International Perspectives on Gender, War and Peace-building

Abstract

Women experience war in different ways that are often distinctive from men, but they tend to be eclipsed by male accounts and men’s preoccupations. International organisations such as the UN, EC, as well as international and local NGOs have been highlighting the ‘hidden’ issues for many years, and yet gender-blindness persists in conflict analysis, conflict resolution, and in the political strategies of governments of war-torn societies and the international agencies that support them. ‘Women’s war stories’ still form a major part of the research, as ignorance about what women do in wartime persists - stereotypes of women as vulnerable victims are more often the focus in preference to the multiple ways in which women take on new roles during wars, whilst they also survive attack. Such new roles are often then marginalized or even deliberately undermined during peace-building efforts. A focus on women as the workers for peace has been championed at the expense of consideration of the other roles women (sometimes the same women) play in conflicts at different times. The extraordinary degree of sexual violence against women during and after war - at home and in the community, as well as from ‘the enemy’ - is often held up as evidence of the depths to which humanity can drop. It is gradually being taken more seriously in the post-war legal context, but with little or no public discussion about why it occurs. This panel reviews how far we have come over the last decade or so, and explores some associated analytical issues about these phenomena, and how these tend to be ignored in policy contexts.

Title	Details
The Problem of Truth: Gender, Silence and Peace-Building	View Paper Details
Feminine Rights: A psychoanalytic Theorisation of Femininity and the Conceptualisation of Human Rights	View Paper Details
The Gendered Parameters of 'New Wars'	View Paper Details
A Few Kind Women: Gender Essentialism and Peacekeeping Operations	View Paper Details
The Woman and War: Features of Female Perception of World War II	View Paper Details
War and Sex - Til Death Do Us Part	View Paper Details