Women, Gender Equality, and Post-Conflict Transformation

Lessons Learned, Implications for the Future

Joyce P. Kaufman, Kristen P. Williams, Joyce P. Kaufman, Kristen P. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472468956
• eBook ISBN: 9781134772827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The end of formal hostilities in any given conflict provides an opportunity to transform society in order to secure a stable peace. This book builds on the existing feminist international relations literature as well as lessons of past cases that reinforce the importance of including women in the post-conflict transition process, and are important to our general understanding of gender relations in the conflict and post-conflict periods. Post-conflict transformation processes, including disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs, transitional justice mechanisms, reconciliation measures, and legal and political reforms, which emerge after the formal hostilities end demonstrate that war and peace impact, and are impacted by, women and men differently. By drawing on a strong theoretical framework and a number of cases, this volume provides important insight into questions pertaining to the end of conflict and the challenges inherent in the post-conflict transition period that are relevant to students and practitioners alike.

Part I
Theory and framework

1 Women living in a gendered world

Laura Sjoberg

Violette Mutegwamaso is one of the few women survivors of the Rwandan genocide whose story is on the internet. It is told by an organization called “Women for Women International.” Violette had to flee her home with her two children, through showering bullets and falling bodies. She fled to a church, only to find the church under attack. She smeared the blood of dead bodies on herself and her children, and told them to lie still among corpses. Violette and her children (aged four and five) lay there for a week pretending to be dead until the church was liberated. Her husband, who had been working a couple of hours away, was murdered in the genocide. Violette lived through the genocide, which is where most International Relations (IR) theorists who pay attention to civilian suffering in war stop paying attention. As hard as Violette’s week on the floor of that church was, however, it was only the beginning of her struggle for survival. In the genocide, she lost not only her husband but her family’s source of income, and any momentum in the Rwandan economy that would have allowed her to get a job with a living wage. After the genocide, Violette took in an orphan whose parents had died. She and her then-three children looked for work, but she was only able to find someone who would allow her to farm their land to get (barely) enough food for them to eat. Violette could not afford schooling, medicine, or clothing for her children, and they were malnourished and unhealthy.

Violette’s story is on Women for Women International’s website because it ends happily.¹ Violette was matched with an American sponsor, whose money helped her pay her family’s expenses and get training to start a career. With the help that she received, Violette started a business that made sorghum-based drinks and sold beans. Her business grew, and she was able to hire other local workers, provide her community with potable water, and promote both peace and economic prosperity among her neighbors. Violette was able to pay her children’s school fees, and to help them set up their careers.

Violette’s life, as well as the life of her American sponsor, Liz Hammer, is the life of a woman in a gendered world. Make no mistake – I am not arguing that women have any essential biological or social commonalities that make their experiences the same or generalizable. Instead, I am arguing that women, by virtue of their association with femininity, are often understood through the lens of their sex and the gender-based expectations paired with that sex. Often, social positioning, professional opportunities, conflict targeting, health care, and other goods and services are distributed on the basis of gendered assumptions. With Violette and the conflict that she lived through in mind, this chapter will argue that it is crucial to understanding both gender dynamics and post-conflict dynamics to see how they are interrelated, and how women who experience conflicts do so in a gendered world. In so doing, it will draw on the literature regarding women and conflict to situate this project and show the importance of understanding the gendered aspects of post-conflict transitions.

To do this work, this chapter will ask a series of questions: What does it mean to focus on women? What does it mean to think about “post-conflict” dynamics? How is it possible to think of women’s participation in conflicts and post-conflict transitions? What is the relationship between women’s participation and gender equality? What methods can be used to understand the gendered dynamics of post-conflict transitions? Each question will be the subject of a sub-section of this chapter, which will conclude by looking forward to the lessons that analyzing post-conflict transitions through gender lenses could provide for both scholars and policy makers.

Focusing on women

Early work on gender in International Relations (IR) was inspired by women IR scholars who looked around them and saw very few other women IR scholars, and little if any work on women’s experiences in global politics. Those scholars asked a question that is at once very simple and very complicated – where are the women in global politics?² Asking where women are in post-conflict transitions is important on its own merits – women make up more than half of the world’s population, and a significant number of its heads of household, primary breadwinners, and primary caregivers. As such, what women do, and what happens to them, after wars and conflicts end, is an important part of the question what happens to people after wars and conflict.

At the same time, there is no reason to assume that asking the seemingly gender-neutral question of what happens to people in post-conflict transitions is enough. Existing scholarship shows us that women are often differently situated than men in almost every aspect of wars and conflicts³ and suggests that women experience post-conflict transitions differently than men as well.⁴ We have reason to suspect, then, that what happens to people in post-conflict transitions, is something we called gendered – it varies on the basis of the association of people with maleness and femaleness, with masculinities and femininities. Therefore, the seemingly gender-neutral question of what happens to people is likely to produce partial, and unrepresentative, answers about people’s experiences, especially women’s. As such, it is important to focus on women’s experiences in their own right to get the whole story about people’s experiences in post-conflict transitions.

It is not immediately clear, however, what it would mean to focus on women. There are a lot of ways to collect data about how women experience post-conflict transitions. Ethnographic data collection provides insight into social dynamics.⁵Interview data collection provides access to women’s descriptions of their experiences.⁶ Discourse analysis reveals where women’s lives are given attention⁷ and where silences surround their experiences.⁸ These methodologies and others can provide significant information about how women’s lives are impacted by, and impact, post-conflict transformation.

Many of the chapters of this book use those methods to provide information about women in post-conflict transitions. They show, however, that collecting this information is only part of figuring out how to focus on women in post-conflict transitions. The other part of the effort is finding the tools to analyze what happens to women in post-conflict transitions to better understand the nature of post-conflict transitions and the nature of gender relations, and to translate these understandings to finding better policy solutions for societies’ transition from times of conflict to times of peace.

Feminist work in IR provides a tool for this – gender analysis. Gender analysis avoids the overly simplistic assumption that focusing on women means looking for women’s differences from men and assuming that women have essential traits in common that can be relied on to predict their behaviors, and even their strengths and weaknesses. This is not only inaccurate, but it also leads policy makers to misestimate possible paths to achieve their goals. For example, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 requires the inclusion of women in post-conflict transition processes, given how essential women are to peace. The Resolution heavily implies that women are more peaceful than, and better at achieving peace than, men.⁹ This expectation is not limited to Security Council Resolution 1325 and has been made in a number of places across the security sector, with problematic results. For example, Annica Kronsell shows how expecting female peacekeepers to behave better than, and moderate the behavior of, male peacekeepers is not only unreasonable but unsuccessful as a policy decision.¹⁰ This is one of many examples that shows that, while it is important to focus on women, the focus needs to be through gender lenses.¹¹ As Jill Steans describes, “to look at the world through gender lenses is to focus on gender as a particular sort of power relation, or to trace out the ways in which gender is central to understanding international processes.”¹² In this understanding, it is important to pay “attention to gender and not simply women … the concept, nature, and practice of gender are key.”¹³

Theorizing the concept, nature, and practice of gender requires distinguishing gender from womanhood – which is a common association among both scholars and policy makers. In common parlance, “gender issues” means “women’s issues,” and references to gender are assumed to be referring to women. These shorthand associations, however, are incorrect for two reasons. First, gender is not only femininity but also masculinity; not only associated with femaleness but also maleness. Second, while gender is associated with, and often attributed because of an association with, the biological sex categories, gender and sex are not the same thing. Gender is not something people automatically have based on their biological maleness or femaleness.¹⁴ Instead, gender is socially constructed – it is “the socially constructed expectation that persons perceived to be members of a biological sex category will have certain characteristics.”¹⁵ It is not, then, what women “are” and what men “are” that gender analysis looks to identify. Instead, it is what expectations of femininities (with which women are associated) and expectations of masculinities (with which men are associated) do to structure how women and men are situated, how women and men are treated, and what that means for the social groups, political groups, states, international organizations, and international systems in which they participate.

Although gender is a social construction, it is one that operates in very real ways in conflicts and post-conflict transitions. What is expected of people, how people are treated, and how people’s behaviors are read in conflict are often filtered through associations of people’s sexed bodies with gender stereotypes.¹⁶ That is why feminist scholars in IR have characterized gender as a “feature of social and political life” that “profoundly shapes our place in, and view of, the world.”¹⁷ In this context, then, focusing on women means looking at women’s experiences without making gender essentialist assumptions about women’s commonality, but with an understanding of the gendered world that the women are living in and experiencing. When I characterize the world that the women in this book live in as gendered, I do not mean that they are all subject to the same gendered pressures or gendered expectations. Instead, I mean that they are all subject to some gendered pressures and gendere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figure and table
• Series preface
• Preface
• Foreword
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Theory and framework
• Part II Case studies
• Part III Lessons learned, implications for the future
• Index