Gender and the Political Economy of Conflict in Africa

The persistence of violence

Meredeth Turshen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317636540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Développement durable

Violence affects the economy of production and the ecology of reproduction— the production of economic goods and services and the generational reproduction of workers, the regeneration of the capacity to work and maintenance of workers on a daily basis, and the renewal of culture and society through community relations and the education of children

Gender and the Political Economy of Conflict in Africa explores the persistence of violence in conflict zones in Africa using a political economy framework. This framework employs an analysis of violence on both edges of the spectrum—a macro-economic analysis of violence against workers and a micro-political analysis of the violence in women's reproductive lives. These analyses come together to create a new explanation of why violence persists, a new political economy of violence against women, and a new theoretical understanding of the relation between production and reproduction. Three case studies are discussed: the Democratic Republic of the Congo (violence in an era of conflict), Sierra Leone (violence post-conflict), and Tanzania (which has not seen armed conflict on the mainland).

This book fills a significant gap on the political economy of war and women/gender for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers in African Studies, Gender Studies, and Peace and Conflict Studies.

Part 1 The persistence of violence

DOI: 10.4324/9781315758565-1

1 Gender and the political economy of violence

DOI: 10.4324/9781315758565-2

Lors des pillages au village, c’est moi qui toquais aux portes. Quand on entendait la voix d’une fillette, on ouvrait sans hésitation et les Interahamwe en profitaient pour piller et violer. En fin de compte, je les aidais à transporter ce qu’ils avaient pillé. Je l’ai fait pendant quatre ans.¹ [Congolese child soldier, 10 years old when abducted]

(Wakubenga, 2013, p. 129)

The title of this book – Gender and the political economy of conflict in Africa: the persistence of violence – establishes its three themes: gender, used here to designate the economic, political, social and cultural relations of power between the sexes; conflict, traced from the slave era through colonialism to the twenty-first century; and violence, meaning individual behaviour or collective acts that inflict injury, death, psychological harm or deprivation, or damage the natural or built environment. Violence is an abstraction that can be reified only within a historical context; it occurs within social structures that consign women, men, children and communities to roles in a highly stratified global economy. The axiomatic expression of violence is war.² In Africa, in the last decades of the twentieth century, 24 civil wars were fought (including one in North Africa).³

This book explores the persistence of violence in conflict zones in Africa using a political economy framework to situate violence against women and men in the context of criminal, corrupt and violent economies. Violence affects the economy of production and the ecology of reproduction – the production of economic goods and services and the generational reproduction of workers, the regeneration of the capacity to work and maintenance of workers on a daily basis, and the renewal of culture and society through community relations and the education of children. The political economy approach employs an analysis of violence on both edges of the spectrum – a macro-economic analysis of violence against workers and a micro-political analysis of the violence in women’s reproductive lives. These analyses come together to create a new explanation of why violence persists, a new political economy of violence against women, and a new theoretical understanding of the relation between production and reproduction. The backdrop is the extractive industries in Africa, the global trade in diamonds, gold and other minerals. The case studies are the Democratic Republic of Congo (violence in an era of conflict), Sierra Leone (violence post-conflict), and Tanzania (which has not seen armed conflict on the mainland).

Chapter 1 reflects on the multiple meanings of violence in order to seat the analysis of structural violence in relations of production and social reproduction. To explain how armed conflict affects those relations, the literature on new wars is considered and linked to an assessment of the corrupting impact of war economies on gender and generational relations. The civil wars in Congo and Sierra Leone – the book’s case studies – are briefly outlined with special attention to the extractive industries, the regionalised character of those wars, and the global trade networks in which they were enmeshed. This background silhouettes the economic and social consequences of civil wars for women, men and children.

The multiple meanings of violence

Most accounts of violence in Africa focus on civil war, on visible and physical violence, and on the bodies of victims and perpetrators as the ‘terrain for staging violence’ (Ferme, 1998, p. 555). Yet even after the truce is signed, repeated reports of deadly clashes reveal that conflict and violence continue, sometimes at even higher levels than during the war, although those who inflict violence and those who suffer are not the same wartime combatant/civilian dyad (Ibeanu, 2002). Gender-based violence appears to be brought from war zones into the community and home life: the levels of violence seen during conflict contribute to a high tolerance of violence in the aftermath (Swaine, 2012, p. 16). In spite of the disarmament and demobilisation of troops, violence persists in the economy, in politics, in everyday life, in gender and generational relations, in memory, and in the country’s international affairs.

Writings about gender and war focus mainly on interpersonal attacks on women, although violence has many explanations and multiple associations. Interpersonal violence is but one dimension of civilians’ wartime experience, as H. Patricia Hynes (2004, p. 433) makes clear: An exclusive focus on sexual attacks on women misses sexual abuse of men, women’s abuse of women and men, and the ways in which war changes more than familial gender relations. A corrective is to define war in its full life cycle, including preparation for war, the prosecution of war, post-war activities and ‘the public ideology of militarized defense as the guarantor of national security’ (Hynes, 2004, p. 433). Even this approach does not convey the full experience of violence. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2003, p. 22) write, Violence, in its manifold institutional, systemic, political, economic, social, cultural and interpersonal forms, has multiple meanings. Many specific meanings are embedded in institutions and disciplines like the criminal justice system (the analysis of interpersonal and self-inflicted violence), psychology and sociology (the study of violent behaviour and social structure), ethics and religion (considerations of intentional and unintentional violence), political science (investigations of armed violence and political and state violence), design (planning that displays the function or workings of objects and spaces) and anthropology (documentation of communal violence). One speaks of cultures of violence, of domestic and intimate-partner violence, of violent cultures, mob violence, and sexual and gender-based violence. Dan Hoffman (2011, p. 48), writing about the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, explores violence as a mode of production; he is thinking of the young men who cycle through the region’s mines and battlefields as labourers. The fungibility of violence, Hoffman says, results from understanding war as a mode of labour, since ‘the performance of violence can be traded on the market’. Some violence is legitimated in the guise of peacekeeping as in United Nations forces in Congo (Intervention by ONUC, 1960), Zaire (MONUC, 1999), Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL, 1999) and the DRC (MONUSCO, 2010).

violence is structured to harness cultural notions of femininity, masculinity, procreation, and nurturance and to put them into the service of state wars and mass murder or to fuel peacetime forms of domination that make the subordinate participate in their own socially imposed suffering.

To lose one’s family, home and community in conflict; to be raped by enemy soldiers and then made suspect and shunned by one’s husband and community – these are a living death marked with acute impoverishment, profound culturally imposed shame and hopelessness.

Violence is sometimes described by the space in which it occurs. Urban violence is a concern in cities the world over. Scheper-Hughes (1997, p. 477) speaks of a ‘violence transition’ from political to criminal violence, referring to an epidemic of homicides, assaults, muggings, break-ins, car-jackings, gang wars and vigilantism for which urban victims hold disaffected, unattached and depoliticised youths responsible. Feminists have worked hard to bring so-called private family violence into the public realm. Movements for carceral reform have organised against the tolerance of prison violence. And educators and child protection services have argued against violent teachers and bullies in schools. Some question whether there is cross-cultural confusion around ‘public’ and ‘private’ violence, since delineations of public and private spheres differ by culture. This public/private binary is more fundamental than expressions of violence: it goes to the heart of society and differentiates cultures, religions and more. Many of the current so-called ‘culture wars’ are struggles around which decisions and behaviour should be individual and private and which should be collective, public and regulated. A more sophisticated analysis sees cultural and religious arguments as deliberate attempts to conceal ‘international structures of inequality, novel forms of patriarchy related to politicized religious movements, and flows of transnational capital’ (Abu-Lughod, 2013, p. 244). By disorganising society, by upsetting the usual hierarchies of genders and generations, violent conflict wrenches intimate behaviour out of private spaces and forces it into the public arena.

Hoffman (2011) uses spatial imagery in another sense – to describe the need of young Sierra Leoneans searching for work to be ready to move at any moment, to displace themselves as opportunities arise. Violence was not intrinsic to the search for work, but the men were willing to exchange violence on the market; the volition to commit violent acts was fungible. Gender continues to be overlooked in studies of the genesis of war violence even though local and international bodies such as the World Bank recognise armed conflict in resource-rich countries as a major cause of human rights violations (Lebert, 2010; Vines, 2006). UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1653 acknowledges the link between the illegal exploitation of natural resources, the illicit trade in those resources, and the proliferation and trafficking of arms as key factors fuelling and exacerbating such conflicts as the one in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa. Recognition of the particular nature of women’s and girls’ vulnerability in conflict is now nearly universal, heightened in such international instruments as UNSCR 1325, 1820, 1888 and 1889; but there is little talk about women as perpetrators of sexual assault on women and men. Rape among boys and men is beginning to be noticed but is still largely ignored in official circles. The full gender dimension is omitted from studies of the mechanisms and economic, social and political impacts of the extractive industries in African conflicts.

That same capacity might as easily be called on for labor in the diamond pits, labor tapping rubber, labor felling trees, or labor standing in line at a disarmament center. As laborers in a violent economy these were all qualitatively similar opportunities for work.

(Hoffman, 2011, p. 53)

Researchers from a range of disciplines (anthropology, conflict studies, history, law, political science and sociology) have studied the increasingly popular topic of sexual violence in conflict, but there is little if any consideration of how larger regional and globalised trade relations, both legal and illicit, manipulate gender dynamics, gender relations and gender-based violence. For example, reports of the UN panel of experts on the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo make little mention of gender (UNSC, 2002, 2003). State-sponsored regional studies, such as those carried out by the UK Department for International Development, examine mineral extraction and trade in the region (Sunman and Bates, 2007), but they do not consider the gender aspects of either benefits or vulnerability, nor do industry statements and ethical guidelines (EICC, 2009). Studies of gender and sexual violence in the eastern DRC have focused on international law, justice, impunity, masculinity, the motivation of perpetrators, public health, female combatants and the vulnerability of the girl child, rarely in context (Lebert, 2010).

Beyond war-related state and non-state activities lies the meta-context of the political economy: how each armed conflict fits into global commerce and international relations. How are we to understand the extortion of people’s livelihoods, the dispossession of their economic activity, the disruption of long-established economic, social and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I The persistence of violence
• 1 Gender and the political economy of violence
• 2 The gendered history of persistent violence
• Part II Violence in production and social reproduction
• 3 Gender and the use of force in production
• 4 Violence in biological and social reproduction
• 5 The construction of lives in armed conflict
• Part III Social movements and social justice
• 6 Social movements and the struggle for social justice
• Index