Gendered Peace

Women's Struggles for Post-War Justice and Reconciliation

Donna Pankhurst

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415874489
• eBook ISBN: 9781135911348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume contributes to the growing literature on women, conflict and peacebuilding by focusing on the moments after a peace accord, or some other official ending of a conflict, often denoted as 'post-conflict' or 'post-war'. Such moments often herald great hope for holding to account those who committed grave wrongs during the conflict, and for a better life in the future. For many women, both of these hopes are often very quickly shattered in starkly different ways to the hopes of men. Such periods are often characterized by violence and insecurities, and the official ending of a war often fails to bring freedom from sexual violence for many women. Within such a context, efforts on the part of women, and those made on their behalf, to hold to account those who commit crimes against them, and to access their rights are difficult to make, are often dangerous, and are also often deployed with little effect. Gendered Peace explores international contexts, and a variety of local ones, in which such struggles take place, and evaluates their progress. The volume highlights the surprising success in the development of international legal advances for women, but contrasts this with the actual experience of women in cases from Sierra Leone, Rwanda, South Africa, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, East Timor, Peru, Central America and the Balkans.'

1	Introduction
	Gendered War and Peace

This book is concerned with what happens to women when wars officially end. Along with several other volumes¹ it recognises that women face particular difficulties at such “aftermath” moments, which often have very strong continuities with what happened during wars, and with the nature of gender relations in society prior to armed conflict. At the international level remarkable progress has been made: in establishing women's legal rights; in the identification of sexual violence as a potential war crime; and even progress in some women's abilities to access such legal frameworks. Nonetheless, when faced with a post-war backlash from men and the state, women in highly varied cultural contexts tend to face distinct difficulties as they seek justice for crimes committed against them during and after wars; when they attempt to participate in “truth and reconciliation” endeavours, and when they attempt to re-build their lives. This book ² explores how far we have come both through international frameworks and in particular countries, and examines the ways in which the endings of war still often bring highly gendered challenges for women which are themselves often violent.

GENDERED WAR DEATHS AND SURVIVAL RATES

An assessment of what happens to women when wars officially end logically begins with an assessment of the extent of mortality and injury as post-war legacies. Much has been written about women's experiences during wars and, after well over a decade of feminists’ lobbying, there has been some success in a generalised recognition at the international level that during wars women play key roles, carry heavy socio-economic burdens, and themselves suffer casualties. Such a shift away from women being virtually invisible in conflict analyses has been facilitated by a common understanding that after the Cold War, war itself took on a different and distinct character, which intensified women's involvement. A key feature of so-called “new wars” is the lack of separation between the “war front” and the “home front”, and, whilst it is possible to argue that some wars in previous decades and centuries could also be characterised in this way, the point is that the increased vulnerability of civilians has become commonplace. There are many publications which assert that civilian casualties in war are greater than military casualties, and that women and children have become major casualties in war where once they were much less so (Giles and Hyndman 2004b: 3, 4–5). Typical of these is Cockburn (2001: 21), who cites the oft-quoted figure that 90 per cent of the casualties of today's wars are civilians.

This overarching realignment of the identity of war casualties as now being predominantly civilian, has sometimes led to the elision that women are victimised by war to a greater extent than men, because the majority of civilians are women, and when the populations of civilian women and children are added together, they outnumber male combatants. In the post-war context women survivors generally outnumber men and so it is also often said that women as a group bear the greater burdens for post-war recovery. An example of this is Turshen (2001b: 58). Nonetheless it is the case that more men than women die directly from violence across the world in general, as well as directly from war (Pearce 2006; WHO 2002) and none of those who cite the 90 per cent civilian deaths figure, or who highlight the burdens of women, actually refute this directly, although there is certainly ambiguity in some accounts if they are not read with care.

Some confusion derives from the fact that we do not usually have anything like accurate data for war-related deaths, as recently demonstrated in the international disputes about deaths in Iraq (Davies 2006). Nonetheless, some analysts have undertaken careful statistical analysis of gender differentials,³ and the calculations of Plümper and Neumayer, 2005 show that more women than men die or suffer serious disease as a result of war:

over the entire conflict period interstate wars, civil wars and internationalised civil wars on average affect women more adversely than men...we also find that ethnic wars and wars in ‘failed’ states are much more damaging to women than other civil wars. (Plümper and Neumayer 2005:3)⁴

Nonetheless the weak statistical base and previous assertions about women “bearing the brunt” of war, has already led to one major publication, by the Human Security Commission (HSC 2005) asserting that publications which allege that women “bear the brunt” of war⁵ are misleading, citing Amnesty International (2004) in particular. The HSC alleges that in gender-aware approaches to conflict, “the huge costs that political violence imposes on males have been mostly ignored” (2005:111) and that the disproportionate suffering of women has been exaggerated. Men certainly do constitute the majority of battle-related deaths, a point which has never been questioned and is in fact emphasised in HSC's cited source of Plümper and Neumayer (2005). Nonetheless, the evidence given by these latter authors and Stewart, Huang, and Wang (2001: 93) for the longer term strongly contradicts the HSC assertions. The HSC report presents no evidence to show that this previous work is incorrect, and confuses data about the relative number of people who have to leave their homes. Some of this debate may be rooted in misunderstandings about the meaning of “casualty”, “victim”, and “bearing the burden”, but the report's dramatic claim seems to go beyond the need for us to tie our analyses more closely to empirical data. In effect it stakes out an ideological position that itself does not accurately reflect the empirical evidence it cites.⁶

On balance then, the extent of women's war-related mortality remains controversial. Not surprisingly, more detailed data on the gender balance of survivors and heads of household, for instance, are also very difficult to generate and are often contested. Against this globally confusing backdrop, there are nonetheless common differences faced by women as a backlash against them occurs.

POST-WAR BACKLASH AGAINST WOMEN

The post-conflict environment cannot be characterized as one in which life for women invariably returns to “normal”—even if a return to previous patterns of gender and social relationships, as if no war had occurred, were desirable or even possible. The upheaval of war, in which societies have been transformed and livelihood systems disrupted, in which women have assumed certain roles for the first time or come into contact with new ideas, has its own impact on intra-personal relationships and social expectations. Furthermore, evidence from gendered analyses of post-war situations in the former Yugoslavia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere (Rehn and Sirleaf 2002) shows that women not only face a continuation of some of the aggression they endured during the war, but may also face new forms of violence. In the design of policies for post-war reconstruction, women's needs are often systematically ignored, and even deliberately marginalized. This may carry forward echoes of past situations and power relations, but there can also be a new edge of aggression against women.⁷ Together, the continued and new forms of violence, and the attacks on women's newly-assumed rights and behaviours, constitute what frequently amounts to a post-war backlash against women.⁸ Such a backlash seems to be very common across quite contrasting social, economic, and geographical contexts, as has been reflected in a number of publications (e.g., Meintjes et al. 2001a) although the specifics seem to vary. Two key elements seem to be common: an “anti-women” discourse with associated restrictions on the life-choices of women regarding social, economic, and political activity (El Bushra 2004; Meintjes et al. 2001b: 12–14); and violence against women which continues above the level of pre-conflict violence, and sometimes at a higher level than during war itself.

The backlash discourse may be expressed through state institutions, the media, or in everyday public and private language. It is often about “restoring” or “returning” to something associated with peace in the past, even where the change actually undermines women's rights to a more unequal situation than before the war—in effect to a balance of gender politics which is unambiguously in favour of men as a gender. It is also often accompanied by imagery of the culturally specific equivalent of Pierson's (1989) concept of a “beautiful soul”, and strongly associates women with cultural notions of “tradition”, motherhood, and peace, using new and old cultural norms (Turshen 2001a: 80).⁹

Women can be targeted for having gained economic independence from men, for having been employed in “male” roles, or for having adopted urban and educated lifestyles in predominantly rural societies. There are calls for them to be forced “back” into kitchens and fields, even if they were not so occupied before the war (Cockburn 2004:40). It is sometimes unclear whether these outcries are spontaneous reactions from individual men, or whether they are orchestrated by the state or government.¹⁰ In either case, at both social and individual levels there are forceful attempts to define women's roles and rights as secondary to those of men,¹¹ and to restrict women's behaviour.

Protests by women against such behaviour are often castigated as being “Western-influenced” (Kandiyoti this volume; El Bushra 2004). In such an intense and sometimes violent moment, the state can bring to bear many of the policies used in “normal times” to intervene in gender politics, or weight the “sex war” in favour of men. The state becomes instrumental in enforcing controls over women's sexuality; fails to increase, or prevent a decline in, women's personal security; imposes legal, or supports social, restrictions on women's movement, access to housing, jobs, and property (especially land), and marginalizes women's health needs. In many cases such official policy outcomes are reinforced by the practices of international organizations which do not actively seek the opinions of women or fail to promote their interests where this might be deemed “culturally insensitive”. Women also commonly find their contributions to the war and peace efforts marginalized in both official and popular accounts of war, as happened in Europe immediately after the Second World War. There seems to be an attempt to deny that shifts in gender relations were required for women to take on their war-time roles, or that they will ever, by implication, actually be possible (Kelly 2000: 62; Sideris 2001a: 54).

Such backlash experiences were experienced with bitterness by women active in liberation struggles; for example in Algeria, Eritrea, Mozambique, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe, where some of the women concerned had even risen to senior military ranks (Luciak this volume; Sørenson 1998:37). Ilja Luciak's chapter summarises some of the fates of women in the post-war contexts of Central America. In El Salvador considerable social animosity and pressure was brought to bear on women who had challenged gender roles during the conflict and those who wanted to continue to do so afterwards. This led to many of them choosing to be much less politically active and take a less public role. Political scandals resulting from the exposure of sexual abuse committed by Ortega and other senior members of FSLN in Nicaragua, and Noriega in Guatemala, revealed the extensive social support that remained for condoning the sexual abuse of girl children and the social abuse of women. Furthermore the dramatic and horrific rise in murders of women in Guatemala is seen to continue with impunity. The chapter concludes with the view that much of the resistance to change faced by women is itself reinforced, if not caused, by a backlash against the struggles for greater equality between women and men.

Women excluded from post-war planning

“It is really amazing”, said one Kosovar woman...”that the international community cared only about Kosovar women when they were being raped—and then only as some sort of exciting story. We see now that they really don't give a damn about us. What we see here are men, men, men from Europe and America, and even Asia, listening to men, men, men from Kosovo. Sometimes they have to be politically correct so they include a woman on a committee or they add a paragraph to a report. But when it comes to real involvement in the planning for the future of this country, our men tell the foreign men to ignore our ideas. And they are happy to do so—under the notion of “cultural sensitivity.” Why is it politically incorrect to ignore the concerns of Serbs or other minorities, but “culturally sensitive” to ignore the concerns of women?”

Source: Rehn and Sirleaf (2002: 125).

The chapter by Dubravka Žarkov, Rada Drezgić, and Tanja Djurić-Kuzmanović also illustrates some aspects of this backlash phenomenon. The authors look at the reproductive rights of women and how these changed in the dramatically shifting political context of the breakup of Yugoslavia and its consequent wars and post-war aftermaths. They highlight a particular feature of the post-war backlash in the region as being the reduction of women's rights to abortion, as compared with the pre-war situation. As these were wars in which mass rape was a key weapon of war, this constitutes a form of violence against women having to bear the consequences of giving birth to children conceived under such horrific circumstances. They also highlight other difficult features for women in the aftermath relating to employment and possibilities for political action.

A second major feature of post-war backlash is that of violence targeted at women, and sexual assault in particular, which often continue above the level of pre-conflict violence, and sometimes at a higher level than during war itself. Women may also be arrested (Jacobs and Howard 1987) and murdered (Luciak, this volume) in this inflamed context of anti-women discourse. After wars officially end, women continue to be raped by soldiers, policemen, former combatants (both strangers and partners) and even peacekeepers¹²—those whose responsibility it is to safeguard and protect them in the “at peace” environment. They may be attacked at home, on the way to collect water, to work in the fields, in the urban workplace and when they go to the police station for help. In camps for refugees and the displaced, and in areas were livelihood systems have collapsed, they continue to be forced to sell sex as a means of economic survival. ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Boxed Text and Tables
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Gendered War and Peace
• 2 Gendering International Justice: Progress and Pitfalls at International Criminal Tribunals
• 3 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and Gender Justice
• 4 “Your Justice Is Too Slow”: Will the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Fail Rwanda’s Rape Victims?
• 5 Gender Injustice and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
• 6 The Politics of Gender and Reconstruction in Afghanistan: Old Dilemmas or New Challenges?
• 7 The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) Accord and After: Gendered Dimensions of Peace
• 8 Marrying Your Rapist: Domesticated War Crimes in Peru
• 9 Joining Forces for Democratic Governance: Women’s Alliance-Building for Post-War Reconstruction in Central America
• 10 Gendered War, Gendered Peace: Violent Conflicts in the Balkans and Their Consequences
• 11 Post-War Backlash Violence against Women: What Can “Masculinity” Explain?
• Contributors
• Index