Women’s discursive agency: How women ask parliamentary questions about transitional justice

Although the global norm of transitional justice is localized in national parliaments, scholars have overlooked how female legislators shape national transitional justice policy-making. Instead, the importance of women’s agency in shaping transitional justice processes has been based on the study of women’s civil society activism. This paper extends the understanding of women’s contribution to transitional justice by conducting a multi-modal discourse analysis of parliamentary questions about transitional justice asked by male and female members of the Croatian Parliament from 2004 to 2020. The paper investigates whether female legislators are marginalized by the adversarial nature of parliamentary discourse, considering women’s preference for cooperative discourse, as sociolinguists have argued. Quantitative analysis of the interactional dimension of parliamentary questions shows that women’s questions are as adversarial as men’s questions. Also, qualitative analysis of discourse demonstrates that female legislators broaden the scope of entitlements and press for the right to reparations to both male and female victims of violence. They overcome constraints posed by ideology and partisanship, although the constraints of nationalism appear most difficult to transcend. The paper advances feminist perspectives on transitional justice by identifying women’s discursive agency in post-conflict parliaments and its impact on transitional justice beyond the advocacy of women’s interests.