Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism PDF
Preview Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism
Women, War, and Violence Women, War, and Violence Personal Perspectives and Global Activism Edited by Robin M. Chandler, Lihua Wang, and Linda K. Fuller WOMEN, WAR, AND VIOLENCE Copyright © Robin M. Chandler, Lihua Wang, and Linda K. Fuller, 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10371-9 Cover image: original collage entitled “Capoeira”, Robin M. Chandler. Collection: Nynex Corporate Art Collection All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above c ompanies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28806-9 ISBN 978-0-230-11197-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230111974 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women, war, and violence : personal perspectives and global activism / edited by Robin M. Chandler, Lihua Wang, and Linda K. Fuller. p. cm. 1. Women and war. 2. War victims. 3. Women—Violence against. 4. Victims of violence. I. Chandler, Robin M. II. Wang, Lihua. III. Fuller, Linda K. JZ6405.W66W66 2009 2009051994 303.6082—dc22 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.(cid:1) Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (cid:53)(cid:83)(cid:66)(cid:79)(cid:84)(cid:71)(cid:70)(cid:83)(cid:83)(cid:70)(cid:69)(cid:1)(cid:85)(cid:80)(cid:1)(cid:37)(cid:74)(cid:72)(cid:74)(cid:85)(cid:66)(cid:77)(cid:1)(cid:49)(cid:83)(cid:74)(cid:79)(cid:85)(cid:74)(cid:79)(cid:72)(cid:1)(cid:19)(cid:17)(cid:18)(cid:22) Contents Foreword vii Cynthia Enloe Preface and Acknowledgments xi Lihua Wang List of Contributors xv Introduction: Life Blossoms in the Killing Fields 1 Robin M. Chandler Part I Understanding Gender-Based Violence, Rebuilding Personal Security for Girls and Women, and Peace-Building 1 Not Making Excuses: Functions of Rape as a Tool in Ethno-Nationalist Wars 17 Natalja Zabeida 2 Speaking with Postwar Liberia: Gender-Based Violence Interventions for Girls and Women 31 Robin M. Chandler 3 Sexual Violence among Refugees and Asylum Seekers Who Come to the United States 45 Linda Piwowarczyk 4 Victims, Villains, and Victors: Mediated Wartime Images of Women 59 Linda K. Fuller Part II Organizational Reconciliation, Policy Reform, and Postwar Effects on Women 5 Challenging Hegemonic Understandings of Human Rights Violations in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The Need for a New Narrative 75 Kiri Gurd and Rashida Manjoo vi Contents 6 A Gendered Approach for Policy in United Nations Peacekeeping Missions 99 Colleen Keaney-Mischel 7 Aftermath of U.S. Invasions: The Anguish of Women in Afghanistan and Iraq 117 Hayat Imam Part III Reframing Twenty-First Century Feminism with Global Ethnic Struggles 8 Women and Peace in a Divided Society: Peace-Building Potentials of Feminist Struggles and Reform Processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina 137 Anne Jenichen 9 Peace Is the Name of an Unborn Child in Turkey 155 Simten Coşar 10 Reconstructing Women in Postconflict Rwanda 171 Laura Sjoberg Part IV Confronting the Patriarchy of War as Women Combatants and Noncombatants 11 Relationships of War: Mothers, Soldiers, Knowledge 189 Steven L. Gardiner and Angie Reed Garner 12 F emale Participation in the Iraqi Insurgency: Insights into Nationalist and Religious Warfare 205 Karla J. Cunningham 13 A gency and Militarization in the Heartland: Noncombatant American Women 219 Michelle M. Gardner-Morkert 14 Horror to Hope, Tragedy to Triumph: The Women of Rwanda 233 Tadia Rice Index 255 Foreword Cynthia Enloe B ooks are written in history. We each read any book in history. Each book grows out of a particular historical context—its distinctive understandings, anxieties, and power dynamics. Some readers’ under- standings of their own historical moment are transformed by reading a book. Women, War, and Violence is going to press in the immediate aftermath of two historic international decisions in the ongoing evolu- tion of global gendered politics. First, on Monday, September 14, the 192 state delegations of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of creating a new consolidated UN agency for women. Then, two weeks later, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted res- olution 1888. It called on all UN agencies and all UN member states to take specific steps to end sexual violence against women in armed conflict, but went further, creating a new Special Representative to provide leadership and monitoring of the steps taken (or not taken) to carry out SCR1888. Robin M. Chandler, Lihua Wang, and Linda K. Fuller as this book’s editors and the researchers who have contributed these chapters to their volume, together, have played a small but crucial role in both of these historic decisions. As their fortunate readers, we are better able to see where we are located at this moment in gendered interna- tional history. For it is has been the burgeoning feminist analyses of women’s experiences of prewar, war and postwar that have provided much of the ground work for the energetic lobbying of the UN by feminist civil society groups to take the condition of women seriously. For decades, government officials and international civil servants and their contractors have been comfortable in imagining, first, that the prewar subordination of women both by individual men and by masculinized state institutions had nothing to do with the sorts of militarized thinking and militarized relationships that led to repeated outbreaks of armed conflict. That is, paying close attention to—and viii Foreword systematically documenting—women’s relationships to men, to prop- erty, to violence, and to states would, they casually assumed, add noth- ing to the causal explanations of why wars broke out. Second, for generations, policy makers within states and within international agencies relied on the short-sighted notion that wars were merely conflicts between men, but that no curiosity had to be invested in the investigations of masculinities, nor in how the politics of femininity and masculinity played out in women’s lives and on their bodies in wartime. Nor did they believe that it was worth pay- ing any attention to the thinking and the organizing that so many women did in the midst of wars. Third, for all these years, state and international actors (some with policy-making portfolios, others with research grants) imagined that the people to worry about in the post- war era were the demobilized male soldiers. They, it was commonly thought, would either subvert the fragile peace or contribute to the postwar national rebuilding efforts. Women in the post war era? They would, it was commonly imagined, simply return to their proper domestic spheres and grieve over their wartime losses in private. All three assumptions have produced masculinized ceasefire and peace negotiations. Together, these three assumptions have left alleg- edly sophisticated political observers surprised at the subsequent outbreak of a new violent conflict. The perpetuation of this trio of assumptions has helped reestablish patriarchal familial and political institutions in postwar societies. These three assumptions also have sustained a UN machinery for women that has been fragmented, toothless and chronically underfunded. The smart editors and contributors to Women, War and Violence underscore here—and add nuance to—the burgeoning evidence that is challenging all three of these deep-seated masculinized interna- tional assumptions. In doing so, they are adding force to the argu- ment for taking women’s subordination in peacetime seriously in the name of preventing war. They are making wartime violence against women a question of policy and thus of accountability. They are mak- ing the militarization of both femininity and of masculinity a topic for peacetime investigation. They are extending our too-short atten- tion spans into postwar eras where widows organize to reform patri- archal inheritance laws, where survivors of wartime rape organize to pursue justice, and where transnational feminist alliances press the United Nations General Assembly and the powerful Security Council to move beyond cheap platitudes to meaningful action for the sake of insuring women’s rights. Foreword ix The relationships between feminist research and feminist action can often seem terribly vague. We rethink old questions, we share research through our teaching, we launch new field investigations, we organize conferences where we can reflect on each other’s find- ings, we publish books and articles that we hope someone will read. But who “out there” listens? Whose understandings—framings, discourses, agendas—are changed by all this feminist work? Well, it turns out, that a lot of people are listening. A lot of minds can be changed. Usually, though, it is not the research and writings of just one person which achieves such a shift. It is the diggings and the public sharing of findings by dozens of people in dozens of countries that manage to unsettle masculinist collective thinking, moving it an inch, sometimes a yard. Preface and Acknowledgments Lihua Wang T his book has had quite a history, dating as it does from a confer- ence on “Women, War, and Violence” that we organized in 2006 at Northeastern University under the directorship of Robin M. Chandler, then chair of Women’s Studies. Like other programs, ours is perceived of as an academic field linked to radical political politics, with academic feminists continually trying to transform public per- ceptions. Here, we encouraged public awareness of violence against women and girls, with many mutual partners and initiatives. Lilly Marceline, then program coordinator of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARCC), proposed her organization’s idea of focusing on war-related violence against women. Other local orga- nizations brought a range of different interests, participants includ- ing Amnesty International, the Reebok Human Rights Project, the Refugee Immigration Ministry, the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence, the Trafficking Victims Outreach & Services Network, the Funding Exchange, and the Boston Care Network. It was both a challenge and an honor to work with all these diverse organizations. The process included on and off campus efforts, collaborations, and negotiations. Mainly, the planning stages reflecting feminist activism, included collectivity, advocacy, and action. From the beginning, utilizing the whole groups’ efforts was our clear goal; to achieve it, we formed a working committee of more than ten representatives from both internal university programs and local organizations. Beside Women’s Studies, internal sponsors included the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence; the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development, and the Dean’s office of College of Arts and Sciences. Two student groups—the Black Student Organization and the Feminist Student Organization, also participated.
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