Table Of ContentWomen, 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®
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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,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above c ompanies
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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.
