Peace and Justice through a Feminist Lens: Gender Justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia

Post-conflict interventions to ‘deal with’ violent pasts have moved from exception to global norm. Early efforts to achieve peace and justice were critiqued as ‘gender-blind’—for failing to address sexual and gender-based violence, and neglecting the gender-specific interests and needs of women in transitional settings. The advent of UN Security Council resolutions on ‘Women, Peace and Security’ provided a key policy framework for integrating both women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite this, gender justice and equality in (post-)conflict settings remain largely unachieved. This article explores efforts to attain gender-just peace in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It critically examines the significance of a recent ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project—the Women’s Court for the former Yugoslavia—as a locally engaged approach to achieving justice and redress for women impacted by armed conflict. Drawing on participant observation, documentary analysis, and interviews with women activists, the article evaluates the successes and shortcomings of responding to gendered forms of wartime violence through truth-telling. Extending Nancy Fraser’s tripartite model of justice to peacebuilding contexts, the article advances notions of recognition, redistribution and representation as crucial components of gender-just peace. It argues that recognizing women as victims and survivors of conflict, achieving a gender-equitable distribution of material and symbolic resources, and enabling women to participate as agents of transitional justice processes are all essential for transforming the structural inequalities that enable gender violence and discrimination to materialize before, during, and after conflict

Café Europa Revisited : How to Survive Post-Communism

This event in the Sawchen Lecture Series featured Slavenka Drakulić in conversation with Professor emeritus Peter Stenberg, moderated by Dr. Markus Hallensleben. Slavenka Drakulić read from her newly translated book, 'Café Europa Revisited: How to Survive Post-Communism' (2021), followed by a discussion of actual political events in Central and Eastern Europe. The volume is an “evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism. An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet-led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Drakulić takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay collection.” This talk was co-organized by the UBC CMS Research Narratives Group.Non UBCUnreviewedOthe

Can Western Europe be at home in the Balkans?

As the title of this final chapter suggests, we wish to reverse the position that runs through much of the existing literature, of whether and how the Balkans have been seeking a home in Europe. Guided by Julia Kristeva’s important idea that it is only at the point at which we can imagine ourselves as strangers that we can start dealing with difference productively (as an enrichment of rather than threat to identity), we suggest that, as far as imagining a future Europe as “united in difference” goes, we need to think not only about the Balkans as part of a “growing” Europe but also of Europe as being at home in the Balkans...