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

Women and the 1951 Refugee Convention: Fifty Years of Seeking Visibility

The refugee regime, built on the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, has long excluded women from the international right to protection from persecution. The gender-blind parameters of the Convention have been exacerbated by the same qualities in the international legal system of which it is a part; state practices toward asylum-seekers; and the dichotomous construction of the refugee regime as a whole, which has produced and reproduced victimizing identities of refugee women. Advances today, such as the adoption of gender guidelines in a number of states, have been more symbolic in effect than transforming. New policy paths need to be evaluated to ensure that the next half-century of refugee protection does not duplicate the inequalities of the past.Le régime juridique encadrant la protection des réfugiés, bâti sur la Convention des Nations Unies de 1951 relative au statut des réfugiés, a longtemps servi à priver les femmes du droit international de protection contre la persécution. Les paramètres de la Convention, qui sont indifférents aux sexospécificités, ont été intensifiés par les mêmes qualités se trouvant dans le régime juridique international dont elle fait d’ailleurs partie, par le traitement réservé aux demandeurs d’asile par les états et par la structure dichotomique du régime de la protection des réfugiés en général qui a produit et reproduit pour les femmes demandeurs d’asile des identités de victimes. Les progrès que l’on peut voir aujourd’hui, tel que l’adoption par un certain nombre de pays de programmes de sensibilisation aux spécificités sexuelles, sont plutôt symboliques et n’apportent pas de transformations réelles. Conséquemment, pour l’avenir, il importe d’examiner de nouvelles initiatives en matière de politiques à suivre afin de s’assurer que le prochain demisiècle de la protection des réfugiés ne perpétue pas les inégalités du passé

Gender Justice and Reconciliation

This paper examins how women's experiences of conflict and transition differ to that of men because of inherent gendered power relations and that, as a result women's experiances of violance and need for justice have till recent times largly been ignored. It speaks of gender justice as the protection of human rights based on gender equality and explores two such tenets: the acknowledgement of and seeking justice for women's experiences of sexual violance in conflict situation; and the securing of increased increased experiences of women in policy.gender justice, conflict, sexual violance, justice

Women at 2020: between progress, gender backlash and (post-)COVID realities

Webcast transmitted live on 24 September 2020The central themes of this discussion moderated by Ruth Rubio Marín, part-time Professor on Gender Governance at the EUI’s School of Transnational Governance were: the difference in the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis on men and women; the deficits and the potential of post-COVID recovery plans; the increase of violence against women in the context of the pandemic; the need for women leadership in managing the pandemic and beyon