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Indicators and Success Stories: Understanding Knowledge Production on Gender, Conflict Mediation and National Reconciliation in Liberia

Africa
Gender
Security
Knowledge
Peace
Maria Martin De Almagro
Ghent University
Maria Martin De Almagro
Ghent University

Abstract

This article interrogates the ways in which knowledge about gender and transitional justice and competing representations of women and women’s organisations have been produced in UN peacebuilding discourse according to different logics of professionalisation, efficiency and neutrality. By focusing on the language and meanings associated with transitional justice, gender and women, and by combining textual analysis of project reports with interviews conducted with implementing partners and beneficiaries of Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) projects in Liberia, the article seeks to contribute to the discussion on knowledge production in peacebuilding and transitional justice in two ways: First, by providing understanding of how knowledge about ‘gender’ and ‘justice’ is produced, the politics behind this process, and how knowledge is exchanged between the different actors. Second, by exploring what this means for the type of policies that are made possible and desirable, and the type of policies that are left overlooked and what subject positions are ascribed to the different actors. Specifically, I first analyse the theory of change and at the success stories identified in PBF reports and argue that the way in which women and women’s organisations are made meaningful in transitional justice and national reconciliation processes moves from the role of victims to the role of new proletarians of national reconciliation. In the final section, I analyse interviews undertaken with implementing partners of these projects in order to understand how particular representations of gender justice were acted upon at the expense of other alternatives. This has significant implications for the ways in which transitional justice projects are gendered.