it is more of a constellation of significations, where masculinities and femininities are mutually constituted (along with race, class, sexuality, etc.) in specific, hierarchical relation to one another – where (often) masculinities are prized and powerful, while femininities are seen as undesirable and therefore subordinated.

In this context, we can talk not just about men and women and masculinities and femininities but of masculinism and feminization. Masculinism is the prizing of masculinities and the exclusion and/or devaluing of femininities in social and/or political contexts. Masculinism leads to feminization – the devaluing of femininities by putting down or putting aside people, groups, or ideas associated with femininities and by associating devalued or marginalized people, groups, or ideas with femininities (V. Peterson 2010; see also V. Peterson and Runyan 2010).⁶ V. Spike Peterson describes feminization as devalorization:

Not only subjects (women and marginalized men), but also concepts, desires, tastes, styles, “ways of knowing” … can be feminized – with the effect of reducing their legitimacy, status and value. Importantly, this devalorization is simultaneously ideological (discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic) …. This devalorization normalizes – with the effect of “legitimating” – the marginalization, subordination, and exploitation of feminized practices and persons … the “naturalness” of sex difference is generalized to the “naturalness” of masculine (not necessarily male) privilege, so that both aspects come to be taken-for-granted “givens” of social life.

(V. Peterson 2010)

In this vein, a key tenet of feminist theorizing about the global political arena is that it is gender-hierarchical (Sjoberg 2009). Though masculinities and femininities are detectable across known human history, they are not static, temporally, geographically, or culturally. Quite the opposite, the dominant ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ is different at different times, and in different places and cultures. While “the exact content of genders varies with various and shifting socio-political contexts, … gender subordination (defined as the subordination of femininities to masculinities) remains a constant feature of social and political life across time and space” (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007: 9). Feminist research in IR, then, asks how these complex notions of gender constitute and influence the realities of everyday life in global politics. In this book, we are particularly interested in how gender influences belligerents’ (especially states’) decisions to attack civilians in war in conjunction with other parts of the ‘puzzle’ of intentional civilian victimization.

Thinking about gender and intentional civilian victimization

Revisiting the narratives that began this introduction, it is possible to see gender influencing intentional civilian victimization in what happened to Hassan and Benedicte and their contemporaries. Referencing experiences like Benedicte’s, Judith Gardam has explained that rape is never truly aimed at or affecting just one person (1993: 363). Instead, “rape functions as a strategy to deliver a blow against a collective energy by striking at a group of high symbolic value” (Pettman 1996: 190). By raping Benedicte, government forces were attacking non-Ivoirians by attacking “their” women, as “xenophobic speech [was] aimed specifically at women from the ‘enemy’ community,” encouraging rape and sexual violence (Amnesty International 2007). As a result, sexual violence became “an intentional strategy to terrorise, demean, and defeat an entire population, as well as a way of engendering hate and destruction” between the rebels and the government in Cote d’Ivoire (Amnesty International 2004).

In the 1990s war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, women ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The civilian and civilian victimization
• 3 Gender and intentional civilian victimization
• 4 Starving women, emasculating nation: the British blockade in World War I
• 5 Marking defeat on women’s bodies: the Soviet occupation of Berlin in 1945
• 6 Writing genocide on gendered bodies: the Rwandan genocide
• 7 Gendered civilian targetings in conflict: Boko Haram in Nigeria
• Conclusion: gender, civilian victimization, and gender in global politics
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index