What is the relationship between gender, agency, and peac ebuilding? Do contemporary peacebuilding practices provide “gender justice” in (post-)conflict settings, or alternatively deliver “gendered” forms of peace marked by injustice and inequality? How and why do the gendered subjects of peace building demonstrate agency and resistance in response to international peacebuildin g interventions? Since the 1990s, reports of widespread sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV)1 perpetrated against civilians in situations of conflict have captured international attention. Media accounts, investigations by human rights groups, and fact-finding missions by international organisations have all documented the gendered nature of contemporary warfare––including the disproportionate targeting of women and girls through rape and sexual vio lence,2 and the gendered impact of enforced disappearances (e.g. Dewhirst and Kapur 2015).3 The increased visibility of SGBV in armed conflict has bolstered international support for a range of justice mechanisms which hold potential to address gender-specific harms4 experienced by women in contexts of political violence. The criminalisation of a range of gender-based harms under the Statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and ad hoc International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, as well as domestic criminal codes, has provided scope for survivors to access justice and redress. Non-judicial mechanisms––spanning truth-telling initiatives, reparation programmes, institutional reform, and so on––are increasingly deployed in peacebuildi ng contexts to deal with complex legacies of violence and wide-scale human rights abuses. Though early approaches were critiqued for being “gender blind”, more recent initiatives have incorporated both women and gender into mechanisms aimed at providing justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of non-repetition for survivors (Theidon 2007; Valji 2010).5
The importance of integrating both women and gender into peacebuilding and justice initiatives is increasingly stressed by international, regional, and local actors. The adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNS CR 1325) in October 2000 is hailed as a “landmark” in this regard, by placing gender equality on the UN’s peace and security agenda for the first time (Cohn 2008). U NSCR 1325 and subsequent resolutions on “Women, Peace and Security” (WPS)6 form a key policy framework for incorporating women’s rights and gender issues into contemporary peacebuilding and post-war justice practices. These resolutions recognise the gendered impact of conflict, and stress the importance of integrating a gender perspective into peacebuilding. They call for women’s full participation as active agents of peacebuilding, and affirm the need to respond to SGBV in conflict by holding perpetrators to account, and by providing survivors with access to justice, protection, and redress.7 A wide array of strategies have emerged, that variously seek to end impunity for SGBV, empower survivors, and mobilise political will, resources, and coordinated responses around the WPS agenda.8 These developments have materialised following years of advocacy by women’s organisations and civil society groups (Askin 1997; Mertus and Hocevar Van Wely 2004). The post-Cold War era saw a “new era of feminist consciousness” (Enloe 1994) emerge, with feminist scholars and practitioners challenging the gender bias of dominant human rights discourse and practice (Bunch and Reilly 1994), and contesting the widespread impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of SGBV in wartime (Askin 1997; de Brouwer 2005; Copelon 1994; Chappell 2015).
Despite the growing rhetoric on the importance of gender justice and equality, many argue that international peacebuildi ng interventions still fail to address the gender-specific concerns of women in conflicted and post-conflict settings, and continue to overlook the agency of women in war and peace. Women continue to be sidelined from official peace processes (Bell 2004; Bell and O’Rourke 2010; UN Women 2010); the issue of gender equality is rarely prioritised in the design and implementation of peace agreements and post-conflict reconstruction programmes (Chinkin and Paradine 2001), and SGBV in conflict is often not adequately addressed in post-war justice processes (Campbell 2016; Copelon 2000; de Brouwer 2005; Mishkowski and Mlinarević 2009). The “post-war moment”, feminist activists and scholars remind us, regularly remains a “gendered continuum of conflict and violence” (Žarkov and Cockburn 2002; Moser 2001), in which gendered forms of injustice, inequality, and insecurity regularly become institutionalised (Pankhurst 2008b). Furthermore, dominant discourses on peacebu il ding, as espoused by international organisations and major states, frequently (re)produce problematic representa tions of women’s agency––stereotyping women in orientalist terms as “homogenized victims of a ‘backward’ society”, or alternatively in essentialised and instrumentalised terms as mothers and peacebuilders (Hudson 2012: 454). These stereotypes are problematic in devaluing women’s agency in conflict and peace, and contributing to their disempowerment (Hudson 2012).
In response to these shortcomings, this book examines the gender politics of contemporary peacebuilding . It develops a feminist critique of the “liberal peace project”9 through a study of transitional justice (TJ) policies and practices, and women’s responses to official discourse surrounding them. Working through traumatic memory is central to how individuals and societies experience and deal with the aftermath of mass violence. TJ mechanisms play a pivotal role in disciplining memory and in (re)constructing a usable past upon which “peace” and “justice” can be (re)built (Edkins 2003: 5–19).10 These encompass judicial and non-judicial tools and approaches––including criminal trials, truth-seeking and truth-tell ing initiatives, reparation programmes, vetting and inst itutional reform––which are intended to enable societies emerging from violent conflict or large-scale human rights abuses come to terms with the past and prevent its repetition in the future.11 However, meanings of “peace” and “justice” are essentially contested, creating important opportunities for gendered agency and resistance to be voiced, often in subtle and nuanced ways. Based on discourse analysis of key TJ policies, narrative interviews with women activists, and observation of gender justice events across Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH),12 this study examines how local expressions of gendered agency and resistanc e emerge within the context of an internationally supported peacebuilding miss ion. Focusing in particular on issues of w artime sexual violence and missin g persons, it explores how women in BiH have responded in agential and resistant ways to TJ policies and programmes emanating from international and domestic elites. The book reveals how BiH women define and perceive post-conflict justice in response to gendered experiences of sexual violence and enforced disappearances.
Drawing on debates within feminist social and political theory on the nature of gender justice, this study explores women activists’ struggles around justice, which entail attempts to reclaim agency and political subjectivity in the aftermath of violence. The book highlights how victims, survivors, and their representatives are pushing for a more complex form of justice than what current paradigms of retributive and restorative justice provide––one that bestows recognition of suffering, addresses demands for the red istribution of material and symbolic/cultural resources, and/or enables victims to participate and reclaim voice and agenc y in the aftermath of trauma.13 Victims and survivors of wartime violence, and their representatives, have mobilised as agents of change in post-war BiH through forms of activism that centre on “dealing with the past”. Through remembrance ceremonies, testimony gathering, political protesting, and the production of cultural texts, images, and monuments, activists are articulating a variety of political demands in response to what they perceive as the shortcomings of the liberal peace project: namely the failure of both local and international actors to create a viable, just, and durable form of peace. These practices, in my view, represent attempts to reclaim agency and political subjectivity from a post-Cold War “civilising mission” (Paris 2002) focused upon governing and managing its host population via mechanisms of regulation, education, discipline, and control (Zanotti 2006), rather than prioritising issues of social justice and the achievem ent of positive peace for the majority of Bosnian citizens.
The Liberal Peace: Peacebuilding as Statebuilding
This study stems from my interest in the theory and practice of internationally supported peacebuilding and reconstruction operations in conflicted and post-conflict countries. These missions aim to prevent the resumption or escalation of violent conflict and to create a durable and sel...