Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice

Transformative Approaches in Post-Conflict Settings

Rita Shackel, Lucy Fiske, Rita Shackel, Lucy Fiske

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319778891
• eBook ISBN: 9783319778907
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Social Sciences

This book draws together established and emerging scholars from sociology, law, history, political science and education to examine the global and local issues in the pursuit of gender justice in post-conflict settings. This examination is especially important given the disappointing progress made to date in spite of concerted efforts over the last two decades. With contributions from both academics and practitioners working at national and international levels, this work integrates theory and practice, examining both global problems and highly contextual case studies including Kenya, Somalia, Peru, Afghanistan and DRC. The contributors aim to provide a comprehensive and compelling argument for the need to fundamentally rethink global approaches to gender justice.

© The Author(s) 2019

Rita Shackel and Lucy Fiske (eds.)Rethinking Transitional Gender JusticeGender, Development and Social Changehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77890-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Lucy Fiske¹ and Rita Shackel²

(1)

University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Sydney, NSW, Australia

(2)

University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Lucy Fiske (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Rita Shackel

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Towards the end of a three-year study investigating women’s access to justice in northern Uganda, Kenya and eastern DRC, we returned to each country to present our preliminary analysis with the women who had shared their thoughts and experiences with us during the project. We wanted to include women participants as analysts and makers of meaning, rather than simply as witnesses to violence. Our audio recorders captured the women’s discussions in small groups with no researcher present. In Nairobi, a group of women discussed the research project and the likelihood of any change occurring. These women, from different conflict affected regions of Kenya spanning from Mount Elgon in the west, to Malindi in the south-east, delivered a damning assessment of Kenya’s political system and social organisation of power. ‘No-one will listen to the voice of weak’ declared one woman, to murmurs of agreement from her interlocutors. ‘Justice should be done instead of telling us that they are taking it to the government. They know everything … they know that you were violated, they don’t care. The weak ones do not have their rights,’ replied another woman. The women discussed the research project—funded by the Australian government during its term on the UN Security Council, and conducted with approval from the Kenyan government—and concluded that if our aim was to take the findings to their government, our government or the UN then ‘We will not benefit, we will remain here….’

This short vignette, apart from being rather sobering, holds a number of points, of both principle and practice, that ought to be taken seriously.

This first is the issue of ‘voice,’ a concept that has been widely embraced by a broad range of humanitarian and justice actors and is now central in discourses surrounding women, poverty and violence (Madianou et al. 2015; Tacchi 2008). The women discussing voice here don’t focus on their inability to ‘find their voice’ or their need to be ‘given voice’ (as so many humanitarian programmes claim to), but the fact that no-one is listening; that their social location as ‘mere women’ (a phrase we heard in all three countries) renders their voices inaudible. The concept of voice has roots in critical social theory (Butler 2005; Fassin 2012). Here voice is understood as a speech act—a mode of participating in social and political life whether as an individual who ‘give(s) an account of oneself’ or as part of a collective engagement such as through social movements, party politics or other actions presenting concerns or ideas in the public realm (Madianou et al. 2015, 3020–3022). The idea of voice, however, has been incorporated in humanitarianism and transitional justice in a very particular way—voice has come to mean the voice of the ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ (distinct terms which rhetorically have become synonymous); archetypal images that women in war zones embody as well as, if not better, than any other group. Women’s voices are drawn upon as witnesses to raw suffering only; their voices are listened to in order to mobilise empathy, demonstrate the ‘human suffering’ of an atrocity or to progress some other agenda. Women’s voices are seldom heard as political subjects, as expert opinion on justice, politics or power relations—these remain the preserve of the expert; the lawyer, aid worker, technocrat or researcher who will interpret and mediate the voices to their respective audiences.

Divorced from the structural critiques found in social theory, in the field there is a presumption that voicelessness arises from women’s lack of confidence or lack of knowledge of their rights. The adoption of ‘voice’ alone (its separation from its socio-political context) has material effects: it directs resources towards programmes that target women’s ‘deficiencies,’ programmes such as women’s empowerment or rights education, while leaving the economic, social and political structures which underpin their disempowerment, untouched. The focus remains on building voice, rather than structural barriers to hearing, yet as Christina Kenny notes, this relies on a problematic assumption that ‘knowledge of rights leads linearly to “empowerment”’ (Chap. 14). This discourse , rather than empowering women, places the responsibility for achieving justice (or failing to do so) on those with very little social, economic and political power. Furthermore, the inclusion of women’s voices only as representations of suffering reinforces their status as symbolic victims, further impairing their ability to participate in justice processes as other than victim-witnesses.

This is closely related to the second point arising from the workshop participants’ discussion—that neither the effects nor the causes of gendered violence and injustice can be addressed outside of patriarchal social and political structures that continue to locate women in secondary positions. Technocratic interventions that don’t account for power relations—who is ‘weak’ and who is strong—are unlikely to respond to the justice demands of the least powerful. Atomised responses that seek reform in the police sector or in health services (important initiatives), but without accounting for land ownership, status of widows or women’s rights to participate in every level of decision-making will have limited effect in terms of achieving the transformations that transitional justice advocates have hoped for, or indeed of restoring women’s confidence in the ability of the various transitional justice actors to improve their lives. The contributions to this volume come from a range of disciplines and cover a wide geographic spread, and while each chapter has a specific focus, one of the strongest themes to emerge across this body of work, is the need for a holistic approach to justice; to understand that class, race and gender interact in mutually constitutive ways in the lives of women. This manifests in different ways in each location, but patriarchal social and political structures in both national and international systems work against women realising justice and a stable foundation upon which to build dignified lives free from violence. The women discussants understand the need for political and social change to underpin any justice programmes.

This leads to the final point arising from the workshop discussion—the profound loss of confidence the women expressed—in governments, the international community and researchers. The women trusted only direct personal relationships as a possible source of change, ‘They should do this research and just decide on their own to help us, not that they are taking it to the government.’ There was great hope that, in the aftermath of conflict and with the high-level determination to work towards justice, moments of rupture would open up space for addressing gendered injustices and responding to women’s justice claims in particular. Indeed, gender justice has been a significant focus of political, legal, international development and scholarly attention over the last twenty-five years. Efforts, however, have not achieved the progress that was anticipated, and all actors—humanitarian workers, international and national justice workers, and researchers—need to earn back the confidence and trust of communities affected by conflict. This trust is unlikely to be regained through ‘more of the same’, in which various combinations of transitional justice are ‘brought to’ conflict affected communities (Nagy 2014, 217). Madeleine Rees and Christine Chinkin (2015, 1215) identify that ‘meaningful participation is perhaps the key entry point for transformation.’ Yet too often, justice is approached as a ‘thing’ to be delivered to a community or country seen as lacking ‘capacity’. Many of the chapters in this collection point to the need to form much stronger, collaborative partnerships with communities, seeing the building of justice as a shared project.

This volume was conceived during a two-day multidisciplinary international symposium held in Sydney in July 2015. It brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to critique the interactions of gender with law, colonialism, race , humanitarianism and politics and, to think through the intersections between the range of harms, interventions and justice initiatives at both global and local levels. The contributors, while recognising the limited outcomes achieved to date, remain committed to the task of building new theoretical and political frameworks that are more responsive to the heterogeneity and complexity of women’s experiences of conflict and transition. Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice challenges reductive historical narratives of women as either absent or peripheral in matters of state or appearing predominantly as victims and occasionally as valorised peace-makers. It both examines the diverse ways that women are victimised in conflict, while also building a stronger framework through which women’s agency, resistance and strategies can be recognised and engaged.

Structure of the Book

The book is divided in to three sections: Rethinking Institutions, Rethinking Interventions and Learning from the Field. The first section seeks to identify and articulate some of the implicit assumptions that underpin transitional justice and gender as a first step in being able to question some of the existing orthodoxies in the hope of prising open space for rethinking bases for action. In Chap. 2, Lucy Fiske gives a brief survey of major developments in transitional justice over the last twenty-five years, with a specific focus on gender justice. In this chapter, Fiske traces how ‘gender’ has largely been drawn in to transitional justice in the form of sexual violence. Not only does this obscure the broad range of gendered harms that are often exacerbated during conflict and narrow the justice lens to a very particular focus, but it also reinforces traditional gender roles in which women are seen predominantly in terms of their reproductive capacities. Women’s efforts to gain ‘a seat at the table’ as equal agents are repeatedly frustrated. This theme runs throughout all the chapters in this first section. Pamela Scully, in Chap. 3, looks at Liberia’s recent Ebola outbreak—both the cracks and fissures that the disease exposed in Liberia’s post-conflict justice developments, and the international community’s response—to hone in on the centrality of ‘capacity’ in the development and justice sectors. Liberians are viewed by the international community and their own leaders as inherently lacking capacity. Capacity, however, is defined and identified by the international community—the health, justice and development experts of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and international NGOs —in a thoroughly self-referential manner that mitigates against opportunities to recognise strengths, knowledge and skills of Liberian communities. Ebola, Scully argues, ‘was halted in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Rethinking Institutions
• Part II. Rethinking Interventions
• Part III. Learning from the Field
• Correction to: Chapter 11: Speaking from the Ground: Transitional Gender Justice in Nepal
• Back Matter