Week 15

Gendercide and the Bosnian War

Joshua Kepkay

Ethnocentrism is the fuel of ethnic conflict, as it can lead to

wars where military strategies quickly become extremist. People become divided by nationality, causing them to believe that ethnicity is linked to social privilege; class privilege is mistaken as the state’s intentional social and economic oppression of poor ethnic groups. Such misrecognition sparked explosions of gendered extremism during the Bosnian war genocide. The territorial unit of the former Yugoslavia, embedded with cultural acrimony and patriarchalism. It became a politicized male space where women’s bodies represented territory to conquered by means of rape. The genocidal rape of non-Serb women and the mass murders of non-Serb men constituted a “gendercide” committed against non-Serbs within Bosnia and Herzegovina; men and women suffered differently at the hands of the Serbs intending to emasculate, terrorize, and weaken states of whom they sought to control. The gendering of this conflict arose from Slobodan Milosevic’s political opportunism, which he predicated on mythic ancient ethnic hatreds, and the patriarchal masculinity embedded within Balkan culture.1 Slobodan Milosevic and Ethnic Cleansing

The late Slobodan Milosevic, ex-president of Serbia, is the personification of Balkan patriarchy. His war crimes reflect a patriarchal masculinity that equates male power with domination and devaluation of the feminine and feminized “others.” Rising to power on an ultranationalist platform, Milosevic cited Serbian supremacy over all other Balkan ethnic groups. He paired his extreme right ideologies with the skilled demagoguery of a charismatic leader. By speaking of a Greater Serbia that would emerge through the seizure and cleansing of territory, he garnered

70 – Joshua Kepkay

the approval necessary to commence an “ethnic cleanse” within the Balkans. Before Milosevic’s rekindling of the “ancient hatred” between Bosniak Muslims and Serbs, those residing in Bosnia and Herzegovina had been content in a relatively peaceful multicultural state for many years. Milosevic’s nationalist campaign, however, inspired hostility towards non-Serbs by constructing a distinctive Serbian identity to encapsulating the nation through what Satzewich puts forth as the foundations of ethnic identity.2 Urging Serbs to rise up and claim class privilege, the ultranationalist campaign rests on employing race as a category for designing difference.3 Describing the Balkans as the historical territory of Serbs, Milosevic ordained that Serbia ought to reclaim them. On the anniversary of Serbia’s 1389 defeat by the Ottoman Empire, he symbolically invoked Serbian history in a speech directed at Serbs all across Europe proclaiming: "Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet."4 Recreating the Serbian ethnicity through his charismatic leadership, extreme right ideology, and a claim to territory, Milosevic’s invocation of history, nationalism, and racial privilege served a powerfully effective justification for war.

He shares traits similar to those of past charismatic leaders

such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin; however, he is perhaps more admirable (or despicable) depending on the value one places on honesty. To gain the territory of other Balkan states, Milosevic wrote ethnic cleansing into official policy allowing him to effectively propagate genocide; Hitler was more secretive in his genocidal campaign. The gendered genocide of the Bosnian war can be seen as a battle between a patriarchal, nationalist leadership and a threatened body of women.5 Milosevic’s mandate provided Serb citizens, military, and paramilitary forces with the rationale to justify the raping of women, the pillaging of their nation, and the murder of their men as a means to secure economic redistribution that would favor those of Serbian ethnic background. Allen describes the Serb policy of genocidal rape as follows:

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 71

1. The policy is aimed at the destruction of a people. 2. The best way to achieve this goal is to attack the women

and children. 3. Rape is the ideal means to this destruction. 4. Rape is used as a torture preceding death and is used on

males as well as females regardless of age. 5. Enforced pregnancy and eventual child birth. 6. Enforced pregnancy negating all cultural identifications of

victims, reducing victims to sexual containers. 7. Three forms of genocidal rape

a. Publicly b. Within concentration camps c. Within rape/death camps6

Rape Warfare and Gendercide

In order to engage in a proper discourse of genocidal rape during the Bosnian war it is essential that we clarify the difference between rape warfare and peacetime rape. Lene Hansen distinguishes the former as a collective threat to a nation and the later as an individual risk. Raping of an individual is predisposed by the victim’s sexual features rather than their ethnicity.7 Moreover, wartime rape lacks the sexual connotations that surround the rape of an individual since it is perpetrated in the name of a nation, religion, or an ethnicity. In the Bosnian War, bodies became gendered and sexed, as non-Serb men were perceived to pose a military and sexual threat to Serb dominance; women were recognized as national territory and sexual container to be conquered and colonized.

Mary Hawkesworth explains that the genocidal rape that

transpired during the Serbian incursion in Bosnia was strategically employed to achieve psychological and military objectives; raping Muslim women functioned to demoralize Bosnian men and to dehumanize the women. Women’s bodies were regarded as an arena for political contestation and thus dehumanized, politicized,

72 – Joshua Kepkay

and perceived as male space.8 The patriarchal construction of women as political male space suggests that women are objects and their bodies a battlefield in a contest between rival males. Warfare becomes a contest of masculinity where the penis is weaponized and males fight to emasculate opponents by invading the bodies of their nation’s women. The ethnic gene pool is thus contaminated by the appropriation and colonizing the nation’s female bodies. This is because, in patriarchy, the inability to protect one’s woman and to control her sexual and procreative powers is recognized as weakness in men.9

Michael Kimmel’s four rules of manhood state that

femininity in any way, shape, or form invalidates masculinity.10 By this logic, raping a mass of ethnic women emasculates the men and feminizes the entire ethnicity, effectively weakening it beyond reconciliation. Milosevic used such societal norms and values to weaken enemy nations in his conquest of the Balkans. Non-Serb men were humiliated and weakened because they failed to be reliable protectors when confronted by Serbs. They were unable to maintain the dominance and control of women that patriarchy commands. It becomes clear that patriarchy is inherently homosocial as it concerns men and what goes on amongst them, pitting them one against one an “other” in a struggle for power, control, and domination. Misogyny and the oppression of women may be an important part of patriarchy but it is not the purpose.11 The goal of patriarchy is to maintain (male) privilege and control of “others.” Balkan patriarchy adopts genocidal rape as a tool to eradicate or at least subordinate the “other.” Eradication in the Bosnian war lies at the nexus of ethnicity and gender where a man’s failure to fulfill his gender role is a reflection on his ethnic group.12 The Three Forms of Genocidal Rape

Allen describes the three forms of genocidal rape that Milosevic incorporated in his attempts to ethnically cleanse

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 73

territory. They were part of a three-pronged approach to remove the Muslims and Croatians residing in Bosnia. First, militias (such as the Chetniks or other irregular Serb forces) would enter a village belonging to Bosnian-Herzegovina or Croatia and violently rape the non-Serb women in public. Soon, the whole village would hear news of the rape, which effectively humiliates Muslim and Croatian men who were powerless to protect “their” women. The women become scared, worrying that they may be raped too, and then official Serbian soldiers enter the village offering safe passage out of the village if villagers promise never to return. The largely unarmed villagers usually accept their coerced emigration that renders them stateless refugees. The second part of the Serbs rape campaign is to capture enemy women and confine them to concentration camps where they are raped at random. This is a method of torture preceding death. The last, and perhaps the most paradoxical, form of “ethnic cleansing” involves Serb forces arresting and imprisoning non-Serb women only to continually rape them until impregnation. Prisoners are held and subjected to physical and psychological torture until their forced pregnancy has progressed past any stage of safe abortion. The women who survive this brutal torture are later set free to have Serbian babies, their bodies having been successfully colonized in the eyes of Serbs.13

The first of the two forms of genocidal rape Allen describes

can be understood as war tactics of humiliation. Target populations are intimidated or exterminated, but the third form (enforced pregnancy) is perplexing, as the policy misunderstands eugenics. Improving the genetic composition of Bosnia’s population is sought through the extermination of what Milosevic saw as “undesired” ethnic groups. The murders were as strategically sound as they were evil because less non-Serbs would strengthen the numbers of the Serbs for political purposes, but forced impregnation fails to serve the same purpose. Forced impregnation is premised on the misconception that the victims lack any identification other than sex. Females are recognized only as empty

74 – Joshua Kepkay

vessels or sexual containers. In reality, the resulting child will only be half Serbian. More importantly, if the mother decides to raise the, she will certainly not socialize it to a Serbian nationality, preventing the child from learning any allegiance to Serbia in the primary institution of socialization, family. Serbian policies of forced impregnation can only function if their torture methods effectively brainwash victims, robbing them of their national and religious attachments. Thus, the logical explanation behind forced impregnation is that the victims, who survive the rape as well as the resulting children, serve only as a lasting symbol of the nation’s defeat and feminization and nothing else.14

Rape is equated with the immediate conquest of the women

through penetration, conquest of the men, insofar as the women are regarded as objects owned by the men, and the entire nation because women’s bodies (in patriarchy) correspond to the ethnic group’s national territory. In a speech to the UN Security Council on 24 August 1993, Bosnian Ambassador Muhamed Sacirbey graphically illustrated the Bosnian crisis through symbolism arguing that:

Bosnia and Herzegovina is being gang raped. . . . I do not lightly apply the analogy of a gang rape to the plight of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As we know, systematic rape has been one of the weapons of this aggression against the Bosnian women in particular.15

In the past rape was thought of as “normal” behavior in warfare because testosterone and male sex drives were perceived as primal needs that required satisfaction. It was commonly accepted that men had to rape enemy women after a battle to satisfy sexual “needs.”16 Today, it seems obvious that this “need” is not of a sexual nature, but of violence and power. Gang raping the enemy nation is a strategy through which to gain power and control through sexual conquest.

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 75

NATO officials within the international community claim that rape used as weaponry is a traditional element of Balkan warfare. They argue that since wartime rape is a part of Balkan warfare, it may not be used as grounds for foreign humanitarian intervention.17 Considering the fact that all of the nationalities residing within the Balkans have raped their enemies during war, this may be true. Unfortunately, the U.N. Peacekeepers furthered the atrocities committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. One Bosnian Serb commander of a concentration camp testified that U.N. soldiers often visited his camp for food and drinks, to watch television, and for the girls too.18 U.N. soldiers of Canadian, French, New Zealanders, Ukrainian, and African nationalities have been identified as having occupied the camps for likely the same reasons. When one U.N. commander was questioned about his visits to the camp he struggled to maintain a plausible answer. Beginning with a complete denial of having ever attended any such place, his story began to deteriorate until, after being met with evidence, the commander spontaneously recollected being there for what he said were “official U.N. reasons” that certainly had nothing to do with rape.19 The participation of soldiers not originating or trained within the Balkans falsifies NATO’s insinuation that the rape of prisoners by soldiers is exclusive to Balkan culture.

What makes the Bosnian war different is that the Serbs are

the only people to have written a mandate of genocidal rape into state policy. By writing rape into policy, Milosevic provided the ethnic cleanse with an air of legitimacy on which reluctant NATO officials capitalized. Officials defended their disregard for the victims by claiming that could not intervene in the Bosnian war because to do so would be culturally insensitive. According to them, rape warfare is part of Balkan culture20 and thus protected under the cultural difference defense; they claim that Balkan wars are wars of rape, while Western wars are not. These racist assertions of NATO officials have since fallen in light of evidence the exposes scandals of Peacekeepers raping Bosnian women.21

76 – Joshua Kepkay

This indicates that U.N. personnel aim to demonstrate masculinity and dominance through sexual conquest and that patriarchy remains a prevalent issue within western institutions; women’s bodies remain recognized primarily as male-space by a diverse group of men, not Balkan soldiers exclusively.

However, using rape as weaponry may not be as easy as once

thought when the aggressing soldiers know they are violating basic human rights. Survivors of the Serb rape camps report that some Serb soldiers were unable to achieve an erection when commanded to rape by their superiors.22 Soldiers who were unable or unwilling to perform were ordered to rape the prisoners or be subject to punishment. Survivors divulge that soldiers were forced to “short- circuit” of any ethical or moral barriers they might hold through viagra usage in combination with illicit drugs and pornographic materials.23 In other instances soldiers used objects to rape and sodomize their prisoners. Threatened with their own death, Serb soldiers may have themselves experienced a gendered abuse of human rights. A policy that calls for the rape of enemy women as a means of national conquest creates the perception that raping women part of being a soldier and a man. When particular men are reluctant to violate their neighbours, their manhood is brought into question and with it the manhood of their nation. As such, the forced rape and impregnation of women illustrates how men and women suffered differently due to hegemonic conceptions of gender that construct men are to be aggressive, violent, and unemotional dominant protectors of a nation, one of which women are the body in their duties as primary caregivers.

Despite the atrocious human rights violations committed

during the Bosnian war, gender-selective mass killing is commonplace in human conflict. While Bosnians were evacuating the cities and towns that surrendered to the Serbs, militia divided men from women and adults from children; they lined up the men and conducted mass executions.24 The slaughter of the target population’s battle-age men frees the aggressor from the concern

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 77

that subsequent generations will claim their revenge in the near future.25 The Serbs did not adopt a “root and branch” extermination where the target population gets murdered as a whole in systematic fashion; however, this may have been the ultimate goal with eradication of non-Serb males serving only as a prelude murder of females.26 Dating back to antiquity patriarchy is manifest in the domination of men over women as well as men over “other” men whose difference is constructed as feminine, whose lack ethnic ties to the aggressing group as a threat to hegemony.27 Historically, men who defended their land were killed; those who were spared were forced into slavery along with the women and children. In many cases, the men were also castrated leading to a further marginalization of their ethnic group.28 No longer a sexual threat, the inapt mates serve only as a symbol of their people’s feminization. Reluctant Humanitarians

The Western world (with exception to the U.N.) remained completely oblivious to the genocide befalling Bosnia and Herzegovina until journalist Roy Gutman brought the story to the forefront of media in 1992.29 Croatian media subsequently provided video footage of Serb militia shelling villages and towns which shocked and appalled Westerners and the plight of Bosnik Muslim women became the center of media focus. What was left in the background, out of focus, was the male suffering. Feminist scholars write the bulk of academia surrounding rape warfare and gender and this may inadvertently lead to the absence of men and male on male rape.30 The media, too, is guilty of overlooking the situation of men. Men are supposed to be tough, consequently, their suffering is considered less valid in the eyes of the public, whereas the raping of women inspires outrage because women are perceived as weak and vulnerable. Women are thought to require protection whereas men are not, thus, the genocide committed against Bosniak Muslims was not a “femicide” but rather a “gendercide,”31 as Non-Serb men and women received distinct

78 – Joshua Kepkay

abuses at the hands of Serbs by virtue of their gender specific social roles. Non-Serb men were raped with foreign objects to humiliate them and their nation before they, the emasculated soldiers, were killed and the women raped and impregnated to figuratively claim the nation’s body. Serb forces executed this gendercidal murdering of masses of battle-age men in addition to raping thousands of women. Such represents the patriarchal dominance of Serb men over all “others.”

The gendercide befalling Bosnia-Herzegovina went on for

months before the crisis was given any attention from the United Nations. Allen shames the U.N. in her analysis of the Bosnian war where she gets “the impression that Europe is testing the limits of suffering” (12). Only when Western media released video footage taken by the Croatian media did the U.N. Security Council begin to feel sufficient pressure to make a humanitarian intervention. Up until the expressed outrage, the international organizations embraced a realist stance towards state security and reasoned that they were unable to contribute support to the Bosniak Muslims, as it did not serve the interests of the powerful member countries.32 They avoided involvement by deeming the Bosnian crisis a civil war in which humanitarian intervention would not equal sound foreign policy. In reality, the U.N. had the authority and the moral duty to intervene because genocide falls contrary to Article II of the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and because rape is against international humanitarian law.33 Bosnians were being persecuted on the basis of gender and ethnicity while the decision makers on the Security Council paid little regard. Human rights intervention, for them, is not sound policy when there is no potential for monetary gain.

When press coverage of the atrocity had sparked enough

public outrage for the U.N. to get involved it was too late. Milosevic’s campaign of genocidal rape had already crossed many borders of territories and inhumanity. Thousands upon thousands of Croatian and Bosniak Muslim women had been raped,

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 79

impregnated, or killed and the men had been sodomized preceding their extermination. One Serb militiaman put it well when he told his female prisoner: “You may have got your country but it will be a land full of widows.”34

The U.N. proved itself to be an intergovernmental

organization with foreign policy reflecting the preferences of an elite group of state leaders during the Bosnian war. The decisions of an international organization should exemplify the preferences of the majority of people it represents, not the powerful few. It took mass media to catalyze global democracy in order to end the suffering of Bosniak Muslims during the Bosnian war. The problem is that it was too late for many men and women. The solution is to establish a check on foreign policy. Political bodies (domestic and international) must work together to establish a democratic dialogue; they must look to the grassroots of which they represent as well as to the non-governmental organizations to determine the best course of action. International relations will only have an outspoken effect on wars once global polities have moved towards intergovernmental organization within a substantive global democracy where the media is not the only source of pressure for action. Media is not reliable as the only check on international governance as it too can be biased towards maintaining the status quo and towards other corporate profit- seeking interests. The Aftermath

The Dayton Agreements marked the official end of the Bosnian war, but not the end of the Serbian genocidal campaigns. Leaders of the Bosnian Serbs were indicted on international war crimes and genocide charges, but Milosevic managed to continue waging his war on the Balkans in Kosovo. He was eventually stopped by NATO and brought to The Hague face similar charges of grave Geneva Convention violations.35 Throughout the late 1990s to the mid 2000s, war criminals such as Slobodan Milosevic,

80 – Joshua Kepkay

Radislav Krstic, Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovac, Zoran Vukovic, and various other Bosnian Serb fighters were indicted, apprehended, and brought to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).36 They were charged with an array of crimes such as mass rape, genocide, and forced prostitution.37 The trials were riddled with witnesses and victims from rape camps giving testimonies recalling rapes, tortures, forced impregnation, enslavement, and forced prostitution. Victims testified behind blinds with their voices altered, but in the courtroom they face and must identify their tormentors. Many rape victims refused to testify and others could not be contacted.38 They had been conquered and humiliated, causing the numbers willing to relive the atrocity in a public forum to be few and far between.

The strength of the women who survived and forced

themselves to testify against their tormentors, despite the inhumane physical and psychological torture they endured, helped bring justice to victims everywhere. Many remain upset, they feel robbed of justice because Milosevic was never officially sentenced for his crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, though he did not die a free man. He died in custody on March 11, 2006 of cardiac arrest before any convictions were reached.39 Perhaps the primary instigator of the Serb hostilities did escape his earthly punishments, but the same cannot be said of his accomplices. The ICTY announced numerous sentences for war crimes and Judges set new precedents designed to protect women from future injustices.

It has been more than a decade since the Bosnian war

reminded people around the world of the human capacity for evil. International organizations have learned from this crisis and have tried many Serb politicians and military leaders, however, the memory still haunts survivors and international institutions maintain a democratic deficit. International law has been rewritten accordingly to add protection for women but we must remain critical of these laws. They may only be new renditions of the “add

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 81

women and stir” method of writing women’s policy.40 The Fourth Geneva Conventions already had provisions for protection of women against rape in humanitarian law.41 Is the ICTY adding the same excerpt into another law book or is this the true defining law of women’s protection? Judges may have the authority to rewrite laws to include gender, but the power to enforce those laws lies in a bureaucracy that is often ruled by elites who operate by their own agendas; the status quo remains secure.

The Bosnian war is a dark chapter in world history. Not only

did it see a monster rise to great power, it bore witness to an organization, which by definition claims to serve humanitarian interests, ignore the plight of a plurality of nations. The nationalist Serbians made Slobodan Milosevic powerful and he propagated their “rightful” privilege, rallying them to claim it. Pathologically, he convinced himself and his countrymen that the other Balkan ethnic groups had undercut them throughout history. Milosevic was a patriarchal dictator peddling majoritarianism and colonialism to Serbs throughout the Balkans, claiming that they would in engage in a “cleansing” of the lands and emerge as the Greater Serbia that they ought to be. Serbian incursion into Bosnia- Herzegovina achieved psychological as well as military objectives. These nations were humiliated and thus weakened internationally by the Serbian gendercide, which emasculated men by violating the bodies of their mothers, sisters, and daughters as well as through the extermination of men and seizure of territory.

Humiliation can be extended to the United Nations as well,

but not by the hand of Milosevic. The UN embarrassed itself and its member nations in its failure to remedy the Bosnian crisis; Western societies thought the lack of humanitarian intervention outrageous and deplorable. Media capitalized on their discovery of the U.N.’s negligence and transmitted the public opinion to governments who began to move on the issue. Although less than humanitarian interests may have motivated the media, they did effectively catalyze the international organizations’ response the

82 – Joshua Kepkay

genocide occurring in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere.42 However, the U.N.’s embarrassment does not stop with their lack of stamina in foreign policy; peacekeepers furthered the humiliation when media exposed their illicit visits to the Serb rape camps.43 Intergovernmental organizations certainly demonstrated their need for reform during the Bosnian war. Conclusion

Ethnicity and gender were allowed exist as legitimate political reasons for murder and rape during the Bosnian war when international organizations decided to stand idly by as Milosevic legislated gender specific violations of the Geneva Code against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following through to commit these many atrocious mass murders of men and forced impregnations of women, supporters of Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing agenda were largely successful in the Bosnian gendercide. Enemy non-Serb men within Bosnia and Herzegovina were feminized and the bodies of women were rendered a politicized male space. Political opportunism and patriarchal masculinity are connected as they intertwine to form the roots of the Bosnian war. Patriarchal manhood requires men to associate domination with power and privilege. What Milosevic did was provide a difference-based justification to unite Serbs against non-Serbs so that they might exert control over women and men lacking immediate ties to Serbia. Non-Serbs were feminized by their inability to protect and control their women. The rules of masculinity had been broken and the consequence was eradication. The consequences that follow this tragedy are debatable, but fortunately the U.N. and NATO did react somewhat faster to the subsequent crisis in Kosovo. International humanitarian law is updated and the criminals convicted and sentenced; the Dayton Agreements have brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina for the time being. Resolutions emerging from aftermath of the Bosnian war are now up against the test of time and, hopefully, patriarchy in the Balkans (and elsewhere) continues to dissolve, bringing contemporary society

Gendercide and the Bosnian War – 83

slowly towards the understanding societies modeled on domination are less stable than multicultural ones based on partnership and mutual recognition.

Notes 1 Adam Jones, Gender Inclusive (New York: Routledge, 2009). 2 Vic Satzewich and Nikolaos Liodakis, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Canada (New

York: Oxford UP: 2007), 112. 3 Jones, Gender Inclusive, 120-121. 4 Michael T Kaufman, “Conflict in the Balkans: The Yugoslav Leader For

Serbs, Apparatchik Appeals to Nationalist Pride to Become a Hero.” The New York Times.

5 Bette Denich, “Sex and Power in the Balkans,” in Woman, Culture, and Society. ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, 69 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974).

6 Ibid., 100-101. 7 Lene Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of

Security,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 3 no. 1 (2001): 59. 8 Mary E. Hawkesworth, “Democratization: Reflections on Gendered

Dislocations in the Public Sphere,” in Gender, Globalization, and Democratization, ed. Rita Mae Kelly et al. (New York: Littlefield, 2001)

9 Denich, “Sex and Power in the Balkans,” 68. 10 Michael Kimmel: On Gender. Perf. Michael Kimmel. Media Education

Foundation, 2008. DVD. 11 Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy,

(Philadelphia. Temple University Press, 2005): 53. 12 Ibid., 167. 13 Denich, “Sex and Power in the Balkans,” 62-63. 14 Ibid., 89. 15 Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of

Postmodernism and Postcommunism, (London: Routledge, 1994): xxi. 16 Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security,” 60. 17 Ibid., 61. 18 Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan, 1993): 7. 19 Ibid., 29. 20 Beverly Allen, Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina

and Croatia, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1996: 43. 21 Gutman, A Witness to Genocide, 7. 22 Allen, Rape Warfare, 97. 23 Ibid., 98.

84 – Joshua Kepkay

24 Jones, Gender Inclusive, 67. 25 Ibid., 166. 26 Ibid., 172. 27 Peter Ferdinand, Robert Garner, and Stephanie Lawson, Introduction to

Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 351. 28 Jones, Gender Inclusive, 167. 29 Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security,” 55. 30 Jones, Gender Inclusive, 150-151. 31 Ibid., 166. 32 Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security,” 61. 33 Allen, Rape Warfare, 62-63; Marlise Simons, “Bosnian War Trial Focuses on

Sex Crimes,” The New York Times, July 29, 1998. 34 Jones, Gender Inclusive, 166. 35 Ian Fisher, “Trial of Milosevic Will Peel Layers of Balkan Guilt, Too,” The

New York Times, February 11, 2002. 36 Marlise Simons, “3 Serbs Convicted in Wartime Rapes,” The New York

Times, February 23, 2001; Kevin Whitelaw, “Bosnia's most wanted” U.S. News & World Report. 125.23 (1998). Academic Search Premier.

37 Simons, “3 Serbs Convicted in Wartime Rapes.” 38 Marlise Simons, “Genocide Verdicts in Srebrenica Killings,” The New York

Times, June 10, 2010. 39 Marlise Simons, “Landmark Bosnia Rape Trial: A Legal Morass,” The New

York Times, February 23, 2001. 40 Karen Beckwith, “A Common Language of Gender?” Politics and Gender 1

no, 1 (2005): 128. 41 Marlise Simons, “U.N. Panel Convicts Bosnian Serb of War Crimes,” The

New York Times, May 8, 1997. 42 Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security,” 61. 43 Gutman, A Witness to Genocide, 7.

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gide20

Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Intersecting identities and global climate change

Joane Nagel

To cite this article: Joane Nagel (2012) Intersecting identities and global climate change, Identities, 19:4, 467-476, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550

Published online: 01 Aug 2012.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1683

View related articles

Citing articles: 7 View citing articles

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power Vol. 19, No. 4, July 2012, 467–476

Intersecting identities and global climate change

Joane Nagel

(Received 1 July 2012)

This article explores the place of race, class, gender, sexual and national identities and cultures in global climate change. Research on gendered vul- nerabilities to disasters suggests that women are more vulnerable than men to many meteorological disasters related to climate change, specifically flooding and drought. This is because of their relative poverty, economic activi- ties (especially subsistence agriculture) and the moral economies governing women’s modesty in many cultures. Research on historical and contempo- rary links between masculinity and the military in environmental politics, polar research and large-scale strategies for managing risk, including from climate change, suggests that men and their perspectives have more influence over climate change policies because of their historical domination of science and government. I expect that masculinist identities, cultures and militarised institutions will tend to favour large-scale remedies, such as geoengineering, minimise mitigation strategies, such as reducing energy use, and emphasise ‘security’ problems of global climate change.

Keywords: gender; masculinity; climate change; militarism; identity

Introduction

Identities and cultures based on race, class, gender, sexuality and nationalism are critical to understanding all social processes, especially those associated with human well-being. Global climate change is no exception. There is a growing international scientific and political consensus that climate change poses one of the greatest contemporary challenges to human civilization (IPCC 2007, Roston 2008, Hoegh-Guldberg and Bruno 2010). Research on climate change is based mainly on the natural sciences and engineering, and these disciplines and perspectives set the research priorities and inform the policy agenda. These investigators recog- nise that social factors play a critical role in both the causes and consequences of climate change, but they generally do not collaborate with social scientists and have only the most rudimentary understanding of social processes relating to climate change causation, mitigation and adaptation. Even when social factors are considered, studies tend to be applied and descriptive: public opinion surveys, policy analyses and economic models (Stern 2007, Nordhaus 2011, Pidgeon and Fischoff 2011, Weber 2011). There is relatively little recognition in the climate change literature of the relevance of gender, race, class and nationalism and cer- tainly not sexuality. When I recently commented to a natural science colleague

ISSN 1070-289X print/ISSN 1547-3384 online © 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2012.710550 http://www.tandfonline.com

468 J. Nagel

that there might be a gendered dimension to climate change, he laughed out loud: ‘Doesn’t climate change affect everyone?!’ The answer to that incredulous ques- tion is ‘no’, climate change does not affect everyone equally, nor does everyone respond uniformly to climate change. This article presents three examples of how identities and cultures based on gender, race, class, sexuality and nationalism are relevant to understanding the impacts of, and adaptations to, climate change.1

Gender, sexuality and the nation

The two consequences of increased global temperatures observed in the last cen- tury are the warming of the Earth’s oceans and the melting of polar ice sheets (IPCC 2007, NSIDC 2012). These combine with an observed and predicted increased intensity of hurricanes and associated storm surges to make coastal flooding a highly expected outcome of global climate change (Webster et al. 2005, Stammerjohn et al. 2008, Sallenger et al., 2012). A widely studied hurricane in Bangladesh in 1991 illustrates the interplay among gender, sexuality and the nation in the kinds of large storms researchers expect to increase in frequency and inten- sity as the Earth’s oceans warm and sea level rises. Cannon (2002) notes that Bangladesh is one of the few countries in the world where men live longer than women. Researchers argue that women’s poverty and vulnerability to weather- related flooding are among the reasons for women’s shorter lives. (Begum 1993, Choudhury et al. 1993). When the flood waters receded after the 1991 monsoon, the International Federated Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimated that 140,000 had died in the flooding; 90% of the deaths were women and children (Schmuck 2002). What accounts for this disproportionate number of women’s deaths?

Research on gender and nationalism tells us that women and men occupy different spaces in national economies – both material (work) and moral (respectability). Women’s domestic responsibilities and cultural expectations for their modesty can expose them to extreme weather events, particularly in the case of ‘hydrometeorological’ disasters such as floods or storm surges (Spring 2006). A number of material and moral economic factors combined to make Bangladeshi women especially vulnerable when the waters rose in 1991. They were responsible for the home – caring for children, finding food, water and fuel, cooking meals, growing crops and tending livestock – which tied poor women to low-lying residences. Their mobility was limited by cultural prescriptions for women’s proper dress, demeanour and public visibility – their long, loose cloth- ing restricted movement through water; they were ashamed to seek higher ground occupied by unrelated men; they could not swim. Women’s relative poverty made them less resilient – they had poor nutrition, poor health care and limited fam- ily support as divorced and widowed women were discouraged from remarrying (Cannon 2002).2 National and ethnic cultures, which restrict women’s mobility and resilience, make them more vulnerable to the effects of climate change – not only from storms and flooding but also from drought, in cases where women are

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 469

subsistence farmers, and from forced migrations out of drought and flooding con- ditions. While it is true that both men and women are affected by climate change, the effects are not always the same, nor are they always equal.

Race, class, gender and the moral economy

It is not only in developing countries or the Global South that gendered local and national identities and cultures shape vulnerabilities to storms and flooding. Seager (2006, p. 30) studied the natural and political disasters associated with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and noted that:

Poverty combines with race and ideologies about gender to produce a metric of deep disadvantage in terms of mobility: even in a country as awash in cars as the United States, women are less likely to have a car or a driver’s license than their male counterparts.

Reports about post-Katrina New Orleans revealed a moral economy of raced, classed and gendered valuations of worth, credibility, dangerousness and deservingness that often shape responses to disasters like Katrina which affect the vulnerabilities of different groups. Officials and reporters described post-Katrina New Orleans as a ‘war zone’, where ‘anarchy’ reigned replete with sniping, loot- ing and raping (Tierney et al. 2006, Stock 2007). Contrary to initial media reports, the notorious murders in the Superdome were never documented, although several people died from natural causes or suicide, nor was there clearly documented evi- dence of widespread rape or sexual assault (Rosenblatt and Rainey 2005, Thevenot and Russell 2005). Racial cosmologies of Black male dangerousness, especially as sexual threats, no doubt added fuel to the rumours of rape and mayhem that char- acterised much early reporting about post-Katrina New Orleans. Ransby (2006, p. 218) found little sympathy for the presumed victims of this crime wave, Black women, who were depicted as ‘culprits in their own misfortune’ because of their presumed laziness, promiscuity and irresponsibility rather than because of low pay, lack of jobs and lack of affordable housing (see also Giroux 2006).3 Raced, gendered, sexual and other moral stereotypes, calculations of worth and blame, questions of responsibility, and notions of fairness can influence plans for and responses to disasters in different national settings and in the international arena.

Nation, class and the global system

The melting of the Arctic permafrost and polar ice sheets combined with coastal flooding resulting from climate change will have dramatic effects on many island nations and coastal communities globally. Coastlines around the world – in both rich and poor countries – will be reshaped by rising sea levels and storm surges, and the consequences and coping capacity of nations to these changes will be greatly influenced by national wealth and standing in the international system.

470 J. Nagel

Rich countries will have more resources to adapt to the impacts of climate change by designing barriers to storm surges, refitting buildings and coastal facilities, or rebuilding away from coastlines. Poor countries, especially island nations whose land and fresh water supplies are vulnerable to sea level rise, will have to rely on others in the global system to provide them with resources to adapt or migrate. While there is broad agreement that national wealth has contributed to climate change by industrialisation’s contribution to increased greenhouse gas emissions, there is no credible commitment by these global climate changers to assist poorer nations to cope with changes they did not cause. Small island states such as Tuvalu, Micronesia, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Maldives and mostly rural Indigenous occupants of Arctic coastal communities in Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Norway and Greenland have neither the resources nor the local or international influence to economically or culturally maintain their communities by remaining in place or migrating en masse as climate change floods or melts their homelands.4 Developed countries have not been quick to take on the responsibility for aiding relatively poor countries affected by other outcomes of rising global temperatures such as heat and drought, the negative consequences of which are easier to ignore or to dismiss as simply ‘weather’, misfortune, outcomes of war and conflict, or the result of poorly managed development policies.5 As in the case of Hurricane Katrina, the often non-white victims of these slowly unfolding climate-related disasters are dismissed as, at least in part, designers of their own demise by living in places where bad things just seem to happen naturally. The climate change-related ‘bad luck’ of poor countries and their populations illustrates both the vulnerabilities of some national identities and cultures to the actions and assumptions of other national identities and cultures. The power of national identities and cultures to keep in place conceptions of who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ represent compared to ‘them’ is illustrated by the durability of this point of view even in the face of our obvious role in causing their problem.

Masculinity, militarism and science

Climate-related environmental transformations underway are escalating and will impact virtually all human communities. Identities and cultures play a role in vulnerability to or responsibility for causing global climate change. Responses to climate change also have a classed, raced, gendered and nationalist face. Strategies for mitigation (stopping or reducing the causes of climate change) and adaptation (learning to live with the consequences of climate change) are not merely technical matters (increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, developing alternative energy sources, redesigning housing, transporta- tion and communities). The policies that shape local, national and international responses to climate change reflect the gendered power, privilege and preoccu- pations of mostly male policy-makers around the world (see, e.g. Bulhaug et al. 2008). Researchers note the paucity of representatives from Indigenous communi- ties, women’s groups and underclasses in shaping climate change mitigation and

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 471

adaptation policies, despite the relative vulnerability of these groups to the effects of climate change (Rohr 2009, UNEP 2009). Less documented is the place of gendered national institutional identities and cultures in shaping climate change responses and setting research priorities.

‘Gender’ is not synonymous with ‘women’, and understanding men’s place and perspectives in how nations respond to climate change is an important aspect of the relationship between gender and climate change. Men are influential in determining the causes of and responses to climate change through their domi- nation of politics and policy-making around the world. Masculine interests, and cultures imbedded in scientific and military organisations come to the fore in set- ting climate change research priorities and approaches to addressing the causes and impacts of climate change.

The marriage of militarism and science is reflected in the history of both polar exploration and climate research. Dodds (2006, p. 61, 2009) described Antarctica as ‘a stage on which men (and it has been men in the main) and their nations either carved out claims to the continent or initiated scientific programmes’. Unlike Antarctica, a competitive (and sometimes cooperative) arena for the men driv- ing international relations and scientific inquiries, Rosner (2009) observes that the Arctic has long been gender integrated, occupied by both women and men. It was into this already-inhabited northern realm that European and American often military-backed male explorer/scientists inserted themselves, exploiting Indigenous knowledge, while claiming Western discovery, conquest and owner- ship. Women largely were erased from the personal accounts and professional publications of these men of science and discovery, thus avoiding female pollution of the pure masculine challenge of men against nature. The Arctic reality, however, was more feminised. Palsson (2008) describes long-term intimate and profes- sional liaisons between some of the most famous early twentieth-century Arctic explorers, such as Robert Peary and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and the Indigenous women and men with whom these Westerners lived and worked for extended periods of time over decades. Not only were Inuit women seen as convenient sex- ual partners by many Arctic ‘explorers’, and as means to keep the men in their crews ‘contented’, Native women also had essential skills in hunting and fish- ing, skinning, seamstressing, cooking local fish and animals and polar survival. They sometimes became mothers of explorers’ children, suitable partners in their place, but invisible in the lives of these men when they returned home to honour and fame.

It is not only in the history of polar exploration that we find a marriage of mas- culinity, militarism and science. Fleming (2007, 2010) catalogues historical efforts (stretching back two centuries and beyond) by the United States and other govern- ments to use and control climate for military purposes. These projects included timing war campaigns to weather forecasts, cloud seeding to create storms and other techniques designed to shift weather patterns. He describes ‘a long paper trail of climate and weather modification studies by the Pentagon and other [US] government agencies’ in the twentieth century (2007, p. 49). For instance, ‘In the

472 J. Nagel

1950s the Pentagon convened a committee to study the development of a Cold War weather weapon’, and ‘During Operation Popeye in the Vietnam war, the Air Force flew more than 2600 cloud seeding sorties over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to . . .

Make mud, not war’ (2007, p. 56). The so-called ‘geoengineers’, who imagine and design massive projects to

alter the global climate, are the contemporary incarnations of these climate war- riors. These male natural scientists and engineers are described by Fleming (2007, p. 50) as ‘The new titans who see themselves as heroic pioneers, capable of alleviating or averting natural disasters’ by large-scale projects to stop global warming. For instance, physicist Lowell Wood, a protégé of Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb), who worked for 40 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has suggested building up the Arctic ice by using large artillery pieces to shoot tons of sulphate aerosols or nanoparticles into the stratosphere to deflect the Sun’s rays and cool the planet or alternatively by hooking a 25-km long ‘sky hose’ to a high-flying military superblimp to pump reflective particles into the atmosphere. Another is chemist Paul Crutzen whose idea is to create a ‘minor nuclear winter’ by shooting or ballooning millions of metric tons of sulphur each year over the tropics to simulate a Mount Pinatubo-scale eruption (Crutzen 2006, Fleming 2007, p. 48). There are a variety of problems with these kinds of schemes: they are likely to be expensive and ineffectual, they relegate to the back burner any plans to mitigate or reduce greenhouse gases; they might actually be dangerous.6

They represent an imperialistic, militaristic bent – large-scale projects undertaken by one country (usually the United States) to dominate the global environmental system, or as Fleming (2007, p. 48) aptly summarises, ‘basically declaring war on the stratosphere’.

The militarisation of climate change studies is evidenced in geoengineering designs. Militarised responses to global climate change can be heard in alarms sounded about ‘national security’ – as in the 2007 report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (CNA-Center for Naval Analysis 2007), the 2008 ‘National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030’ (US. House of Representatives 2008) and the 2012 National Council for Science and the Environment conference on ‘Environment and Security’ (2012). The institutionalisation of a militarised mas- culinist mentality into the climate-related policies and operations of government agencies can be seen in plans to protect borders from climate refugees or use rail guns designed during Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to fire tons of material into space to deflect the Sun’s rays. The implications for climate science and policy of redeploying the resources of US national lab- oratories previously engaged in nuclear weapons production (e.g. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore) for climate change modelling and geoengineering projects should not be presumed to be purely innocuous. Even when these facil- ities contribute valuable technology and expertise to the research enterprise, they also bring along their budgetary needs, ‘strategic’ goals and militaristic assumptions.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 473

Conclusions

Sociological studies of organisational culture suggest that organisations impose their own agendas and worldviews on the problem at hand: to a man with a ham- mer, everything looks like a nail. Researchers need to ask: What perspectives and plans will the United States and other national militaries and their organisa- tional apparati bring to the policy table when planning responses to global climate change? (Climate security?) What strategies for addressing the effects of climate change should we expect from national weapons laboratories? (Geoengineering?) It is important to not only ask the question, What is the role of gender in shaping vulnerabilities to climate change? but also to ask the question, What is the role of gendered institutions and ideologies in creating the world that will result from gendered responses to climate change? A major challenge for researchers working on identities and cultures not only is to continue to document inequalities, but also to be willing to examine the identities and cultures of those in positions of power. Exploring the place of dominant group identities and cultures in unlikely topics such as global climate change, allows us to see more easily the opaque workings and interests of privilege and interests. Once exposed, our responsibility is to use this knowledge in policy arenas.

Acknowledgements The author thanks Natalie Parker, University of Kansas, and Monique Laney, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, for their collegial assistance with the research and ideas in this article.

Notes 1. For overviews of ‘gender and climate change’, see Denton (2002, 2004), Fordham

(2003), Byanyima and Martinez-Soliman (2009) and Enarson (2012). 2. For a general discussion of gender and ‘natural disasters’, see Neumayer and Plümper

(2007). Not all of Bangladesh is dominated by or bows to strict patriarchy; Kabeer (2000) outlines the transformation in the lives of Bangladeshi women who partici- pated in Bangladesh’s ‘New Industrial Policy’ in the 1980s which brought many young women to cities to work, challenging traditions of women’s seclusion. In 2011, the Bangladesh government approved the National Women Development Policy, which gives women equal political and economic rights to men; conservative Islamic groups opposed implementation of the policy, first introduced in 1997, then again in 2007 (Islam 2011).

3. Ransby also points out the resiliency of many whose lives were disrupted by Hurricane Katrina, including the support networks and mutual aid responses undertaken by many of New Orleans most vulnerable residents; for a discussion of the ways in which gender shaped the impact of Hurricane Katrina on men and women in New Orleans, see Read (2009).

4. For a list of small island states grappling with sea level rise, see Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) at http://aosis.info/ accessed on 9 January 2012; for a list of Indigenous peoples contending with the warming of the Arctic, see Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) at http://inuitcircumpolar.com/index.php?Lang=En&ID=1, accessed on 9 January 2012.

474 J. Nagel

5. Major contributors to greenhouse gases such as the four biggest emitters – China, the United States, the European Union and Brazil – have not met any previous emissions reduction targets, the first of which was set at the Rio de Janiero ‘Earth Summit’ in 1992 and the most recent in the 2009 ‘Copenhagen Accord’ (United Nations 1997, 2010). Similarly, most of the financial assistance promised by industrial countries to assist poorer nations affected by climate change has not been deliv- ered; see http://www.fedre.org/en/content/developed-world-failing-climate-funds- pledge-says-bangladeshi-minister, accessed on 12 January 2012; http://www.iied. org/climate-change/media/rich-nations-failing-keep-copenhagen-promise-help-poor- nations-adapt-climate-ch, accessed on 12 January 2012.

6. Some of these schemes have been evaluated by natural scientists; for instance, Bala et al. (2008) predict decreased global mean precipitation as a hydrological consequence of geoengineered reductions in solar radiation.

References Bala, G., Duffy, P.B., and Taylor, K.E., 2008. Impact of geoengineering schemes on the

global hydrological cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 7664–7669.

Begum, R., 1993. Women in environmental disasters: the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh. Gender and Development, 1(1), 34–49.

Bulhaug, H., Gleditsch, N.P., and Theisen, O.M., 2008. Implications of climate change for armed conflict [online]. In: Paper presented in workshop on the Social Dimensions of Climate Change, The World Bank, Washington, DC. Available from: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTRANETSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/Resources/ SDCCWorkingPaper_Conflict.pdf [Accessed 1 July 2012].

Byanyima, W. and Martinez-Soliman, M., 2009. Resource guide on gender and cli- mate change [online]. United Nations Development Programme. Available from: http://www.uneca.org/acpc/about_acpc/docs/UNDP-GENDER-CLIMATE-CHANGE- RESOURCE-GUIDE.pdf [Accessed 11 January 2012].

Cannon, T., 2002. Gender and climate hazards in Bangladesh. Gender and Development, 10 (2), 45–50.

Center for Naval Analysis, 2007. National security and the threat of climate change. Alexandria, VA: CNA Corporation.

Choudhury, A.M.R., Bhuyia, A.U., et al., 1993. The Bangladesh cyclone of 1991: why so many people died. Disasters, 18 (4), 291–304.

Crutzen, P.J., 2006. Albedo enhancement by stratospheric sulfur injections: a con- tribution to resolve a policy dilemma? [online]. Climatic Change, 77 (3–4), 211–20. Available from: http://www.cogci.dk/news/Crutzen_albedo%20enhancement_ sulfur%20injections.pdf [Accessed 16 January 2012].

Denton, F., 2002. Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: Why does gender matter? Gender and Development, 10, 10–20.

Denton, F., 2004. Gender and climate change: giving the ‘Latecomer’ a head start. IDS Bulletin, 35, 42–49.

Dodds, K., 2006. Post-colonial Antarctica: an emerging engagement. Polar Record, 42 (1), 59–70.

Dodds, K., 2009. Settling and unsettling Antarctica. SIGNS, Spring, 505–509. Enarson, E.P., 2012. Women confronting natural disaster: from vulnerability to resilience.

Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Fleming, J., 2007. The climate engineers. The Wilson Quarterly, 31 (2), 46–60. Fleming, J., 2010. Fixing the sky: the checkered history of weather and climate control.

New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 475

Fordham, M., 2003. Gender, disaster and development: the necessity of integration. In: M. Pelling, ed. Natural disasters and development in a globalising world. London: Routledge, 57–74.

Giroux, H., 2006. Stormy weather: Katrina and the politics of disposability. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Books.

Hoeg-Gulberg, O. and Bruno, J., 2010. The impact of abrupt climate change on the world’s marine ecosystems. Science, 18 (328), 1523–1528.

Islam, N., 2011. Government tries to push women’s equality for a third time, but Islamists object [online]. AsiaNews.it, 25 March. Available from: http://www.asianews.it/news- en/Government-tries-to-push-womens-equality-for-a-third-time,-but-Islamists-object- 21120.html [Accessed 10 January 2012].

Kabeer, N., 2000. The power to choose: Bangladeshi women and labour market decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.

National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), 2012. Environment and security: 12th national conference on science, policy, and the environment [online]. Available from: http://www.environmentandsecurity.org/ [Accessed 15 January 2012].

National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), 2012. Arctic sea ice news and analy- sis [online]. Available from: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/ [Accessed 24 January 2012].

Neumayer, E. and Plümper, T., 2007. The gendered nature of natural disasters: the impact of catastrophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy, 1981–2002. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97 (3), 551–566.

Nordhaus, W.D., 2011. The economics of tail events with an application to climate change. Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, 5 (2), 240–257.

Palsson, G., 2008. Hot bodies in cold zones: Arctic exploration [online]. S&F Online, 7 (1). Available from: http://barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/ice/index.htm [Accessed 24 January 2012].

Pigeon, N. and Fischoff, B., 2011. The role of social and decision sciences in communicat- ing uncertain climate risks. Nature Climate Change, 1, 35–41.

Ransby, B., 2006. Katrina, black women, and the deadly discourse on black poverty in America. Du Bois Review, 3, 215–222.

Read, C., 2009. ‘His and her Katrina. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society, Des Moines, Iowa.

Rohr, U., 2009. Gender into climate policy [online]. GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice. Available from: http://www.gendercc.net/fileadmin/inhalte/Dokumente/Tools/ toolkit-gender-cc-web.pdf [Accessed 10 January 2012].

Rosenblatt, S. and Rainey, J., 2005. Katrina takes a toll on truth, news accuracy [online]. Los Angeles Times, 27 September. Available from: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/sep/27/ nation/na-rumors27 [Accessed 10 April 2009].

Rosner, V., 2009. Gender and polar studies: mapping the terrain. Signs, 34 (3), 489–494. Roston, E., 2008. The carbon age: how life’s care element has become civilization’s

greatest threat. New York, NY: Walker Publishing Company. Sallenger, A.H., Doran, K.S., and Howd., P.A., 2012. Hotspot of accelerated sea-

level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America [online]. Nature, 2 (7), 1597. Available from: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate 1597.html [Accessed 1 July 2012].

Schmuck, H., 2002. Empowering Women in Bangladesh [online]. International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Available from: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/ rwb.nsf/AllDocsByUNID/570056eb0ae62524c1256b6b00587224 [Accessed 11 April 2009].

Seager, J., 2006. Noticing gender (or not) in disasters. Geoforum, 37 (1), 2–3.

476 J. Nagel

Spring, U., 28 July 2006. Vulnerability and resilience building of gender confronted with extreme hydro-meterological events [online]. PowerPoint presentation at CRIM- National University of Mexico. Available from: http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache: QpRDmoK9nakJ:www.ehs.unu.edu/file.php%3Fid%3D158+hydrometerological+ disasters+gender&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us [Accessed 10 April 2009].

Stammerjohn, S.E., et al., 2008. Trends in Arctic annual sea ice retreat and advance and their relation to El Nino-southern oscillation and southern annular mode variability. Journal of Geophysical Research, 113 (10), 10–29.

Stern, N., 2007. The economics of climate change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stock, P., 2007. Katrina and anarchy: a content analysis of a new disaster myth. Sociological

Spectrum, 27, 705–726. Thevenot, B. and Russell, G., 2005. Reports of anarchy at Superdome overstated [online].

Seattle Times, 26 September. Available from: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/ nationworld/2002520986_katmyth26.html [Accessed 10 April 2009].

Tierney, K., Bevc, C., and Kuligowski, E., 2006. Metaphors matter: disaster myths, media frames, and their consequences in hurricane Katrina. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 604, 57–81.

United Nations, 1997. Earth summit [online]. Available from: http://www.un.org/geninfo/ bp/enviro.html [Accessed 10 January 2012].

United Nations, 2010. Copenhagen accord [online]. Available from: http://unfccc.int/ meetings/copenhagen_dec_2009/items/5262.php [Accessed 10 January 2012].

United Nations Environmental Programme, 2009. Bridging the gap: gender transforming environmental management [online]. Available from: http://www.unep.org/GC/GC25/ Docs/Women-Concept-Note.pdf [Accessed 12 January 2012].

US House of Representatives, 2008. National intelligence assessment on the national secu- rity implications of global climate change to 2030 [online]. Available from: http://www. dni.gov/testimonies/20080625_testimony.pdf [Accessed 11 April 2009].

Weber, E.U., 2011. Psychology: climate change hits home [online]. Nature Climate Change, 1 (March), 25–26. Available from: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v1/n1/full/ nclimate1070.html [Accessed 15 January 2012].

Webster, P.J., Holland, G.J., et al., 2005. Changes in tropical cyclone number, duration, and intensity in a warming environment [online]. Science, 16 (309), 1844–1846.

JOANE NAGEL is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas. She is Director of the National Science Foundation’s C-CHANGE (Climate Change, Humans, and Nature in the Global Environment) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program at KU. Her recent publications include Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (Oxford University Press), ‘Deploying race, gender, class, and sexuality in the Iraq war’ (with Lindsey Feitz), in Race, Gender & Class, ‘Climate change, public opinion, and the military-security complex,’ in The Sociological Quarterly. ADDRESS: Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA. Email: [email protected]

Gender , Nat ion , Rape

BOSNIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SECURITY

LENE HANSEN Institute of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract The mass rapes in Bosnia brought gendered security problems onto the international agenda to an unprecedented extent. This article examines the debate surrounding whether these rapes should be characterized as a security problem which warranted international attention and possibly intervention. This debate evolved around the question whether wartime rape should be understood as an individual risk or a collective security problem; and whether it should be deéned in national or in gendered terms. The empirical part of the article analyses the three dominant representations of the Bosnian mass rapes: ‘rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ argued that rape did not constitute a collective security problem and the international community had therefore no reason or responsibility to intervene; the “rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare” representation read the rapes through national lenses and argued that the international community should intervene militarily in defence of the Bosnian government; and the third representation, “Balkan patriarchy”, claimed the privileged of a gendered reading of the rapes, the conflict in Bosnian should, according to this discourse, be understood as involving women on the one side and the patriarchal nationalistic leaderships on the other. The article concludes that the political impact of each of the representations is difécult to assess, but that the willingness of the International Crime Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to pursue rape-related indictments constitutes an important step towards the recognition of wartime rape as a collective security problem.

Keywords Bosnia, rape, security, nationalism, gender, The International Crime Tribunal of the former Yugoslavia

The war in Bosnia brought gender issues onto the international security agenda to an unprecedented extent. Initiated by Roy Gutman’s uncovering of the

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3:1 April 2001, 55–75 ISSN 1461-6742 print/ISSN 1468-4470 online © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1461674001001984 8

atrocities in Bosnia beginning in August 1992, the stories of mass rape of Bosnian women by Serbian forces went on the front pages of the western media in 1992 and 1993 (Allen 1996: 95–68; Morokvasic 1998: 80–2 and 87, fn. 17; Stanley 1999). Although this attention was a passing one, the western world had become so attuned to the issue of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia that the onset of the NATO operation/intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was followed by reports in the media as well as a UN investigation undertaken by the United Nations Population Fund (Fitamant 1999; Nordland 1999).1 This attention to mass rape was perhaps slightly surprising considering that the use of rape as a strategy of warfare is an old phenomenon; historical evidence testiées to the commonality of rape not only as a reward for the victorious soldier but also as a means of destroying the social fabric of the conquered population by driving a wedge between polluted females and emasculated males (Brownmiller 1975: 31–40; on rape in the érst and second Balkan wars, see Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914). However, despite the traditional ignorance of this gendered aspect of warfare by policy makers as well as the academic éeld of Security Studies, the International Crime Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has argued for the explicit inclusion of wartime rape as a form of torture as well as a crime against humanity, and has prosecuted rape in several trials (Statute of the International Tribunal, adopted 25 May 1993 as amended 13 May 1998; Blaskic IT-95-14; Furundzija IT-95-17/1; Celebici IT-96-21; all listed on www.un.org/icty).

Yet, the narrative about Bosnian mass rapes is not simply a story of the énal vindication of the gendered subject of security. It involves a much more complicated account of the construction of this very subject along gendered as well as national terms. The large-scale raping of Bosnian women – commonly suggested to be as many as 20,000 – and the perceived inability of the Bosnian men to provide protection were part of Serbian attempts to constitute the entire Bosnian nation as humiliated, inferior, weak and feminine. However, the precise construction of this nationalized-gendered subject, and its implications, were by no means uncontested. Different groups offered competing understandings of the meaning and causes of the rapes as well as which policies should be undertaken towards them. The goal of this article is to explore the dynamics involved in these constructions of the Bosnian mass rapes as a possible security problem.2

The aim of the analysis is, more precisely, to explore how different repre- sentations of the rapes rely upon competing conceptualizations of security.3 The two dominant questions involved in the conceptualizations of the mass rapes are érst, whether one should conceptualize security in individual or in collective terms, and, second, whether to understand security as a matter of national security only, or to open up the concept to gender-based insecurity. These conceptual choices, described in detail in the érst section of the article, are not only theoretical; they also are practical, since they condition the exact meaning and importance attributed to the mass rapes as well as shape the appropriate policy to be undertaken by the international community. In other words,

56 International Feminist Journal of Politics

competing interpretations of the rapes did not simply reèect differences about whether or not the rapes were a security problem. At the core of their differences was a more fundamental clash over the importance of individual security versus the security of the nation or the state, as well as over the relationship between the nation and the women within it.

The second part of the article argues that there were three dominant representations of the mass rapes, each of which relied upon a particular articulation of the individual-collective and nation-gender dichotomies. The érst representation – ‘Rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ – is a classical realist one. In this perspective, wartime rape does not by itself constitute a security problem: rape is an individual, not a collective problem, and is understood to be a ‘natural’ component of warfare. In the Bosnian context, this classic discourse had a ‘Balkan variant’ which held that violent behaviour is common in the Balkans. In this discourse, mass rapes are both predictable and unavoidable. Its policy implication was that since rape was an individual problem, international inter- vention should be avoided. The second representation – ‘Rape as exceptional/ Serbian warfare’ – was also located within the conventional conceptualization of security inasmuch as it held national security as its conceptual focus. Within the framework of this discourse, rapes did constitute a security problem: the Serbian rape campaign was aimed at eradicating the Bosnian nation. Moreover, since the rapes were a threat to national security, this persepective’s policy implication was that the West should intervene in defence of Bosnia. Finally, in the third representation – ‘Balkan patriarchy’ – the rapes were understood in gendered, not national, terms, and rape was deéned as a threat to women on all sides of the war, not only on the Bosnian (Muslim) one.4 The policy implications of this representation were more ambiguous shifting between calls for military intervention and a more undecided position.

After the war, the main site for studying the international response to the mass rapes has been the International Criminal Tribunal in Hague, and the article concludes by turning brieèy to the Tribunal’s practice and construction of the rapes as well as to the dilemmas involved in conceptualizing the security implications of mass rapes in war.

DICHOTOMIES IN THE SECURITY DEBATE

For the past decade, the central debate within Security Studies has been whether to expand the concept of security beyond its traditional realist focus on the military security of the state (Krause and Williams 1996: 229–30; Buzan et al. 1998). Those in favour of an expansion have pointed to the saliency of issues other than the military-strategic ones and have argued that rather than seeing the state as a provider of security, it is important to understand how the state has often constituted a threat to its citizens (Booth 1991). Upholding a concept of military state-security would, the ‘wideners’ argue, bestow a problematic political privilege upon the state while simultaneously pressuring other equally

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 57

important problems off the security agenda (see, for example, Nye and Lynn- Jones 1988; Booth 1991, 1997; Dalby 1992).

The response from those who defend a narrow concept of the state has been that the inclusion of individual and global security as well as a plethora of issues other than the military – economic, social, gendered, environmental and so on – would render the concept of security analytically and politically meaningless. If everything could be security, so this argument goes, then there would be no way of setting ‘real’ security apart from less pressing problems and situations.5

Not surprisingly, feminists generally have been located on the expansion side of the security debate. Many have argued that the military security of the state offers limited, if any, possibility for recognizing the security problems speciécally encountered by women. As Jill Steans puts it:

[a] feminist analysis of the military and the patriarchal state raises questions about the validity of continuing to view the state as the mainstay of security and of assuming that security for the individual is adequately understood in terms of her or his membership in a given national community.

(Steans 1998: 104, emphasis added; see also Grant 1992; Tickner 1992: 54–66)

The juxtaposition of the security of the individual and the security of the national community in feminist security analysis, as well as in Security Studies more broadly, involves two dichotomies: the érst one pitches an individual concept of security against a collective one; the second pitches the nation against the gendered community.6

Although the security debate is centred around these two dichotomies, it should be noted that in some important ways these dichotomies constrain the debate itself. The juxtaposition between an individual and a collective/national concept masks the actual interconnection between individual and collective security. The realist concept of state security is in fact dependent upon the transfer and institutionalization of individual security onto the state, without which, the Hobbesian fear is, we would return to the state of nature (Campbell 1992: 63–4; Williams 1998). The concept of individual security on the other hand must still confront the question of how collective solutions or priorities can be negotiated. In short, a tension between the individual and the collective (the state) rather than a choice is at the core of security.

To gain an understanding of the dominance of ‘state security’ we need to look at the way in which ‘security’ has become intimately connected to the principle of state sovereignty. This is so not because the state is an immortal entity or because ‘security’ is objectively provided by the state, but because ‘the meaning of security is tied to historically speciéc forms of political community’ (Walker 1990: 5) In the case of war, the governmental prerogative on deéning what constitutes threats to ‘national security’ relies upon a set of discursive practices that inscribe state sovereignty and national identity as the privileged reference point for security. Gendered security problems have, as a consequence, been

58 International Feminist Journal of Politics

recognized by governments to the extent that they followed the national logic (Walker 1992; Hansen 2000b). ‘Gender security’ cannot therefore be studied in isolation from ‘national security’ if one wishes to understand the dominant constructions of security. Yet it remains crucial to emphasize that the discourse of ‘national security’ might silence women’s security problems when ‘women’s problems’ conèict with the securities of the national community. Thus, feminist studies must examine constructions of the relationship between gender and nation not to make them correspond, but in order to analyse how the political structures of patriarchy and state sovereignty condition the way gender security can be thought.

CONCEPTUALIZING MASS RAPE

Following Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking study of rape, radical feminism has argued that rape constitutes a threat to women’s security. Only recently has Security Studies begun to take gender-specific issues, including mass rape, on board (Brownmiller 1975; MacKinnon 1989: 171–83; for a presentation of war rape, see Pettman 1996: 100–4). The emerging acceptance of rape as a security problem is built upon a construction of wartime rape as a collective threat to the nation. ‘Wartime rape’ or ‘mass rape’ is thereby set aside from ‘normal’, peacetime rape which is located within the category of individual risks. Peacetime rape is considered a crime that should of course be prosecuted, but it is not considered a collective security problem. As a consequence, the responsibility for avoiding rape is ultimately located with the individual woman who should prevent herself from being raped by behaving in a ‘safe’ and ‘smart’ manner, e.g. by being sexually non-provoking, avoiding desolate places, not bringing men into her house and so on. The construction of peacetime rape as an individual problem is furthermore one that constructs the female subject in sexual terms; rape is a sexual crime and the victim’s sexual history is therefore considered admissible evidence in many cases.

Wartime rape is on the other hand constructed as a collective security problem. Rape happens, not as a consequence of thoughtless, provocative or unfortunate behaviour, but as a question of national warfare. The woman in question is understood as being raped primarily because of her national, religious or ethnic identity and only secondarily because of her sexual features, and the crime is seen, in contrast to peacetime rape, in much less sexual terms.7 In this optic, the representation of female subjectivity changes. Her previous sexual behaviour becomes irrelevant as the context of warfare makes the question of consent disappear, as illustrated in the recent trials at the Tribunal which have had no discussion of the sexual conduct of the victim. As a consequence of this shift in female subjectivity, the responsibility for rape avoidance is shifted from the individual woman and onto the larger national community.8

The past exclusion of wartime rape as a security problem relied upon a

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 59

construction of rape as ‘normal behaviour’ in warfare. When soldiers were raping in their military capacity they were seen as acting outside of a public sphere in which they would be held responsible. While rape was part of warfare, it was simultaneously accepted that male sexual drives needed to be satiséed on or after the battleéeld. The move to see wartime rape as a security problem challenges this acceptance of an (always potentially) raping male sexuality, but continues to hold the question of whether soldiers are acting in public or private capacities to be of crucial importance. The Tribunal in the Hague has held individuals accountable for rape by arguing that rape can amount to torture, which constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva convention when it is inèicted by or instigated or consented to by a public ofécial or someone acting in a non-private capacity. The key question becomes then how broadly the room for ‘private capacity’ is deéned: is a soldier always an ofécial even when ofécially off duty or does he have dual identities in the context of war?9

If we return to the argument above that the two dichotomies of the security debate forces misleading separations between the individual and the collective as well as between the national and the gendered we might say that rape is committed against an individual but that this act is also inscribed and given signiécance within a collective framework. Rape is in short both individual and collective, even when the argument is that the collective (the state, the tribe, the international community) holds no responsibility for countering rape.10 The main debate in the speciéc context of warfare is whether rape is a national or a gendered security problem.11 But instead of constructing this as a dichotomous choice, we might instead understand rape as an identity producing practice (Butler 1990: 33). Rape in warfare does not simply constitute attacks on already formed nations and women/men (Elshtain 1987; Zalewski 1995: 355; Yuval- Davis 1997).12 In a Foucaultian sense, the productive power of rape is that it forms and reinforces national and gendered identity. While wartime rapes on one level ‘serve as a means for destruction of a nation’ (Nikolic-Ristanovic 1996: 202; see also Allen 1996: 97), at another level, they simultaneously inscribe the nation they aim to erase.

More concretely, the Bosnian rapes have separated ‘women’ from ‘men’, and ‘Bosnians’ from ‘Serbs’, and have attributed superior/inferior gendered and national identities to these subjects (Stiglmayer 1994: 85; Ramet 1996: 284). The consequence of the rapes is thus a dual construction of femininity and masculinity. They highlight the importance of gender at the same time as they invest the two national communities with particular constructions of feminine and masculine identity. Raping ‘the nation’s women’ is not only an act of violence against individual women; it also works to install a disem- powered masculinity as constitutive of the identities of the nation’s men. The interconnection between individual/collective and national/gendered might also be illustrated by the way that a woman impregnated by rape can be represented as a passive ‘national’ container of a child imagined to be the future bearer of the rapist’s nationality. In this way, an individual rape can be read for its collective, national signiécance through the complex sign of the child’s

60 International Feminist Journal of Politics

imagined future identity as an embodiment of the enemy state (Stiglmayer 1994: 119, 122, 140, 142; Nikolic-Ristanovic 1996: 201; see also Yuval-Davis 1997: 29).

REALIST SECURITY: ‘RAPE AS NORMAL/BALKAN WARFARE’

The érst representation of the Bosnian rapes locates them within the traditional realist framework outlined above. The realist concept of state security implies that intervention only takes place when it is in one’s own national interest. In the context of the war in Bosnia, the realist discourse argued that western intervention should only be carried out if there were threats to western security. Intervention merely in defence of the Bosnian government and Bosnian women would not live up to the requirements of a sound foreign policy.13

This general privileging of national security was coupled to two specific claims: first, that rape has been a traditional element of warfare, that as deplorable as it might be, it is nevertheless a problem which falls within the realm of the private/domestic, not the international; and, second, that the particular context of the Balkans would make intervention difficult and ultimately unsuccessful.14 This construction of ‘the Balkans’ argued the existence of a ‘Balkan’ tradition of eternal hatred and brutality, that the Balkans has a repetitive history of violence (Todorova 1997; Hansen 2000a). As George F. Kennan wrote in his introduction to the reprinting of the 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry: the érst and second Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 resemble the current one in numerous ways, one of them being that: ‘Woe betided the man of military age, or the woman of “enemy” national identity, who were found alive in the conquered village. Rape was ubiquitous, sometimes murderous’ (Kennan 1993: 10).

Historical continuity érmly in place, the discovery of mass rape in Bosnia did not seriously shake the foundation of this discourse. Reading the exposure of the mass rape through the prisms of essential ‘Balkan brutality’ it could be argued that extreme forms of violence had always been a feature of the Balkans and that while more Bosnians had been raped than Serbians, it was still the case that rapes have been carried out by all sides.

The traditional construction of wartime rape as expected, hence at one level acceptable, and thus an element of all warfare, including ‘our own’, would have been hard to sustain if the Balkans were situated in an unambiguously western context. It would then no longer have been possible politically to argue that ‘everybody’ carries out rape in warfare as this would include ourselves. Constructing ‘the Balkans’ as a place where this happens implies therefore that the western ‘we’ is different because ‘we’ do not subscribe to this practice.

The representation of ‘the Balkans’ as non-western and rape as something to be expected during wartime combined to advocate a policy of western non- intervention. Insisting on the privilege of national security and on the difference

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 61

between ‘the West’ and ‘the Balkans’ combined to install a fundamental political and ethical distance between the West and the war. Yet this construction was, after all, not completely stable. Rape is gendered inasmuch as it is an act of military men attacking threatened women. To argue that rape is common in the history of the Balkans also calls the uniformity of the Balkans into question by marking a differentiation between ‘threatening men’ and ‘vulnerable women’.

Yet if these [Balkan] women are threatened should not ‘we’ [ in the West] assume responsibility for their defence? The destabilizing effect of this question points to an internal contradiction in the ‘rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ discourse: this discourse’s preferred position is one where the radical differences of the Balkans sets it aside from ‘the West’; yet it is the gendered construction of Balkan identities implicit in the deénition of rape as an act of aggressive Balkan men against Balkan vulnerable women that leads to a problematization of its own political inaction. This inaction can only be sustained by reinforcing the articulation of the non-existence of responsibility for the security of others. Thus, although the ‘rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ representation at first appears to construct security strictly in national terms, its less explicit gender constructions leads to a destabilization, or at least questioning, of its narrow nationally based security policy.15

NATIONAL SECURITY: ‘RAPE AS EXCEPTIONAL/SERBIAN WARFARE’

As with the realist position, this representation is located within a construction of security as national security. Yet it argues that international intervention should not be based only on evaluating one’s own national security interest. Security and defence should be extended to those nations that are exposed to aggression, and, in particular, to victims of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Based on this conceptualization of security, it has been argued that the Bosnian war was a war of aggression undertaken by Serbia/Yugoslavia against Bosnia, that the Serb actions amounted to ethnic cleansing or even genocide and that the mass rapes were an integral element of this campaign (Cohen 1996: 53 and 47). Not surprisingly, this was the construction argued by the Bosnian government when it tried to compel the West to intervene militarily in its defence. Addressing the international community in a speech to the UN Security Council on 24 August 1993 the Bosnian Ambassador to the UN, Muhamed Sacirbey, invoked the rapes concretely as well as symbolically when arguing that:

Bosnia and Herzegovina is being gang raped. . . . I do not lightly apply the analogy of a gang rape to the plight of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As we know, systematic rape has been one of the weapons of this aggression against the Bosnian women in particular.

(quoted in Mestrovic 1994: xii)

62 International Feminist Journal of Politics

From the feminist side, this interpretation was supported by western as well as Bosnian feminists who ‘contend[ed] that the mass rapes of their countrywomen [were] an attempt at genocide, unique in the history of rapes . . . [M]any of them demand[ ed] military intervention to rescue the women’ (Stiglmayer 1994: 162).

The construction of the mass rapes as constituting a unique historical case is coupled with a national perspective that implies a delineation of homogenous Serbian and Bosnian national groups into entities with radically different identities. Serbian nationalism is seen as being of a fundamentally different kind than ‘normal’ Western and Central European ones, since it ‘advocate[ s] vengeance’, and ‘derive[ s] from the blood-cloudy mists of extremist Serb nationalist legend’ of which the most important element is ‘the Chetnik cult of the knife’ (Allen 1996: 16, 42, 79–81). In probably the most cited book on mass rapes in Bosnia, Beverly Allen argues not only that this identity sets Serbia apart from the civilized world, but also that the Serbian use of wartime rape to cause forced impregnation constituted a unique ‘invention’ in the history of warfare. To establish a comparable point of reference for Serb identity, Allen argued that ‘not even the Nazis managed to invent a way to turn the biological process of gestation into a weapon of annihilation’ (Allen 1996: 91). Although rape had been committed by Bosnian forces in this perspective such rapes were classified as ‘sporadic’ compared to the genocide of the Serbs, and as ‘spontaneous’ rather than intentional as was the case of the Serbian rapes (Cohen 1996: 53).

The ‘Rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’ representation argues on the one hand that wartime rape constitutes an urgent security problem towards which the international community must act. The juxtaposition of Serbian intentional and Bosnian spontaneous rape imply, however, on the other hand, an accommodating attitude towards ‘spontaneous, private’ rapes. By arguing that there are two kinds of rape in this war, the international ones which are part of a strategy of warfare and the spontaneous ones which (presumably) happen because of (temporarily) unchecked male sexual drives, this position leaves room for an acceptance of a construction of rape as an ‘unfortunate, but expected’ act in warfare. In other words, this discourse draws on the traditional construction of warfare rape inasmuch as rapes by Bosnian government forces are explained – and legitimized – by reference to this construction. The point here is not to claim that rapes by Bosnian Serb and Bosnian government forces took place on the same scale, but to point out that the construction of Bosnian identity draws upon a traditional understanding of rape, which renders rapes by the latter party both different from and more acceptable than Bosnian Serbian ones. As the case of Celebici IT-96-21 shows, this is a problematic account of the reality of the war. The conviction of Hazim Delic, a Bosnian Muslim, for rape of two Bosnian Serb women does not support a construction of Muslim rapes as different in nature from the Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Croat ones.16 From the point of view of the victim, whether the rape is seen as spon- taneous or intentional might not make much of a difference. It is the location of rape within a national security discourse that focuses on the collective

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 63

importance of rape to the exclusion of attention to its individual meaning that allows for a separation between the two types.

The consequence of this particular construction of national security is that although the rapes are considered signiécant, the interests and security concerns of the women are collapsed with those of Bosnia as a whole. Solving ‘women’s security problems’ becomes, in short, a function of addressing larger Bosnian security concerns. Such a representation led to a reluctance to engage with the fact that raped Bosnian women have been divorced by their husbands, shunned by their society and in some cases killed (Folnegovic-Smalc 1994: 179; Seifert 1994: 59; Stiglmayer 1994: 91). For example, Allen argued that the world press exaggerated these threats in order to constitute the Bosnians as demonic Muslim Others (Allen 1996: 89). She contended that not only Bosnian women have been under pressure from their society, but so also have Bosnian Serbs and Croats. She referred to examples of raped women who had not been expelled or treated negatively by their community and husbands (Allen 1996: 70–1). This is undoubtedly true. Yet, it does not tackle those cases of threats and abuse of Bosnian Muslim women that have been documented. Nor is it a construction conducive to the acknowledgement of raped Serbian women’s security problems (for a case study see Nikolic-Ristanovic 1996). The construction of the rapes as expressions of a particular form of national warfare implies that individual rapes are assigned different meaning and values depending upon into which national group the victim falls, regardless of the similarities that might exist among ‘different’ – e.g. Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian – women’s experi- ence. Mirjana Morokvasic has stressed that reading the rapes through national collective security lenses risked removing the rapes from the women themselves; in the collective, national-security construction ‘individuals cease to exist’ (Morokvasic 1998: 81).

The policy implication of the ‘Rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’ repre- sentation is to prompt the international community, more speciécally the West, to intervene in defence of the Bosnian government against a genocidal Serbian campaign. (Mestrovic 1994; Ó Tuathail 1996) Most of the raped Bosnian women interviewed by Stiglmayer took the same position and ‘asked that the world intervene militarily or lift the weapons embargo so that the war, and with it the rapes and expulsions, would cease’ (Stiglmayer 1994: 164). The fact that ‘even one person has been subjected to such treatment should be enough to guarantee immediate and effective intervention to stop it’ (Allen 1996: 66). Humanitarian intervention was seen simply as not sufécient to guarantee either the security of Bosnia or of the Bosnian women (Allen 1996: 94, 138). In the aftermath of the rapes, it is considered crucial that the perpetrators are brought to trial and that extensive counselling is offered to those traumatized women seeking help.

Western unwillingness to muster the prescribed military intervention resulted, within the conénes of this discourse, in a negative assessment of the West: ‘Lack of intervention to stop the genocide is a clear sign of the crisis, if not the end, of the moral and ethical systems upon which Western democratic

64 International Feminist Journal of Politics

institutions have historically been based’ (Allen 1996: 135). To this evaluation of western policy overall is added a speciéc critique of the western media which was accused of adopting a voyeuristic attitude towards the rapes (Allen 1996: 29–40). According to Stjepan Mestrovic: ‘The Croatian government has sought not to publicize the plight of its rape victims, for fear they would be labeled as prostitutes, or be exploited by a West that seems to thrive on sado-masochistic sexual fantasies in its popular culture’ (Mestrovic 1994: 100). It was feared that the (necessary) mobilization of the international community might subject raped women to a new form of humiliation by the media by turning them into ‘warnography’ (Pettman 1996: 104, in a discussion of Suzanne Gibson). The danger was not only that this form of exposure might turn people off, but ‘[w]orse, it may turn some people on, given the eroticisation of both violence and women’s bodies’ (Pettman 1996: 104; see also Stanley 1999: 95). Rumours about the existence of videotapes of rapes circulating on the international pornography market conérmed the horror of the voyeuristic gaze of the (male) West. The dilemma became how to use the media to mobilize support for intervention when that same media attention might construct the victims in problematic – sexualized – ways (Stanley 1999: 95).

FEMINIST SECURITY: ‘BALKAN PATRIARCHY’

The starting-point of the ‘Balkan patriarchy’ representation is the feminist critique of the traditional construction and acceptance of wartime rape. Radical feminists have argued that men engaged in warfare, even if fighting on opposing sides, share an understanding of practices such as rape, prostitution, pornography and sexual murder ‘as an excess of passion in peace or the spoils of victory in war, or as the liberties, civil or otherwise, of their perpetrators’ (MacKinnon 1994: 185). The ‘Balkan patriarchy’ construction is not only highly critical of this (male) view of rape and war, it also challenges the distinction between strategic and emotional rape, and between rape as an ‘international security problem’ and rape as an individual risk. The separation of different forms of warfare rape as well as the distinction between warfare rape and rape in the national or domestic context is thus challenged and replaced by a reading which emphasizes the common elements of both types of rape. This emphasis on commonalities across national boundaries questions the traditional concept of national security (Denich 1995: 67). Substituting the national for the gendered reference, the Bosnian war is portrayed as taking place between a patriarchal, nationalist leadership on the one side and a threatened body of women on the other (Denich 1995: 69). Denich holds that:

Serbian Chetniks and Croatian Ustasha were resurrected from World War II, while the Muslim Green Berets represented a new wave of Islamic fundamentalism. But under their opposing symbols and èags, these éghters were akin in their goals and methods. Young men turned into warriors, and in this particular kind of ethnic

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 65

war, they attacked not only the opposing warriors of the other side, but entire populations of the ‘other’ ethnicity who inhabited contested territory.

(Denich 1995: 67)

The consequences for women have been that ‘whatever their ethnic and religious background, and in whatever éghting zone they happen to énd themselves, [ they] have been thrust against their will into another identity’ (Brownmiller 1994: 180).

While the ‘rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’ discourse constructed male identity radically different in the case of Serbia and in the case of Bosnia, ‘Balkan patriarchy’ argued, on the contrary, that male identity has identical traits across national groups. Often, it added an analysis of the particularity of Balkan patriarchy to the view of patriarchy as a universal structure inèuencing women’s lives negatively. As Denich put it:

Male perpetrators appropriated women simultaneously as objects of sexual violence and as symbols in a contest with rival males that replicated the traditional forms of Balkan patriarchy, in which men’s inability to protect ‘their’ women and to control their sexual and procreative powers is perceived as a critical symptom of weakness.

(Denich 1995: 68, emphasis added; see also Denich 1974; Brownmiller 1994: 180; Morokvasic 1998: 68)

The ‘Balkan patriarchy’ representation allows for an understanding of security which includes the ‘domestic’, and ‘non-national’ security problems: threats to raped women from their own communities and even sometimes families, the general post-conèict problem of heightened levels of domestic violence, and the existence of rape on all sides of the war. The problem with this representation is, however, that the accentuation of either ‘patriarchy’ or ‘the Balkans’ might imply a rather static stance: the understanding of rape in the Brownmiller tradition is built upon a biological drive in men which borders on essentialism (Elshtain 1981: 207–8). Moreover, the construction of ‘the Balkans’ might come close to the ‘eternal hatred’ construction discussed in the ‘Rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ representation above.

Another, more fundamental shortcoming is, however, that the separation of Balkan women from nationalistic patriarchy comes close to substituting the antagonistic relationship between Bosnia and Serbia with one between women and men. As a consequence the women of the ‘Balkan patriarchy’ construction become rendered as the non-violent, non-combatant women. This construction downplays the role of the Spartan Mothers, who urge sons and husbands to éght and who foster nationalism and warfare, (Elshtain 1987: 99–101), and of older women’s socialization of younger women into acceptance of patriarchal – or other social – structures. It also leaves out the ‘experience’ of those women who have fought in the war, as well as the phenomenon of female group violence where women and children were blocking UN vehicles (Elshtain 1987: 167–71).

66 International Feminist Journal of Politics

But perhaps, most importantly, it comes disturbingly close to a conservative, Romantic vision of women as essentially different from men, as being the nurturing core of the nation. The privileged position accorded women within this vision is, however, dependent on women staying clear of the actual politics and strategy of war-making. Consequently, the political space in which ‘Balkan women’ can act, and be responsible, becomes limited (Elshtain 1981: 204–28). This construction of political space with its uniform female community runs into the problem that representations voiced by the majority of the raped women who have spoken have been located within the national framework of the ‘rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’, and not within the feminist ‘Balkan patriarchy’ construction. The ‘solution’ to this incongruity has been either to leave this fact unarticulated, or to argue that Balkan women énd themselves situated within patriarchal structures what are too pervasive to challenge. Although there may be some truth to this analysis, it remains ultimately unsatisfactory since it deprives the raped women of their own political choice and voice.

The policy recommendations of the ‘Rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ and ‘Rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’ representations were fairly straight- forward. The érst argued that the rapes did not call for intervention, while the second demanded intervention on the side of the Bosnian government. The ‘Balkan patriarchy’ representation is, by comparison, more ambiguous since it calls for political action yet in conèicted ways. The existence of a radically threatening situation appears to demand intervention. Yet when the conèict is read in gendered terms specifying which form intervention should take it becomes complicated for two reasons. First, if aggressive male behaviour is a corollary to all military action, one would have to be critical of western military invention, even in the case where its explicit goal were to stop rape. This reser- vation can be found in MacKinnon’s comment that UN peace-keeping troops have been accused of rape (MacKinnon 1994: 185). Second, as pointed out by Stanley, many women who called attention to the rapes had a background in the peace-movements that tended to take a more anti-militaristic attitude (Stanley 1999: 99). As a consequence, claims to a singular ‘feminist’ politics on the issue of rape in warfare should be met with caution.

CONCLUSION

This article has traced the constructions of security at the heart of the debate about how to understand and react to the mass rapes in the Bosnian war. It argued that each of the three representations evolved around conceptualizations of security in, érst, individual or collective terms, and second, in national or gendered terms. The realist representation of the rapes, ‘Rape as normal/Balkan warfare’, proceeded from a narrow construction of security as national/state security and held that rape was common in warfare and did not in itself warrant international intervention. The construction of the Balkans as having a history of violent warfare, including rape, did, however, create an instability within

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 67

this representation as the gendering of ‘the Balkans’ threatened to create a responsibility towards the raped women. The second representation, ‘Rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’, argued that mass rape should be seen as a national security problem and that the mass rapes were an evidence of the particularly vicious Serbian warfare, with a corollary call for western military intervention in support of the Bosnian government. The emphasis on national security and a fundamental differentiation between Serbs and Bosnians leads, however, this representation to argue that the rapes by Bosnian government forces are different not only in terms of numbers but also in terms of their character, and second, to downplay the documented cases of problems faced by raped Bosnian women upon their return to community and family. The third and énal representation, ‘Balkan patriarchy’, changed the privileged concept from the nation to gender and argued that women on all sides had been threatened by masculinistic and nationalistic warfare. This construction relied upon a differentiation between men and women that left out the role of women in fostering nationalism and supporting militarism and warfare. In addition, it did not acknowledge the fact that those women who have spoken about their rape have done so in most cases through narratives that favoured the ‘Rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’ framework and not along the lines of ‘Balkan patriarchy’. The ‘Balkan patriarchy’ representation remained more ambiguous in terms of which policy to advocate. Recognition of the rapes appeared on the one hand to call for international intervention. Yet military intervention might, on the other hand, be problematic both because of more paciést beliefs within some versions of feminism as well as the reality that such intervention would have to depend upon men for protection against the actions of other men.

The end of the war in Bosnia came after an American-led NATO-operation in August 1995 pushed back the Bosnian Serbs, which was followed by the peace negotiations at Dayton. We might ask then which representation turned out to be most successful. Yet, this apparently simple question is not so easily answered. Should one interpret the intervention in 1995 in support of the Bosnian government as a vindication of the ‘Rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare’, or, should one, on the contrary, see the failure to intervene militarily from 1992 to 1995 as a conérmation of the ‘Rape as normal/Balkan warfare’ representation? The answer depends to some extent on the time perspective involved when evaluating policy responses. As Stanley notes, the reports of mass rape in 1992–3 had little immediate impact. Yet although not the main impetus behind the intervention, one might argue that the attention to those rapes nevertheless helped galvanize political support among western govern- ments in favour of intervention (Stanley 1999: 87).

During the conèict the policy debate was focused on the question of interven- tion. Post-conèict, the question of the mass rapes moved onto the International Crime Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. When the Tribunal began the existing legal body of work concerning rape as a war crime was fairly limited and several observers expressed scepticism about the Tribunal’s capacity to, or interest

68 International Feminist Journal of Politics

in, pursuing the perpetrators of rape (Copelon 1994: 209–10; Zarkov 1995: 114; Morokvasic 1998: 82; Rodgers 1998: 110). Fortunately, however, the prosecution has appeared willing to pursue rape-related indictments on several occasions, both as part of the indictments concerning superiors ordering of attacks and their failure to prevent crimes committed by subordinates and in indictments concerning rapes committed personally or by a subordinate in a situation where the accused was personally present.

In the former category, the case against General Blaskic, a Colonel of the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) from May 1992 to 1994, stands out. Blaskic was convicted in March 2000 of crimes against humanity for actions, including rape, carried out against the Bosnian Muslim population. Blaskic, who was promoted to General in August 1994, was given a prison sentence of forty-éve years. Cases involving personal presence include the one brought against Anto Furundzija, a local commander of a special unit of HVO, who was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for being a co-perpetrator to torture in a case where he was interrogating a witness who was raped by another soldier; and the case against Hazim Delic, a Bosnian Muslim, who was convicted of two cases of rape of Bosnian Serbian women, each bringing a sentence of fifteen years (judgments can be found on the homepage of the ICTY, www.un.org/icty).

Several of the trials currently in session involve rape. Mass rape is at the centre of the trials of Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic, who are indicted for their role in keeping women in detention centres (‘rape camps’) in Foca in the summer of 1992, and rape charges have been added to the case against Nikolic a commander at the Susica detention camp in May–June 1992 (for further details see the homepage of the ICTY, www.un.org/icty).

Arguably only a small number of rapes ultimately will be prosecuted. The diféculties in compiling the cases, the traumas of standing trial and the possible fear of response from one’s community all work against the prosecution of wartime rape. Yet, keeping in mind the diféculty of changing international practice, the inclusion of wartime rape in the larger security discourse and the developing legal practice of the Tribunal to make rape a serious offence are important steps which should be applauded. This inclusion, however, also creates new dilemmas: NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in spring 1999 was in part legitimized through reference to mass rape and Serbian-run rape camps in Kosovo. After the conèict, the reliability of NATO’s account of what was factually taking place on the ground in Kosovo has been contested. Human Rights Watch has argued in a recent report that while rape did take place, also on what appears to be a fairly widespread basis, the organization found no evidence of actual rape camps (Human Rights Watch 2000: 2). This raises the difficult question not only of when there are enough rapes for a situation to qualify as mass rape; it also raises the equally difécult question of whether this justiées intervention. Finally, it provokes reèection upon what degree of uncertainty about the veriécation of information can be tolerated in a conèict situation where decisions often need to be made more quickly than in ‘normal’ politics.

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 69

Notes

1 The fact that the ‘Assessment Report on Sexual Violence in Kosovo’ was carried out by United Nations Population Fund, which deals with population control, infants and rape rather than by the Security Council might illustrate an ambiguity as to whether the wartime rapes should be understood within the context of ‘normal’ rapes or the context of warfare.

2 It should be emphasized that there are more aspects to gender and security in Bosnia than the mass rapes. For an analysis of the increase in domestic violence see Nikolic-Ristanovic 1996: 203–8; on the negative economic and emancipatory effects of transition from communism in Yugoslavia see Djuric 1995: 130–5; Jalusic 1994; Ramet 1996: 282–4; Morokvasic 1998: 69–76; on women as refugees see Arcel et al. 1995 and Morokvasic 1998: 78–9.

3 The theoretical strategy pursued in the rest of this article is in other words neither a ‘bottom-up’ nor a ‘top-down’ explanation. Tickner argues that the érst one is characteristic of feminist security studies (Tickner 1997: 628, 1998: 208–9).

4 It is problematic to equal ‘Bosnian’ with ‘Bosnian Muslim’, and both are used in this article. The difference is acknowledged, but it is beyond the scope of this article to go into a discussion of the difference between the two. I have used ‘Bosnian Muslim’ when that is the term being used by those arguing a particular representation, in all other cases ‘Bosnian’ is adopted.

5 For very different versions of this argument see Walt (1991) and Ayoob (1997); for an excellent account of the political foundation of neo-realism see Williams (1998).

6 The mass rapes provide a useful point for interrogating the relationship between Security Studies and feminist approaches to security. Although rape has tradi- tionally been a central feminist concern, the location of mass rape within the context of warfare and military strategy provides a link to the éeld of Security Studies which has traditionally isolated itself from questions of gender.

7 As argued by Winifred Woodhull, the dichotomous discussion of rape as either about power or about sex is problematic insofar as it relies upon ‘the designation of “sex” as a biological or ontological given whose function is to guarantee that sexuality appear to have its origin outside of and prior to power’ (Woodhull 1988: 170). The focus of our analysis should therefore be on the way in which ‘social mechanisms, including language and conceptual structures, [ that] bind the two together in our culture’ and on what this distinction does to our understanding of rape as a security problem (Woodhull 1988: 171).

8 The different constructions of female subjectivity and responsibility in wartime and peacetime rape make the wartime construction appear more progressive from a feminist point of view. It should be noted, however, that women do énd them- selves in a different security situation in the case of warfare, and second, as argued by the Tribunal, that the increased attention to wartime rape is in part a result of increased attention at the national level (Furundzija IT-95-17/1-T 10, Judgement, paragraph 179).

70 International Feminist Journal of Politics

9 As will be argued in the conclusion, the Tribunal has taken a stance in favour of allowing very little room for ‘private capacity’.

10 To decline a role for the collective is still, in other words, to make an argument about the importance of the collective.

11 Adam Jones has argued that feminist analysis fails to notice that more men than women were killed in Bosnia; the point, however, is not simply who got killed in largest numbers, but to investigate the rapes as identity producing practices (Jones 1994; Carver et al. 1998: 296).

12 ‘Women/men’ indicates that a construction of women (or men) is simultaneously a construction of the other gender.

13 On the link between representations and policy recommendations, see Ó Tuathail (1996); Crawford and Lipschutz (1997); Hansen (2000a).

14 It should be noted that not all realists articulated the speciéc Balkan component; neo-realists like Mearsheimer, Posen and Kaufmann for example relied upon a structural realist account of international politics devoid of particular cultural traits, such as ‘Balkan’ (Hansen 2000a).

15 It should be mentioned that ‘Balkan history’ has not always historically been seen as doomed to repetition and its women to a lower social status by western observers, nor did one necessarily claim a correlation between (Balkan) patriarchy and the propensity to rape. The Carnegie Commission writing in 1913, the original document introduced by Kennan in 1993, noted the widespread practice of rape, or ‘outrage’ as it was called. Yet, in keeping with its classical idealist orientation, the Commission was optimistic about ‘the Balkans’’ ability to reach the standards of European civilization. It expected that such a ‘civilized’ transformation would, in part, depend upon changes in women’s social conditions. The Commission thought that as long as women were deferred to a low societal status, the ascendance of the Balkans to ‘civilization’ as a whole could not be accomplished. ‘A people can not rise high in the social scale while women are permitted to bear the heaviest burdens and perform the hardest labor’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914: 271). Not only did the Carnegie Commission differ from Kennan due to its belief in Balkan progress and its explicit attention devoted to changing Balkan patriarchy, it also argued that this patriarchal culture functioned as a protection of women against rape by concurring troops: ‘the Bulgarians are probably less guilty than the others. More patriarchal or more primitive in their ideas, they preserve the feeling of the soil, and are more disciplined than the others’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 1914: 232).

16 In the other major case concerning rape, Furundzija IT-95-17/1, a Croat was indicted and convicted.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this article was presented at the British International Studies Association’s annual conference in Leeds, December 1997. I wish to thank the audience on this occasion as well as Barry Buzan, Thomas Diez, Kathy

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 71

Jones, Karen Lund Petersen, Ole Wæver, Michael C. Williams and the two anonymous reviewers for IFjP for their valuable comments and suggestions.

References

Allen, Beverly. 1996. Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Arcel, Libby Tata, Vera Folnegovic-Smalc, Dragica Kozaric-Kovacic and Ana Marusic (eds). 1995. Psycho-Social Help to War Victims: Women Refugees and Their Families. Croatia: Nakladnistvo Lumin.

Ayoob, Mohammed. 1997. ‘Deéning Security: A Subaltern Realist Perspective’, in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds) Critical Security Studies, pp. 121–46. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Booth, Ken. 1991. ‘Strategy and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies 17 (4): 313–26.

—— 1997. ‘Security and Self: Reèections of a Fallen Realist’, in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds) Critical Security Studies, pp. 83–120. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Brownmiller, Susan. 1975. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. New York: Fawcett Columbine.

—— 1994. ‘Making Female Bodies the Battleéeld’, in Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 180–2. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. First published in Newsweek, 4 January 1993: 37.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.

Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde. 1998. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Campbell, David. 1992. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and Politics of Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1914. Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. Washington, DC: The Carnegie Endowment.

Carver, Terrell, Molly Cochran and Judith Squires. 1998. ‘Gendering Jones: Feminisms, IRs, Masculinities’, Review of International Studies, 24 (2): 283–98.

Cohen, Philip J. 1996. ‘The Complicity of Serbian Intellectuals in Genocide in the 1990s’, in Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic (eds) This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia, pp. 39–64. New York: New York University Press.

Copelon, Rhonda. 1994. ‘Surfacing Gender: Reconceptualizing Crimes against Women in Time of War’, in Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 197–218. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Crawford, Beverly and Ronnie D. Lipschutz. 1997. ‘Discourses of War: Security and the

72 International Feminist Journal of Politics

Case of Yugoslavia’, in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds) Critical Security Studies , pp. 149–88. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Dalby, Simon. (1992). ‘Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Discourse’, Alternatives 17 (1): 95–134.

Denich, Bette. 1974. ‘Sex and Power in the Balkans’, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (eds) Woman, Culture, and Society, pp. 243–62. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

—— 1995. ‘Of Arms, Men, and Ethnic War in (Former) Yugoslavia’, in Constance R. Sutton (ed.) Feminism, Nationalism and Militarism, pp. 61–71. USA: Association for Feminist Anthropology/American Anthropological Association.

Djuric, Tatjana. 1995. ‘From National Economics to Nationalist Hysteria – Consequences for Women’, in Helma Lutz, Ann Phoenix and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds) Crosséres: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, pp. 121–41. London: Pluto Press.

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1981. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—— 1987. Women and War. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Fitamant, D. Serrano. 1999. Assessment Report on Sexual Violence in Kosovo. United

Nations Population Fund. Folnegovic-Smalc, Vera. 1994. ‘Psychiatric Aspects of the Rapes in the War against

the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 174–9. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Grant, Rebecca. 1992. ‘The Quagmire of Gender and International Security’, in V. Spike Peterson (ed.) Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, pp. 83–97. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Hansen, Lene. 2000a. ‘Past as Preface: Civilizational Politics and the “Third” Balkan War’, Journal of Peace Research 37 (3): 345–62.

—— 2000b. ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in the Copenhagen School’, Millennium 29 (2) 285–306.

Human Rights Watch. 2000. Kosovo: Rape as a weapon of ‘ethnic cleansing’. New York: Human Rights Watch.

Jalusic, Vlasta. 1994. ‘Troubles with Democracy: Women and Slovene Independence’, in Jill Benderly and Even Kraft (eds) Independent Slovenia, pp. 135–57. London: Macmillan.

Jones, Adam. 1994. ‘Gender and Ethnic Conèict in Ex-Yugoslavia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (1): 115–34.

Kennan, George. 1993. ‘Introduction: The Balkan Crises: 1913 and 1993’, in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reèections on the Present Conèict by George F. Kennan, pp. 3–16. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment.

Krause, Keith and Michael C. Williams. 1996. ‘Broadening the Agenda of Security Studies? Politics and Method’, Mershon International Studies Review 40 (2): 229–54.

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 73

MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— 1994. ‘Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights’, in Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 183–96. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Mestrovic, Stjepan G. 1994. The Balkanization of the West: The Conèuence of Postmodernism and Postcommunism. London: Routledge.

Morokvasic, Mirjana. 1998. ‘The Logics of Exclusion: Nationalism, Sexism and the Yugoslav War’, in Nickie Charles and Helen Hintjens (eds) Gender, Ethnicity and Political Ideologies, pp. 65–90. London: Routledge.

Nikolic-Ristanovic, Vesna. 1996. ‘War and Violence against Women’, in Jennifer Turpin and Lois Ann Lorentzen (eds) The Gendered New World Order: Militarism, Development, and the Environment, pp. 195–210. London: Routledge.

Nordland, Rod. 1999. ‘Rape and Aftermath.’ Newsweek, 24 May: 27, 28. Nye, Joseph S. and Sean M. Lynn-Jones. 1988. ‘International Security Studies’,

International Security 12(4): 5–27. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. 1996. Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pettman, Jan Jindy. 1996. Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics.

London: Routledge. Ramet, Sabrina Petra. 1996. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the

Death of Tito to Ethnic War, 2nd edn. Boulder, CO: Westview. Rodgers, Jane. 1998. ‘Bosnia, Gender and the Ethics of Intervention in Civil Wars’,

Civil Wars 1 (1): 103–16. Seifert, Ruth. 1994. ‘War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis’, in Alexandra Stiglmayer

(ed.) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 54–72. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Stanley, Penny. 1999. ‘Reporting of Mass Rape in the Balkans: Plus Ca Change, Plus C’est Même Chose? From Bosnia to Kosovo’, Civil Wars 2 (2): 74–110.

Steans, Jill. 1998. Gender and International Relations: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stiglmayer, Alexandra. 1994. ‘The Rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in Alexandra Stiglmayer (ed.) Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, pp. 82–169. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

Tickner, J. Ann. 1992. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press.

—— 1997. ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists’, International Studies Quarterly 41 (4): 611–32.

—— 1998. ‘Continuing the Conversation . . . ’, International Studies Quarterly 42 (1): 205–10.

Todorova, Maria. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, R. B. J. 1990. ‘Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics’,

Alternatives 15 (1): 3–27. —— 1992. ‘Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations’, in V. Spike

Peterson (ed.) Gendered States, pp. 179–202. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

74 International Feminist Journal of Politics

Walt, Stephen M. 1991. ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly 35 (2): 211–39.

Williams, Michael C. 1998. ‘Identity and the Politics of Security’, European Journal of International Relations 4 (2): 204–25.

Woodhull, Winifred. 1988. ‘Sexuality, Power, and the Question of Rape’, in Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (eds) Feminism & Foucault: Reèections on Resistance, pp. 167–74. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender & Nation. London: Sage. Zalewski, Marysia. 1995. ‘Well, What is the Feminist Perspective on Bosnia?’,

International Affairs 71 (2): 339–56. Zarkov, Dubravka. 1995. ‘Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the

Former Yugoslavia’, in Helma Lutz, Ann Phoenix and Nira Yuval-Davis (eds) Crosséres: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, pp. 105–20. London: Pluto Press.

Lene Hansen/Gender, Nation, Rape 75

The K4D helpdesk service provides brief summaries of current research, evidence, and lessons learned. Helpdesk reports are not rigorous or systematic reviews; they are intended to provide an introduction to the most important evidence related to a research question. They draw on a rapid desk-based review of published literature and consultation with subject specialists.

Helpdesk reports are commissioned by the UK Department for International Development and other Government departments, but the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of DFID, the UK Government, K4D or any other contributing organisation. For further information, please contact [email protected].

Helpdesk Report

Gender and conflict in the Western Balkans Huma Haider University of Birmingham 17.03.2017

Question How have structural gender inequalities changed during and after the various conflicts in the Western Balkans? To what extent do legacies of gender based violence during conflict continue to impact social relations?

Contents 1. Overview 2. Gender and ethnic conflict in the Western Balkans 3. Women’s agency 4. Gender relations and women’s rights in the post-conflict contexts 5. References

1. Overview Ethnic wars in the Western Balkans had a parallel in ‘gender wars’ – and both were instrumental in fostering competitive, conflictual and antagonistic perspectives of social relations (Hughson, 2012). This report provides a brief summary of gender relations and (in)equalities in the Western Balkans, in particular, how they have been influenced by the violent conflicts following the breakup of Yugoslavia. It discusses gender stereotypes and the portrayal and treatment of women and men in Western Balkan societies; gender-based violence during conflict and its legacy; women’s agency in the region; and women’s rights and participation post-conflict. Much of the literature focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Serbia – and the report reflects

2

this. There is a companion piece to this report which focuses on gender norms and indicators of gender equality in the Western Balkans1

In the lead up to the conflicts in the region, there was a re-patriarchalisation of Yugoslavian society and a reductionist portrayal of gender roles. The concept of ‘militant masculinity’ placed males in the role of violent warrior, capable of fighting ethno-national wars, and women in the role of biological reproducers or nurturers of the nation (Berna, 2014; Haug, 2013; Hughson, 2012).

Gender-based violence

Women’s bodies and war narratives: Sexual and gender-based violence is often enabled by gendered narratives that portray women’s bodies as territory, to be ‘protected’ by men of their ‘own side’ and attacked and conquered by the ‘enemy’ (O’Reilly, 2016). Nationalistic governments used sexual victimisation of ‘their’ women to strengthen gendered narratives of ‘their endangered nations’ (Korac, 2016). In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the rape of Bosnian Muslim women by Serb forces took on symbolic meaning as a site of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Todorova, 2011).

Legacy of sexual violence: Survivors of sexual violence during the various wars often experience trauma and social exclusion, and subsequent problems of poverty, unemployment and lack of health care (Hughson, 2014; Zajović, n.d.). Survivors also feel discriminated against in terms of compensation and access to social benefits, with veterans receiving greater attention and resources (O’Reilly, 2016; Hughson, 2014). Since survivors of sexual violence are primarily women and war veterans are mainly men, the implications are gendered (Hughson, 2014).

Experiences of wartime rape are often marginalised and silenced (Todorova, 2011). In Kosovo, for example, the issue of wartime rape rapidly and completely disappeared from public discourse after the war (Di Lellio, 2016). There is also silence with regard to sexual violence against males, as this goes against the patriarchal and militarist narrative (Korac, 2016).

Addressing the legacy of mass rape, including children born from inter-ethnic violence, is considered essential for future reconciliation (Todorova, 2011). In BiH, it is also considered necessary for establishment of an inclusive Bosnian national identity (ibid).

Domestic violence: The number of women who experience domestic violence has reportedly increased as a result of the violent conflicts (Korac, 2016), aggravated by post-conflict tensions and greater intolerance and discrimination of minorities and marginalised groups (Berna, 2013).

Women’s agency

The gendered propaganda in the lead up to and during the Yugoslav wars, and the ensuing acts of violence, stimulated the mobilisation and leadership of women throughout the region. They sought in various ways to counter nationalism and militarism in their countries and to seek accountability for widespread human rights violations (Di Lellio, 2016). Women across the Western Balkans also formed transnational networks, within the region and internationally. From

1 Browne, E. (2017). Gender norms in the Western Balkans (K4D Helpdesk Research Report no. 58). Birmingham, UK: GSDRC, University of Birmingham.

3

the early 1990s, they engaged in analyses, activism and lobbying concerning the gender-power aspects of the conflicts and patterns of gender-based violence (Korac, 2016).

In some contexts, women’s rights and activism experienced a general backlash in the aftermath of conflict with the decline in the mobilisation of international women’s networks on wartime sexual violence (Di Lellio, 2016). There have still been notable successes in the Western Balkans, however – in particular the establishment of the Women’s Court, through the efforts of a diverse range of women’s groups from throughout the region. The Court, which is designed and staffed by women, provides a space for women’s voices and for their testimonies (O’Reilly, 2016).

Gender relations and women’s rights in the post-conflict context

The dominance of national politics and the myriad of transitional and post-conflict challenges in the Western Balkan countries have pushed issues of gender equality, the human rights of women and implementation of related legislation to the margins (Simić, 2015; Haug, 2013).

The persistence of patriarchy and gender-stereotypical roles: A key obstacle to women’s progress and inclusion is the persistence of patriarchal social norms and attitudes and traditional views of gender roles in society (Simić, 2015; Haug, 2013). Studies show that education in many Yugoslav successor states, for example, continues to convey traditional value systems (Korac, 2016).

Without addressing structural constraints (e.g. patriarchal values, dominant structures of power, social relations that exploit and marginalise women, constructions of masculinity) legislation and gender mainstreaming can be implemented without actually leading to any constructive transformation of gender relations (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015; Simić, 2015; Berna, 2013).

Socioeconomic life: The Yugoslav successor states have been undergoing difficult transitions not only from conflict, but also from communism to a market economy. Economic insecurity and the legacy of war have created an even deeper gap between genders (Korac, 2016; Hughson, 2012). Gender gaps in labour market participation rates and in pay are key problems in the region (Nikoloski and Adnett, 2015; Berna, 2014).

Peace agreements: Not a single woman participated in the peace process that preceded the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 (Mlinarević, Isaković and Rees, 2015) or in Kosovo’s negotiation team in the status talks between Serbia and Kosovo (Haug, 2013). This marked absence of women has implications for society as a whole; and for women as a group and their ability to be recognised as agents of change in later processes (Mlinarević, Isaković and Rees, 2015). Subsequent discussions on constitutional reforms in BiH have also excluded women. In addition, gender-related issues, such as domestic violence, health care, education and employment, have not been factored into a carefully planned transition in post-war BiH. (ibid)

Political life: Women’s access to political leadership and participation in decision-making is often constrained by expected gender roles (Simić, 2015). In BiH, there has been a conservative backlash for women in politics in the aftermath of the war (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015). The number of women in decision-making roles has declined well below the levels of socialist Yugoslavia (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015), despite the existence of a quota system. In Kosovo, however, the quota system has contributed to increasing the participation of women in decision- making roles (Haug, 2013).

4

It has also been argued that the dominance of ethnic considerations in political life in post-war BiH has relegated women and gender issues a lower priority (Hughson, 2014). This is reportedly also an influence in Macedonia, where attention to Albanian and Macedonian ethnic groups in political representation is said to have marginalised other groups within the individual ethnic group – in particular, women (Risteka, 2011).

2. Gender and ethnic conflict in the Western Balkans Gender is often a crucial dimension shaping social and political processes before, during and after violent conflict (Di Lellio, 2016). At the same time, gender equality can be significantly affected by conflict and turbulent political situations (Haug, 2013). In Kosovo, for example, ‘gender equality has been closely interconnected and intersected by the Serbian-Albanian conflict, the rise of new nationalist discourses, and the dispute over state status’ (Haug, 2013, 148). It has also been affected by the domestic responses to these processes (ibid).

Gender differences are tied to other socially constructed differences (Hughson, 2012). Ethnic wars in the Western Balkans had a parallel in ‘gender wars’ – and both were instrumental in fostering competitive, conflictual and antagonistic perspectives of social relations (ibid). Ethnification is closely linked to re-traditionalisation and re-patriarchisation of Western Balkan societies (ibid). It is argued that notions of femininity and masculinity and norms of sexuality combine to produce ethnicity, which became a powerful catalyst for war mobilisation throughout the former Yugoslavia (Di Lellio, 2016).

Given the close ties between gender and ethnic wars, gender reconciliation and ethnic reconciliation are inseparable (Hughson, 2012). The deconstruction of structural power relations related to war making is important for both gender relations and peacemaking (ibid).

The perception and portrayal of gender roles

The traditional patriarchal value system in the Western Balkans has been an ongoing factor in the region (with the exception of the period of socialism). It influences the position of women and men in societies (Duhaček, 2015; Berna, 2014).

In the lead up to the conflicts in the region, there was a re-patriarchalisation of Yugoslavian society and a reductionist conceptualisation and portrayal of gender roles. Gender representations during the wars were in sharp contrast to former Yugoslav media representations of women and very different from what many former Yugoslavs perceived as their reality (Hughson, 2012). The discourse of the nationalist regimes portrayed women’s emancipation as an ‘unnatural’ effect of the socialist system (Haug, 2013).

The concept of ‘militant masculinity’ placed males in the role of violent warrior, capable of fighting ethno-national wars, and women in the role of biological reproducers or nurturers of the nation (Berna, 2014; Haug, 2013; Hughson, 2012). In Kosovo, for example, the engagement of women was framed within the context of helping and sacrificing for the sake of the country (Haug, 2013). Women in the region were obligated to remain in their communities and endure the war atrocities, without any opportunity to exercise non-traditional roles (Berna, 2014). They were portrayed in the media and by politicians as powerless victims (Haug, 2013; Hughson, 2012).

Such gendered and sexualised metaphors and propaganda were used to construct essentialist national and ethnic identities (Haug, 2013). They contributed to the militarisation of societies,

5

mobilisation of populations for war, and violence against women (Di Lellio, 2016; Korac, 2016; Hughson, 2012).

The wars reinforced gender stereotypes, traditional views of the role of women, and the influence of religious traditionalism (Berna, 2014). In Serbia, the political regime and army involved in the break-up of Yugoslavia reinstated Serbian traditional ‘family values’, which negatively impacted on women’s human rights and gender equality (Duhaček, 2015). In Kosovo, the political leadership that emerged from the war promoted masculine ideas of ‘valour’ and ‘patriotism’ (Di Lellio, 2016). Gender stereotypes have persisted since the end of the conflicts, which has undermined movement toward gender equality (Di Lellio, 2016; Berna, 2014). Gender relations have also been persistently patriarchal (Bobić, 2012).

Women’s bodies and war narratives

Sexual and gender-based violence is often enabled by gendered narratives that portray women’s bodies as territory, to be ‘protected’ by men of their ‘own side’ and attacked and conquered by the ‘enemy’ (O’Reilly, 2016). In the Western Balkans, women’s bodies were equated with ethno- national ‘territories’ (Korac, 2016). Women were routinely subjected to sexualised violence during the various armed conflicts (ibid).

Nationalistic governments used sexual victimisation of ‘their’ women to strengthen gendered narratives of ‘their endangered nations’ and their territories (Korac, 2016). The sexual abuse of women in war was used to foster gender-power systems that underpin the processes of militarisation and war violence (ibid).

Throughout the 1990s, women in Serbia were perceived not as citizens but as biological reproductive material, in relation to their ethnic belonging (Duhaček, 2015). This made women vulnerable to the risk of mass rape (ibid). In the case of Kosovo, representations of Albanian men were limited to dangerous sexual aggressors, preying on Serbian women (Di Lellio, 2016; Haug, 2013). Media campaigns concerning cases of rapes of Serbian women by Albanian men in Kosovo were instrumental for the war and national mobilisation (Hughson, 2012). Albanian women were labelled as baby factories, representing a danger to the Serbian nation (Di Lellio, 2016; Haug, 2013). The high birth rate amongst Albanians was portrayed as an act of sexual aggression against Serbia (Di Lellio, 2016).

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the inter-relationship between ethnicity and gender was exploited by Bosnian Serb nationalists, who drew on patriarchal traditions and violent militarist tactics (Todorova, 2011). Women became a specific target for sexual violence by enemy forces. The widespread use of mass rape against Bosnian Muslim women was one of the tactics deployed by Serb forces to intimidate and terrorise the Muslim population (ibid). From an ethnicist patriarchal perspective, the rape of Bosnian Muslim women took on the symbolic meaning as a site of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (ibid).

Throughout wartime in the region, a woman’s body became a haven of survival – not of personal survival, but of the survival of a nation and, moreover, of an ethnicity (Berna, 2014).

Legacy of sexual violence

Addressing the legacy of inter-communal mass violence and the reintegration of survivors of mass violence is a key challenge in post-conflict societies. This is particularly the case with

6

women who were raped and the children that were born as a result of these rapes (Todorova, 2011).

Survivors of sexual violence during the various wars often experience trauma and social exclusion, and subsequent problems of poverty, unemployment and lack of health care (Hughson, 2014; Zajović, n.d.). Trauma can be transferred to new generations (Hughson, 2014). Many female survivors were also left without close male relatives and without economic or social support (Di Lellio, 2016). Female survivors of war-time rape and sexual violence in BiH, for example, often feel the State neglects their existence and fails to address its responsibilities towards them (Hughson, 2014).

Survivors also feel discriminated against in terms of compensation and access to social benefits, with veterans receiving greater attention and resources (O’Reilly, 2016; Hughson, 2014). Since survivors of sexual violence are primarily women and war veterans are mainly men, the issues of treatment and choices are clearly gendered (Hughson, 2014). In addition, survivors may prefer compensation in the form of reparation that addresses wartime abuses and acknowledges the tremendous wrong that they experienced, rather than a payment in the form of a social support benefit (Mlinarević, Isaković and Rees, 2015).

Experiences of wartime rape are also often marginalised and silenced (Todorova, 2011). In Kosovo, for example, the issue of wartime rape rapidly and completely disappeared from public discourse after the war, with society entering a phase of denial (Di Lellio, 2016). The question of gender-based sexual violence thus continues to undermine Kosovar society (Haug, 2013). Many survivors were forced to keep silent by patriarchs and older women, who acted as ‘custodians of tradition’ (Di Lellio, 2016). This silence went alongside the reproduction of stereotypical gender roles, with men as responsible for policing behaviour and women for upholding social mores (ibid).

There is also silence with regard to sexual violence against males. Speaking about raped men within a patriarchal context is considered to emasculate not only the victims themselves but also the notion of the nation and the state by eroding the very gender-power system upon which it is built (Korac, 2016). Lack of acknowledgment on the part of local feminist anti-war activists of the diversity of men’s experiences of the war, and of men’s victimisation by war, represents a missed opportunity for pushing for more radical challenges to patriarchy and gender-power relations (ibid).

Addressing the legacy of mass rape, including children born from rape, is considered necessary for future reconciliation (Todorova, 2011). In BiH, it is also considered necessary for establishment of an inclusive Bosnian national identity (ibid). There are many issues related to the children born from rape. Questions relate to Bosnian society’s response to the children born out of inter-communal violence: are they Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), like their mothers, or Serbian, like their fathers? Are they ‘the enemy within’? (Todorova, 2011). In Kosovo, some rape survivors also had babies, with some choosing to give up their children (Di Lellio, 2016). The local media often published stories with headlines that labelled the children as ‘bastards’, undermining the security and dignity of women once again (ibid).

Domestic violence

The number of women who experience domestic violence has reportedly increased as a result of the violent conflicts (Korac, 2016). Domestic violence is considered to be the most widespread

7

form of violence throughout the Western Balkans, aggravated by post-conflict tensions and increased intolerance and discrimination of minorities and marginalised groups (Berna, 2013). Victims of domestic violence have limited access to justice and proper protection, with most services provided by women’s groups and funded by international donors (Berna, 2013). Despite legislation countering domestic violence, there is poor implementation (ibid). In addition, governments in the region have not engaged in public awareness campaigns on domestic violence (ibid).

For further discussion on domestic violence in the Western Balkans, please see K4D helpdesk report, no. 58 on Gender norms in the Western Balkans.

3. Women’s agency The gendered propaganda in the lead up to and during the Yugoslav wars, which contributed to mobilisation in the war effort, also stimulated the mobilisation and leadership of women throughout the region. They sought in various ways to counter nationalism and to seek accountability for widespread human rights violations (Di Lellio, 2016). In Serbia, for example, women’s NGOs took the lead in resisting nationalism and opposing the militaristic and patriarchal practices of the Milosevic regime, as part of their policy of taking responsibility as citizens (Duhaček, 2015; Irvine, 2013). The activity of women’s groups and networks in Serbia has increased the chances that social capital will be stronger among women (Berna, 2013).

In Kosovo, women organised throughout the 1990s as part of a parallel Kosovar society in opposition to Serbian authorities (Irvine, 2013). They were able to apply this experience to the task of reconstruction after 1999 (ibid). In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a number of women’s groups formed during the war with the aim of helping women by providing psychological support and counselling (Simić, 2015). Such support continued after the war. These organisations have also since the end of the war sought to counter domestic violence, trafficking of women, gender discrimination and gender inequality (ibid). As a result of women’s civil society efforts, BiH adopted its first Gender Equality Law in 2003, which acknowledged for the first time the problem of gender-based violence and gender discrimination in the country and obliged the state to take action to protect women’s human rights (ibid). Women in BiH have also pushed to ensure that newly emerging political structures in the post-conflict period paid attention to women’s concerns (ibid).

Women across the Western Balkans also formed transnational networks, within the region and internationally. From the early 1990s, they engaged in analyses, activism and lobbying concerning the gender-power aspects of the conflicts and patterns of gender-based violence (Korac, 2016). They were instrumental in drawing attention to rape and other forms of sexual violence, gathering evidence on these crimes, and pushing for their inclusion within definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity (Di Lellio, 2016; Korac, 2016; Irvine, 2013). The first written accounts and analyses of the rape of women in Bosnia and Herzegovina were disseminated by local feminist groups in 1992-1993 (Korac, 2016). Women in Kosovo were later able to amplify their activism by linking to numerous reports of rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina that were receiving relatively greater attention, particularly with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (Di Lellio, 2016).

In some contexts, women’s rights experienced a general backlash in the aftermath of conflict with the decline in the mobilisation of international women’s networks on wartime sexual violence (Di

8

Lellio, 2016). In Kosovo, for example, survivors and their advocates stopped raising the issue of sexual violence in public (ibid). The support that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) wartime political leadership had given to women activists waned, reportedly as there was no longer a need to use the narrative of the suffering of women to strengthen the national cause (ibid). Instead, women advocates in post-war Kosovo received threats and were undermined by public opinion campaigns (ibid).

There have still been notable successes in the Western Balkans, however – in particular the Women’s Court. A diverse range of women’s groups from throughout the region worked together and successfully pushed for the establishment of a Women’s Court, which involves all former Yugoslavia countries. In contrast to existing Tribunals, the Court is designed by women, staffed by women and involves the full participation of women. It provides a space for women’s voices and for their testimonies of the injustices and various forms of violence they have experienced during war and peacetime (O’Reilly, 2016).

The Women’s Court, which began operation in 2015, is considered to be a more empowering process for victims and survivors than participation in the traditional war crimes tribunals. It offers a ‘feminist approach to justice’ and symbolic recognition of war-time gender-based violence (rape for nationalistic purposes; male violence against women; political repression of women human rights defenders). It is argued that it has, however, failed to capture the many other aspects of women’s wartime roles and identities (O’Reilly, 2016). Women were not solely victims in war. Several thousand women in BiH, for example, volunteered to serve in the national armies and militias, adopting combatant roles (ibid).

4. Gender relations and women’s rights in the post-conflict contexts

The widespread adoption throughout the region of international conventions and national legislation that address gender equality and gender perspectives has been inadequate in countering discrimination against women in public and private spheres. The dominance of national politics and the myriad of transitional and post-conflict challenges in the Western Balkan countries have pushed issues of gender equality, the human rights of women and implementation of related legislation to the margins (Simić, 2015; Haug, 2013). Despite more than a decade of powerful and dedicated activity in civil society and significant organisation on national and international stages, women have occupied few positions of formal decision-making authority in the various post-conflict contexts throughout the Western Balkans (Irvine, 2013).

Lack of enforcement of gender equality provisions is due in part to the existence of legal and political systems that have not sufficiently defined acts of gender discrimination or built an effective legal framework to successfully prosecute offenders (ibid). It is also due to the need to integrate a gender perspective into all aspects of the social fabric of society, including in the educational system (Duhaček, 2015; Hughson, 2014). A key obstacle to women’s progress and inclusion is the persistence of patriarchal social norms and attitudes, traditional views of gender roles in society and conservative ideologies (Simić, 2015; Haug, 2013).

9

The persistence of patriarchy and gender-stereotypical roles

The reconfiguration of gender roles has been one of the biggest challenges in the post-conflict transition period in the Western Balkans, in particular transforming, diversifying and highlighting a variety of roles for men and women (Berna, 2014).

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, conservative, patriarchal views about gender roles and the portrayal of women as mother and housewife are held by all religious communities, which undermine efforts at gender equality (Simić, 2015). Despite progress in legislation guaranteeing equality between men and women, deep-rooted, patriarchal stereotypes persist (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015; Simić, 2015). This is reflected in unequal opportunities for women, higher rates of unemployment and the under-representation of women in most public areas, including in politics and in the security sector (Ibid; Hughson, 2014). In Kosovo, it is also argued that the persistence of patriarchal values and discriminatory attitudes toward women undermines progress made in establishing legislative frameworks for gender equality and prevents equal access to markets and goods (Dauti and Zhllima, 2016; Haug, 2013). Men continue to dominate the top-level parallel Kosovar-Albanian political and social structures, despite women having engaged in much activism (Haug, 2013).

Studies show that education in many Yugoslav successor states continues to convey war-time divisions and traditional value systems (Korac, 2016). In Albania, for example, a gender analysis of elementary school textbooks found evidence that the education system reinforces gender stereotypes, representing boys as leaders and high achievers and girls as caretakers (Dauti and Gjermeni, 2013). The education system also fails to critically address gender regimes and roles that lead to war violence, which hinders transformations from violent to peaceful societies (Korac, 2016). This is a more general problem in the Western Balkans. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, war-time narratives are given prominence, which excludes recognition of pre-war and post-war periods and the gendered structures of inequality that enabled gendered violence and discrimination to emerge and endure (Porobić Isaković and Mlinarević 2016; cited in O’Reilly, 2016).

At the national level and across the entire Western Balkans, attention needs to be given to challenging structural constraints – socioeconomic, gender-based violence, patriarchal values, dominant structures of power, social relations that exploit and marginalise women, and constructions of masculinity for young men (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015; Simić, 2015; Berna, 2013). It is also necessary to challenge the ‘status subordination’ affecting many women survivors of violence by positively revaluing their identities (Fraser, cited in O’Reilly, 2016). Without such transformations, legislation and gender mainstreaming can be implemented without actually leading to any constructive transformation of gender power relations (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015). A reformed education system is one area that could be used as a long- term strategy for gender equality (Duhaček, 2015).

Socioeconomic life

Although women in socialist Yugoslavia lived in a patriarchal society, they also participated in a socialist culture which granted them certain important human rights and freedoms. They were granted rights of divorce, abortion, contraception, employment and education (Simić, 2015). Prior to the dissolution of the country, over 40 per cent of women worked full time, fostering economic independence (ibid). This status, economic and social condition of women has changed in the post-war period (Berna, 2014).

10

The Yugoslav successor states have been undergoing difficult transitions not only from conflict, but also from communism to a market economy and from single party rule to pluralist democracy (Simić, 2015; Hughson, 2012). Their economies remain weak, with poor conditions of everyday life (Hughson, 2012). Economic insecurity and the legacy of war have created an even deeper gap between genders (Korac, 2016; Hughson, 2012). The transition and restructuring of employment in the new market economies in the Western Balkans have contributed to large and increasing gender gaps in labour market participation rates (Nikoloski and Adnett, 2015). The gap is particularly large in Kosovo, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (ibid). This gender unemployment gap is driven in part by an education gap and by discrimination and traditional stereotypes of female workers (ibid). The gender pay gap is a key problem in the Western Balkans, estimated to range from 20 percent to 39 percent (Berna, 2014).

For further discussion on women and work, please see K4D helpdesk report, no. 58 on Gender norms in the Western Balkans.

Peace agreements

There was hope among women’s organisations in the Western Balkans that the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security in 2000 would have a positive impact on the region (Irvine, 2013). Women’s organisations seemed well positioned to use UNSCR 1325 as a tool to leverage increased participation and to improve the status of women in their post-conflict countries (ibid). The resolution also provided a key policy framework for integrating women and gender issues into transitional justice processes and mechanisms (O’Reilly, 2016).

Women were generally absent from peace processes in the Western Balkans, reflecting worldwide trends. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, women were actively engaged in addressing the consequences of the violent conflict (e.g. providing assistance to victims of sexual violence and internally displaced persons, working on cross-community dialogue). After the war, women continued organising in some instances to demand the truth about missing family members or to demand inclusion of women in formal politics (Mlinarević, Isaković and Rees, 2015). There was, however, no mechanism at the time to carry those experiences across into the formal peace negotiations (UNSCR 1325 had yet to be implemented) (ibid). Not a single woman participated in the peace process that preceded the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 (ibid). This marked absence of women has arguably had concrete consequences for society as a whole and for women as a group and their ability to be recognised as agents of change in later processes (ibid). Subsequent discussions on constitutional reforms have also excluded women. In addition, gender-related issues, such as domestic violence, health care, education and employment, have not been factored into a carefully planned transition in post-war BiH. They were not considered by decision-makers to be ‘serious’ and of ethno-national interest and were thus to be dealt with separately from Dayton and the transition (ibid). Domestic violence, for example, considered to be an entirely ethno-politically neutral issue, has been left to be dealt with by women’s organisations (ibid).

There were also no women in Kosovo’s negotiation team in the status talks between Serbia and Kosovo, despite the reliance by women on UNSCR 1325, which had then been adopted (Haug, 2013). Men considered the status talks to be their exclusive domain and they took precedence over ‘women’s concerns’ (ibid). It is argued that international actors fostered this form of discrimination, discussing larger political issues only with Kosovar Albanian male

11

representatives. Some justified this by pointing to Kosovo being a traditional and patriarchal society (ibid).

Political life

The inclusion of women in political processes has been a challenging struggle (Haug, 2013). Women’s access to political leadership and participation in decision-making is often constrained by expected gender roles (Simić, 2015). At the same time, women’s participation in decision- making is considered to be critical in challenging patriarchal structures and promoting inclusive decision-making (Dauti and Gjermeni, 2013). The presence of women in decision-making is poor throughout the region.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, there has been a conservative backlash for women in politics in the aftermath of the war, with the number of women in decision-making roles declining well below the levels of Socialist Yugoslavia (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015). Legislation to promote gender equality and the introduction of a quota system (election candidate lists must contain at least 30 per cent women) and gender mainstreaming have contributed to a general increase in the participation of women in political life (Björkdahl & Selimovic, 2015; Simić, 2015). However, the overall share of women in decision-making and in leadership positions remains low (ibid). In addition, women in politics are often slandered, considered as ‘window-dressing’ or pawns for a specific political agenda (ibid).

In addition to suffering from a conservative backlash, it has also been argued that the dominance of ethnic considerations in the Dayton Accord and political life in post-war BiH has relegated women and gender issues a lower priority (Hughson, 2014). This is reportedly also an influence in Macedonia, where attention to Albanian and Macedonian ethnic groups in political representation in the Ohrid Framework Agreement is said to have marginalised the other groups within the individual ethnic group – in particular, women (Risteka, 2011). They have been placed in inequitable positions compared to men of the same ethnic group (ibid).

In Kosovo, the quota system (legislative gender quota reserving 30 per cent of the seats on the lists of electoral and assembly candidates) has contributed to increasing the participation of women in decision-making roles (Haug, 2013). Kosovo and Macedonia are tied in having the greatest number of women deputies in Parliament and Municipality assemblies in the Western Balkans (ibid). In Serbia, the proportion of women as deputies in the Serbian parliament (33.6 per cent in 2012) compares favourably with most democratic political communities in Europe (Duhaček, 2015). Women remain underrepresented, however, in executive and legislative power at central and regional levels (Babović, 2016).

In Albania, women remain in the minority in political participation (Dauti and Gjermeni, 2013). There are also regional challenges. Women’s representation in local decision-making is very low in poor, rural, and mountainous local governments, which supports the argument that structural barriers affect women’s involvement in local politics (ibid). Thus, improving the participation of women in local decision-making also requires diminishing the gap that exists between regions (ibid).

For further discussion on women’s political participation in the Western Balkans, please see K4D helpdesk report, no. 58 on Gender norms in the Western Balkans.

12

5. References Babović, M. (2016). Gender equality index for Serbia: Measuring gender equality in 2014. Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Unit Government of Republic of Serbia. http://socijalnoukljucivanje.gov.rs/wp- content/uploads/2016/02/Izvestaj_Indeks_rodne_ravnopravnosti_2016_EN.pdf

Berna, I.B. (2014). Post-conflict gender politics in the Western Balkans – Between the same circle of palms with human security and a small stream outside the box. Revista Hiperboreea, 1(2), 282-300. http://revistahiperboreea.ro/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Ioana-Bianca-BERNA- POST-CONFLICT-GENDER-POLITICS-IN-THE-WESTERN.pdf

Berna, I.B. (2013). Gender politics and post-conflict reconstruction in the Western Balkans. Journal of Research in Gender Studies, 3(2), 128-133. https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3234861811/gender-politics-and-post-conflict- reconstruction-in

Björkdahl, A. and Selimovic, J. M. (2015). Translating UNSCR 1325 from the global to the national: protection, representation and participation in the National Action Plans of Bosnia- Herzegovina and Rwanda. Conflict, Security & Development, 15(4), 311-335. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2015.1071973

Bobić, M. (2012). The application of the concept of social capital in understanding marriage and family in contemporary Serbia. In Predrag Cvetičanin and Ana Birešev (eds.), Social and Cultural Capital in Western Balkan Societies (41-58). Belgrade: CECSSEE-IPSTUB

Dauti, M. and Zhllima, E. (2016). Public perceptions and attitudes toward gender equality in Albania. Tirana: UNDP. http://www.al.undp.org/content/albania/en/home/library/poverty/public- perceptions-and-attitude-towards-genedr-equality-in-alban.html

Dauti, M. (2015). Mapping women’s representation in the local councils of Albania. In S. P. Ramet and C. Hassenstab (eds). Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe: A Question of Justice (Gender and Politics) (147-168), Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Di Lellio, A. (2016). Seeking justice for wartime sexual violence in Kosovo: Voices and silence of women. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, 30(3), 621–643. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0888325416630959

Duhaček, D. (2015). Gender equality in Serbia: “A drop of oil” in the waters of inequality?. In S. P. Ramet and C. Hassenstab (eds). Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe: A Question of Justice (Gender and Politics) (108-125), Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Haug, H. K. (2015). Gender equality and inequality in Kosovo. In S. P. Ramet and C. Hassenstab (eds). Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe: A Question of Justice (Gender and Politics) (147-168), Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Hughson, M. (2014). Gender country profile for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Herts: HTSPE Limited. https://europa.ba/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/delegacijaEU_2014070314432045eng.pdf

Hughson (Blagojevic), M. (2012). Got undoing gender, undoing the Balkans: Towards ethnic and gender reconciliation. In R. Kersten-Pejanić, S. Rajilić, & C. Voss (eds). Doing gender – doing the Balkans (17-42).

13

Irvine, J. A. (2013). Leveraging change: Women’s organisations and the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in the Balkans. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15(1), 20-38. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616742.2012.699779

Korac, M. (2016). Is there a right time for gender-just peace? Feminist anti-war organising revisited. Gender and Education, 28(3), 431-444. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1169252

Mlinarević, G., Isaković, N. P. and Rees, M. (2015). If women are left out of peace talks. Forced Migration Review, 50. http://www.fmreview.org/mlinarevic-isakovic-rees.html

Nikoloski, D. and Adnett, N. (2015) The determinants of gender differences in responses to unemployment in post-transition countries: the case of Macedonia. In P. Cvetičanin, I. Mangova, and N. Markovikj (eds). A life for tomorrow: Social transformations in South-east Europe (155- 172). Skopje: Institute for Democracy “Societas Civilis”.

O’Reilly, M. (2016). Peace and justice through a feminist lens: Gender justice and the Women’s Court for the Former Yugoslavia. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10(3), 419-445. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2016.1199482

Risteka, M. (2011). Macedonia: Ten years after the Ohrid Framework Agreement. In J. Nemec and M. S. de Vries (eds.) Public Sector Dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe (51-64). Bratislava NISPAcee. http://www.nispa.org/files/publications/ebooks/nispacee-proceedings- varna-2011.pdf#page=53

Simić, O. (2015). Gender (in)equality in Bosnia and Herzegovina: One step forwards, two steps back. In S. P. Ramet and C. Hassenstab (eds). Gender (In)equality and Gender Politics in Southeastern Europe: A Question of Justice (Gender and Politics) (87-107), Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Todorova, T. (2011). ‘Giving memory a future:’ Confronting the legacy of mass rape in post- conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 12(2), 3–15. http://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1103&context=jiws

Zajović, S. (n.d.). The Women's Court – a Feminist Approach to Justice: Review of the Process of Organizing the Women's Court. http://www.helsinki.org.rs/doc/stasa%20zajovic%20tekst%20eng.doc

Acknowledgements We thank the following experts who voluntarily provided suggestions for relevant literature or other advice to the author to support the preparation of this report. The content of the report is the sole responsibility of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of any of the experts consulted.

x Marija Babovic,University of Belgrade x Marsela Dauti, University of New York Tirana

x Nita Gojani, UN Women x Hilde Katrine Haug, OSCE

x Maja Korac, University of East London

14

x Jelena Pešić , University of Belgrade

Suggested citation Haider, H. (2017). Gender and conflict in the Western Balkans. K4D Helpdesk Report. Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies.

About this report This report is based on five days of desk-based research. The K4D research helpdesk provides rapid syntheses of a selection of recent relevant literature and international expert thinking in response to specific questions relating to international development. For any enquiries, contact [email protected].

K4D services are provided by a consortium of leading organisations working in international development, led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), with Education Development Trust, Itad, University of Leeds Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), University of Birmingham International Development Department (IDD) and the University of Manchester Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI).

This report was prepared for the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) and its partners in support of pro-poor programmes. It is licensed for non-commercial purposes only. K4D cannot be held responsible for errors or any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this report. Any views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of DFID, K4D or any other contributing organisation. © DFID – Crown copyright 2017.

Copyright of Ethnic & Racial Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed

to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However,

users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfjp20

International Feminist Journal of Politics

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20

Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate

Carol Cohn (she/her/hers) & Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers)

To cite this article: Carol Cohn (she/her/hers) & Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers) (2020) Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22:5, 742-762, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2020.1843364

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1843364

Published online: 24 Nov 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 650

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Women, Peace and Security in a changing climate Carol Cohn (she/her/hers)a and Claire Duncanson (she/her/hers)b

aConsortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA; bPolitics and International Relations, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

ABSTRACT In this article, we argue that the effort to get the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda implemented in a series of bureaucratic institutions has pulled the agenda quite far from its original motivating intent. Indeed, going down the bureaucratic implementation rabbit hole has made it almost impossible for advocates to stay in touch with the foundational WPS question: how do you get to gender-just sustainable peace? As we approach the twentieth anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, we argue that WPS advocates need to return to that question, but in doing so, must also acknowledge the changed context. One striking change is that climate breakdown is both more acute and more apparent than in 2000, and any attempt to build gender-just sustainable peace will face serious climate- induced challenges. However, the climate crisis creates not only challenges for the WPS agenda, but also opportunities. The sustainability of peace and of the planet are inextricably linked, and we argue that the realization of the WPS agenda requires transformations to social, political, and, most importantly, economic structures that are precisely the same as the transformations needed to ward off greater climate catastrophe.

KEYWORDS Women, Peace and Security; UNSCR 1325; feminist political economy; climate; peacebuilding

Introduction

The regular anniversaries of the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) – 20 years old this year – are appropriately occasions of both celebration and critical assess- ment. In the first section of this article, we assess progress and make the claim that the effort to get the WPS agenda implemented in a series of bureaucratic institutions has pulled the agenda quite far from its original motivating intent. We query whether WPS advocates have been able to stay in touch with the foundational WPS question: how do you get to gender-just sustain- able peace?

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Claire Duncanson [email protected] Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD, UK

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 2020, VOL. 22, NO. 5, 742–762 https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1843364

We next ask: what happens if we return to ask that original motivating question today? Considering this question anew exposes, we think, two salient, disturbing issues. The first is that many of the structural barriers to achieving gender-just sustainable peace have endured, both unaddressed and untroubled by the WPS agenda. This leads us to revisit the question: was the WPS agenda, even 20 years ago, a sturdy enough vehicle to foster the achievement of gender-just sustainable peace? We argue that from the beginning, there have been critical gaps in the WPS agenda, and in particular we highlight its neglect of transnational economic actors and dynamics as a major impediment to the WPS agenda ever achieving its goals.

The second issue is that, two decades after the inception of the WPS agenda, a clear-eyed assessment of what it will take to achieve those goals must recognize that the world is in some ways strikingly different than in 2000. In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been a global inten- sification of economic inequality (Oxfam 2019), often the driver of war and insecurity (Stewart 2008). We have also witnessed the alarming rise of the populist, authoritarian patriarchal right (Graff, Kapur, and Walters 2019) in almost every corner of the world. These changes are tremendously con- sequential, and are yet to be reckoned with by the WPS agenda. But perhaps the most looming and pervasive change is that climate and ecologi- cal breakdown is both more acute and more apparent than in 2000, and this reshapes the context in which all of our attempts to secure a peace that is gender-just and sustainable will take place. Thus, after looking back at the agenda’s early and enduring neglect of the ways in which transnational econ- omic systems undermine the possibilities for peace, we turn, in the third section, to climate breakdown and its implications for the WPS agenda.

We argue, ultimately, that it is many of the same economic forces under- mining peace that are also leading to environmental and climate breakdown. Consequently, the realization of the WPS agenda requires transformations to social, political, and, most importantly, economic structures that are nearly precisely the same as the transformations needed to ward off greater climate catastrophe.

The WPS agenda: down the rabbit hole

Through the careful strategic thinking and Herculean work of advocates outside and inside the United Nations (UN), UNSCR 1325 has avoided the obscurity into which many Security Council (SC) resolutions fall; it has become instead the foundation of what is commonly known in the inter- national policy community as the “Women, Peace and Security agenda” (or WPS agenda). That agenda, in turn, has shaped (and in part been shaped by), inter alia: institutional policies and procedures in international organiz- ations and national governments; the funding priorities of bilateral donors

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 743

and foundations; the range of activities for which non-governmental organ- izations (NGOs) can – and cannot – access funding; and the research ques- tions of many feminist scholars. Thus, UNSCR 1325, which was revolutionary in its creation of a space to bring women (and, to a lesser degree, gender relations) into public policy discourse on war and security, has also in many ways framed the contents and the limits of the space in which women peace activists and gender equality advocates have been able to address war and peacebuilding.

Although at times it seems as though the terms “1325,” “WPS agenda,” and “WPS architecture” are used fairly interchangeably, we think it is worth dis- tinguishing between the motivating goals of UNSCR 1325, the WPS agenda, WPS architecture, implementation, and the impacts of that implementation. Such distinctions are useful in assessments of feminist strategies for change, but are not often explicit in the scholarship on WPS.

We use motivating goals to refer to the problem that activists were trying to solve: ending the ravages of war and building peace free of oppressive gender relations. Once they identified the SC as a critical leverage point for achieving this goal, and made the tactical decision to try for a SC resolution, it was axiomatic that the scope of the agenda-defining SC resolution would be restricted by the exigencies of the SC as an institution, including both the parameters of its mandate and its internal politics. In other words, with the tactical turn to the SC, it was inevitable that the WPS agenda that emerged would be only a subset of the issues that needed to be addressed to achieve the larger goals (Cohn, Kinsella, and Gibbings 2004; Cockburn 2007; Cohn 2008; Klot 2015).

In bureaucratic institutions, agendas are not translated into actions without architectures to make it happen. In the case of UNSCR 1325, this archi- tecture includes the normative documents (including the nine successor res- olutions)1 and guidance documents (such as plans of action, toolkits, and training manuals), as well as the specialized positions and offices that have come into being over the last two decades. Creating the architecture is a criti- cal step forward; it is also, of necessity, a selective and interpretive process, which ends up emphasizing some parts of the agenda while de facto whit- tling away others. For example, as is well documented, sexual violence is emphasized while prevention of armed conflict has been largely ignored (Meger 2016; Aroussi 2017); “gender perspectives in peacekeeping” is inter- preted as a need to add women into peacekeeping forces and provide gender sensitivity training for soldiers who will be deployed in the field, but not as necessitating in-depth training in gender analysis skills for mission planners at headquarters (Simić 2014; Coomaraswamy 2015, 135, 144; Rupesinghe, Stamnes, and Karlsrud 2019).

If architecture is meant to provide the normative and bureaucratic frame- work that will mandate and enable implementation, it still does not assure it.

744 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Departmental Plans of Action and National Action Plans, for example, can be left sitting on shelves (George and Shepherd 2016). Resolutions can call for more women to be appointed as heads of peacekeeping operations or as international negotiators, but institutional leaders can fail to recommend or appoint them (UN Women 2012). Gender units in UN missions can be created but left without sufficient, if any, budgets; they can be situated in physically and bureaucratically isolated locations far from the exercise of power; and they can be staffed with people who are themselves untrained or uninterested in gender analysis, and/or too junior to have meaningful influence (Coomaraswamy 2015, 277; Landgren 2019, 116).

Just as architecture is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for implementation, implementation, in and of itself, does not assure the intended impact. Does putting troops through gender trainings actually impact their understandings, attitudes, or behaviors? Do prosecutions for conflict-related sexual violence actually have a deterrent effect that decreases future use of sexual violence as a tactic of war? Does the presence of (just any? how many?) women in a peace negotiation actually lead to a more sus- tainable and gender-just peace? As none of these is a given, and in each case we can enumerate myriad impediments that can and do militate against the intended impact, it is crucial not only to avoid conflating implementation and impact, but also to be aware that there can be a tremendous amount of slip- page between the two, and to assess each of them separately.

Indeed, when looking at the journey from feminist goals, through their translation into the UN’s WPS agenda, their institutionalization as an architec- ture, their patchy implementation, and, finally, any discernible impacts, there is considerable slippage at each point along the way. And while one could analyze the reasons for and consequences of each of those slippages, our concern here is more with the process as a whole, which has resulted in a suc- cessive narrowing from, and sometimes distortion of, the original intent of the WPS agenda.2 That is, the cumulative effect of all of these bureaucratic steps has been to remove us from the goal, from first principles.

This is probably somewhat inevitable; when you invest tremendous amounts of effort in bureaucratic struggles to create an architecture, but still see little impact in what the organization actually does, the natural reac- tion is to push harder down the same path, to invest more energy in repeat- edly struggling for implementation of hard-won mechanisms and/or to put new bits of architecture into place. The focused energy and attention required by that daily struggle can make it extremely difficult to stay in touch with the scope of the motivating goal, as you push against stubborn bureaucratic resistance, or seek to identify and prize open the tiny crevices where one might be able to insert useful new language, and do the compli- cated alliance building that those actions require. That is, as you go deeper down that rabbit hole of pressing for implementation and carving out

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 745

small bureaucratic wins, it becomes more challenging to remain focused on and re-ask the original motivating question: how can we get to gender-just sustainable peace?

We find that when we re-ask that question today, there is much that has changed (as we will discuss below), but much that is depressingly familiar. What remains the same is that the decision to aim for a UNSCR itself created enduring gaps in the agenda (Cohn 2008). Some of these gaps have repeatedly been the focus of feminist critics, including the failure to address causes of war, the omission of attempts to tackle militarism and the global arms trade, and the gaping silence around the role of masculinities in driving insecurity and war (see, for example, Kapur and Rees 2019). But other gaps have been relatively neglected. We have long argued that one of the most critical omissions has been the transnational economic dynamics that can have tremendous impacts on the possibility of realizing gender-just sustainable peace (Cohn 2014; Duncanson 2016); we believe this still to be very much the case 20 years on. We also see those same dynamics as under- lying the newer challenge to WPS: the increasing speed and severity of climate breakdown. Thus, before turning to climate, we outline what we mean by transnational economic dynamics and why we think that the failure to address them so undermines the potential of the WPS agenda.

Enduring barriers to achieving gender-just sustainable peace: transnational economic dynamics

It is in many ways understandable that the WPS agenda and architecture have focused on the protection and participation of women and girls. Beyond the constraints inherent in the SC’s mandate and politics, these were, and still are, painfully salient issues. Gender-based violence in contexts of war had reached new levels of severity in both its nature and prevalence and yet had remained largely unaddressed (Ní Aoláin and Valji 2019). And women from conflict- affected regions around the world were fed up with their exclusion from the processes that can bring wars to an end (Anderlini 2019).

But what this focus obscured was the set of largely economic, trans- national processes and dynamics that are just as, if not more, decisive in whether a gender-just, sustainable peace can be achieved.3 This is because in the aftermath of the formal political settlement of an armed conflict, a raft of predictable processes and dynamics are set in motion (see, for example Berdal and Zaum 2013; Langer and Brown 2016). While the specifics will differ from country to country, physical infrastructure will be rebuilt (at least to some degree and in some form); issues of lack of livelihoods and deficits in health and education will be addressed (in some way); external revenue will be raised for reconstruction and governance (including loans from international financial institutions, and multi-lateral and bi-lateral

746 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

official development assistance (ODA), often associated with various condi- tionalities); there will be greater integration into the global economic system, including pressure from donors to open up national markets to inter- national trade; and private multinational economic actors will take the increased stability as an opportunity to come in to extract resources such oil, gas, timber, and minerals, or to amass large tracts of land for agribusiness. For all of these, a plethora of international actors will play a major role in how these processes do – and do not – occur. And the specific logics of a global capitalist economic system and its key institutions will be shaping, and in many cases determining, the outcomes, often far more than any national democratic process or set of political agreements in a peace settlement.

We need, then, when thinking about peace processes and peacebuilding, to highlight two related disjunctures. The first is between the national or binational scope of most peace agreements and the internationality of the factors contributing to the war and shaping the conditions of the post-war society. That is, no matter how much an armed conflict is framed as a “civil war” or “insurgency,” there are increasingly and almost inevitably cross- border forces feeding the war, from personnel, weapons, and remittances, to the reliance on embeddedness in global political alliances and global econ- omic market relations (both licit and illicit) for funding the fighting (see Kaldor 2012). When national political settlements are made by the immediate “parties to the conflict,” those extra-national forces do not disappear, and additional forces crowd in. So any group hoping to shape social, political, and economic relations in the post-war society, including advocates of the WPS agenda, must take those extra-national forces into account, and analyze how best to engage with them.

The second disjuncture is between formal political agreements and the material conditions in the real world required for their realization. While WPS advocates expect that women’s participation in peace processes and post-war governance will result in the inclusion of women’s human rights and other socially transformative provisions, the realization or enjoyment of human rights requires more than formal political guarantees.4 First, it requires changes in how people think about gendered power relations, and this requires long-term support for transformations in educational and media institutions, as well as for the grassroots women’s civil society organizations that are often active in working to transform patriarchal ideologies.

But, crucially, the enjoyment of rights requires more than a belief in those rights; it requires a set of material conditions. And here, unfortunately, is where many of the international political economic dynamics, processes, and actors referenced above can have the effect of undermining the transfor- mative provisions for which women and other civil society participants have fought in peace agreements. For example, while women participants in peace processes might fight for inclusion of provisions granting women the rights

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 747

to inherit and own land and/or ensuring Indigenous people’s rights to their ancestral territories, these rights can be negated by the actions of trans- national extractive or industrialized agriculture corporations. Examples of this abound, from the Guatemala Nickel Company, a subsidiary of the Cana- dian company Hudbay Minerals, employing rape of Indigenous women in northern Guatemala as a method of dispossessing Indigenous communities of their land (Imai, Maheandiran, and Crystal 2014; Méndez Gutiérrez and Carrera Guerra 2015), to biofuel companies in Sierra Leone negotiating with male village elders to gain access to lands traditionally controlled by women in the community (Millar 2015; Ryan 2018). As competition for access to resources increases, and the demand on land makes it an asset on which investors speculate (de Schutter 2016, 12), the likelihood that women can realize their rights to land recedes further from view. Already, since 2000, over 1,073 “large-scale land deals” have been concluded, covering an estimated total of almost 40 million hectares, and most of these deals have taken place in war-affected countries seen as underexploited sites for indus- trialized agriculture, such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Laos, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (de Schutter 2016, 10).

Or, to choose another of these international political economic dynamics, the post-war economic recovery prescriptions of international lenders and donors, when they include shrinking and/or privatizing state services, have the effects of closing down a key source of women’s employment (since in many countries women’s employment is heavily weighted in the state sector) and of increasing women’s subsistence and care burdens – when, for example, privatization of the local water supply increases the time that women spend walking to access water, or the defunding of nearby health ser- vices means that the care of wounded and disabled relatives becomes wholly women’s responsibility (see Peterson 2009; Jacobson 2013; True et al. 2017). In these and other cases, the sheer time burden that women face makes their social, economic, and political participation in the post-war society far more difficult and less likely (de Alwis, Mertus, and Sajjad 2013) – a direct counter to the WPS agenda’s goals of increasing women’s political participation and empowerment.

It is not that the WPS agenda has ignored economic dynamics entirely. Several WPS UNSCRs reference the need to tackle the socio-economic barriers to women’s participation and to empower women economically, but the WPS agenda tends to conceptualize women’s economic empowerment in a par- ticular way, as individual betterment achieved through inclusion in the labor force or market (Duncanson 2019; Martín de Almagro and Ryan 2019). As feminists have long pointed out, this form of empowerment is rarely a route out of economic insecurity for women; it is a far cry from the original concept of women’s empowerment, which was envisaged as a process involving the collective pursuit of structural change (Batliwala

748 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

2007). In the WPS agenda, socio-economic inequalities appear as local prob- lems, often linked to patriarchal cultures, while the transnational economic dynamics that drive those inequalities are more or less absent. Yet, it will be impossible to realize the goals of the WPS agenda without transforming those dynamics and the political economic assumptions upon which they are based.

New threats: climate breakdown

These transnational economic dynamics have been undermining the WPS agenda from its outset; now, 20 years on, related impediments to achieving gender-just sustainable peace have emerged. A global intensification of economic inequality and the rise of the right are two obvious depressing shifts, but perhaps the most inescapable and alarming threat is the impend- ing breakdown of the climate. Although environmental destruction has been happening for a long time, we are now facing an unprecedented climate, eco- logical, and mass extinction emergency. We argue that it is impossible for WPS advocates to work toward, or even talk about, peace and security without centering this.

The environmental emergency that we face includes a whole range of elements, including climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, pollution, and land degradation. We focus here on climate breakdown because it would be impossible to cover in this short article the many ways in which human activity is pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their capacities to support life on this planet. They are all in any case interconnected, and as such we hope to convey something of the importance of biodiversity loss, for example, even while concentrating most directly on climate breakdown. We prefer the terms climate “breakdown,” “disruption,” “crisis,” and “cata- strophe” to “climate change,” because, as an editorial decision by the Guardian newspaper recently noted, the phrase “climate change” “sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a cata- strophe for humanity” (Carrington 2019).

So how and why should the climate crisis be understood as integral to the possibility of ever meeting the goals of the WPS agenda? We highlight three issues. First, if it was the threat that war posed to women’s human security that was at the heart of the WPS agenda, it is now clear that women’s human security – in fact all people’s – will never be attained unless we can also deal with the climate and ecological emergency. Second, even if we stay focused only on traditional conceptions of security – that is, addressing armed conflict and war – we need to address the ways in which climate breakdown can play a role in extending or intensifying violent conflict. Third, climate breakdown has to transform our understanding of peacebuild- ing. It increasingly defines the context in which peacebuilding takes place,

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 749

requiring us to consider not just climate breakdown’s impacts on peacebuild- ing, but also the ways in which peacebuilding will have effects on climate breakdown and citizens’ ability to cope with it.

Climate breakdown as a threat to human security

The climate crisis poses an enormous direct threat to human security, includ- ing women’s human security, making it a fundamental impediment to realiz- ing the goals of the WPS agenda. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s Human Development Report 1994 introduced the concept of human security, arguing that to achieve meaningful security for people, it was crucial to include access to such basic rights as food, liveli- hoods, shelter, and some protection from disease and ill-health (UNDP 1994). Climate breakdown directly undermines all of them. A few brief snap- shots of climate breakdown makes clear the futility of talking about women’s security without taking climate into account.

Consider food security. As global warming accelerates, ocean tempera- tures, acidity, and pollution are all rising, damaging not only marine biodiver- sity and ecosystems but the fisheries upon which so many rely. About 97 percent of the world’s fisherfolk live in developing countries, and fishing is their major source of food and income; fish accounts for over 50 percent of animal protein in many least developed countries (World Bank 2012, xi, 30). Ninety percent of the world’s fish stocks are already fully exploited or over- exploited (Kituyi and Thomson 2018). Climate-related disasters, such as heat- waves, droughts, monsoons, and hurricanes harm agricultural productivity and undermine food availability, with knock-on effects causing food price hikes and income losses that further reduce people’s access to food (IPCC 2012; FAO et al. 2019). The number of these climate-related disasters has doubled since the early 1990. An average of 213 of these events occurred every year during the period from 1990 to 2016. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that 124 million people were facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity in 2017 (FAO et al. 2019).

Consider displacement. Climate disruption is intensifying the global water cycle, with wetter regions generally becoming wetter and drier regions becoming even drier. An estimated 3.6 billion people (nearly half the global population) live in areas that are potentially water-scarce at least one month per year, and this population could increase to some 4.8–5.7 billion by 2050 (WWAP/UN-Water 2018). Meanwhile, with sea levels rising, other areas are under threat not from drought but because their land is already or soon to be submerged by water. Sea levels are rising at increasing rates as ice melts and warming seawater expands, while nearly 2.4 billion people (about 40 percent of the world’s population) live within 60 miles of the coast (NASA Science n.d.). As a result of these and other climate-related

750 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

factors, people in many parts of the world are already being forced to leave their homes, livelihoods, and communities on an unprecedented scale, a trend that will only accelerate.

Consider health. Climate breakdown is leading to changes in patterns of prevalence and incidence of infectious disease. According to The Lancet, the climate crisis threatens to undermine the last half-century of gains in development and global health (Watts et al. 2015).

Of course, all of these threats to human security have specifically gendered dimensions that further undermine the aspiration for women’s security embedded in the WPS agenda. Among them, women often bear the brunt of coping with climate-related shocks and stresses because of the roles assigned to them in many areas of the world, including food management, water procurement, and caring for family members (Leach 2015; Kronsell 2019). As alternative sources of food, water, and income need to be found, and the sick need to be cared for, the burden of additional work often falls on women (Habtezion 2012). As well as increasing women’s burdens, the climate-induced threats to human security can exacerbate or entrench pre- existing gendered inequalities. If, as is the case in many cultures, men are pre- sumed to deserve or need to have access to the best food, the most food, and the most protein-rich types of food, women are going to be rendered less able than men to respond to climate breakdown (BRIDGE 2014). Scholars of forced displacement note that women are often “less mobile and less monied” and as such face particular challenges when their homes and liveli- hoods come under threat (Giles 2013). Likewise, health crises can be more lethal for women, for whom health facilities are more often unavailable or unaffordable (UNEP 2016). In short, climate breakdown is a massive, multi- dimensional, gender-differentiated threat to human security.

Climate breakdown as a contributor to war

It is hard to imagine how, in any country subject to the effects outlined above, people’s lives could ever be imagined as “peaceful” or “secure.”5 On those grounds alone, any agenda concerned with women, peace, and security must engage with this threat, which is even more pervasive than armed conflict. But even taking only the narrowest construal of the WPS agenda as centered on war, climate breakdown still needs to be confronted, because of the ways in which it amplifies the well-documented drivers of armed conflict such as poverty, inequalities, and economic shocks.

While climate change does not directly cause violent conflict (see, for example, Buhaug 2015; Selby 2019), evidence suggests that climactic con- ditions in combination and interaction with socio-economic and political factors can intensify it (Koubi 2019). For example, this can occur when: gov- ernments cannot or do not fairly distribute resources that climate breakdown

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 751

has rendered increasingly scarce, such as water, arable lands, pasturing lands, and so on (Brzoska and Fröhlich 2016); when increased migration due to climate disruption leads to additional pressure on stressed humanitarian and governance systems (Koubi et al. 2018; Abel et al. 2019); when govern- ments cannot or do not mitigate the volatility of food prices and provision (Beniston 2010; Calzadilla et al. 2013); and when societies cannot or do not prevent economic opportunities disappearing (Mobjörk 2017).

None of this is to imply that climate breakdown should be conceived of as demanding a militarized response, as if it were a threat to individual states’ national security. To see it principally in those terms is to betray a fundamen- tal misunderstanding of the social and economic causes and impacts of our environmental collapse. It also risks empowering militaries, which are not only embodiments of a regressive worldview that is part of the problem – that of self-interested units in perpetual competition – but are also major pol- luters and producers of greenhouse gases (Duncanson 2017).6 But while we are not sanguine about climate being incorporated into conventional national security discourses, we are arguing that the WPS agenda needs to take climate breakdown and the effects that it has on exacerbating and inten- sifying violent conflict much more seriously.

Climate breakdown is increasingly the context within which peacebuilding takes place

Whatever the degree to which climate change is implicated in intensifying wars, what will be true in all wars is that the attempt to build sustainable peace will take place in, and be made much more challenging by, climate breakdown. Building peace requires the provision of jobs and livelihoods, at the same time as climate breakdown destroys the conditions for maintain- ing traditional livelihoods. Building peace requires addressing issues around land reform and restitution, at the same time as climate breakdown reduces the quality and quantity of land available for sustaining livelihoods, and forces yet more people to leave their homes. Building peace requires dealing with the injuries caused by war as well as the health needs that went unaddressed during war, while climate breakdown puts additional pressure on health services through the rise in infectious diseases. Building peace requires the rebuilding of physical infrastructure – everything from roads and railways to power grids – at the same time as climate breakdown causes an increase in extreme weather events that destroy such infrastructure.

Furthermore, peace agreement implementation and post-war reconstruc- tion require tremendous financial resources, and peace already often foun- ders on the lack of implementation – especially with regard to gender equality provisions (Bell 2015). But the financial, governmental, and human

752 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

resources for peacebuilding, and for implementing the WPS agenda in peace- building, will become yet more scarce as post-war countries simultaneously try to deal with the humanitarian crises provoked by drought, heatwaves, flooding from monsoons and hurricanes; the intensified prevalence and inci- dence of infectious disease; greater food insecurity; and climate-based displacement.

As if climate breakdown’s effects on peacebuilding were not already enough of a challenge to how we imagine doing successful peacebuilding, WPS advocates will also need to consider the effects of peacebuilding on climate disruption, and on citizens’ resources to cope with it. For instance, decisions about post-war economic recovery – jobs, land reform, infrastruc- ture – should not only consider the key peacebuilding question of whether they deepen or transform pre-existing inequalities (for example, are employ- ment schemes inclusive of women?; do land tenure systems and agricultural policy support the multi-cropping of smallholder farmers or the large-scale land acquisition and mono-cropping of agribusiness interests?; do roadbuild- ing plans prioritize local-level feeder roads and access to markets, healthcare, and schools, or only main highways to facilitate large-scale resource extrac- tion?). Now, these policy decisions must also be made in light of their effects on climate disruption, and must assess whether the proposed sol- utions will be sustainable as the climate continues to change (for example, will jobs created be in sectors that are contributing to climate breakdown or combating it?; will roadbuilding materials, labor power, and technologies be responsive to predictable climate-related conditions, such as flooding that is more frequent and severe?; will land and agricultural policy take into account the increasing climate-related vulnerability of mono-crop agricul- ture, as well as the climate costs of petrochemical-heavy forms of farming?).7

The need for a paradigm shift

When we ask the motivating WPS question again, two decades on, it is clear that the challenges facing the WPS agenda are immense. Not only do WPS advocates have to deal with the root cause issues that were originally excluded, including the transnational economic dynamics that undermine gender-just sustainable peace; we also have to reckon with the ever more apparent and acute environmental emergency. Peace now has to be accom- plished in a context in which security of all kinds is being undermined to an unprecedented degree. If women ever do get a seat at the table, the current focus of so much WPS energy, it is going to be in the midst of the worst crisis for humanity in global history.

However, the climate emergency also provides an opportunity. The very severity of the emergency makes it clear that we need radical solutions, a transformation to our approach to living on earth. There is a need for an

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 753

overhaul of the social, political, and – crucially – economic systems that govern human societies. For, as is increasingly acknowledged across the pol- itical spectrum in many countries (see Guardian 2019), climate breakdown is caused by our particular economic system, our current form of extractivist capitalism. Extractivist capitalism relies on the exploitation of natural resources as if they were unlimited, and “externalizes” the environmental costs of production, from pollution to the release of greenhouse gases (Daly 1996; Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Leach 2015). Through its depen- dence on fossil fuels for cheap energy and industrial agriculture that over- exploits soil and water supplies, extractivist capitalism destroys the environ- ment as it champions growth at all costs (Daly 1996; Benería, Berik, and Floro 2015; Leach 2015). Its neoliberal insistence on “liberating” free markets and vilifying regulations and collective action has made it impossible for people to act to stop climate breakdown (Klein 2015).

To address and arrest climate change, we need a paradigm shift in how we conceptualize the functioning and purpose of the economy. And as should by now be obvious from what we have written above, we believe that the para- digm shift required to tackle climate breakdown is the very same one that is required to achieve the original goal of the WPS agenda: gender-just sustain- able peace. It is the obsession with growth that guides the transnational economic dynamics that undermine any rights that women might win at the peace table. It is that same obsession that continues to speed us down the road to climate catastrophe, despite ever more visible danger signs and knowledge about where this will lead.

The paradigm shift that we need for gender-just sustainable peace, and the paradigm shift that the planet needs to survive this climate emergency, is a feminist green transformation. In arguing for such a transformation, we are not just making another call for green economies, or green new deals.8

These come in many guises, but too often they are market-based approaches that involve the commodification and enclosure of resources and commons, undermining livelihoods, justifying land- and green-grabs (Borras et al. 2011; Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones 2012; Kari-Oca 2 Declaration 2012; Mehta, Veldwisch, and Franco 2012), and dispossessing local people, especially women food producers. And too often, their attention to gendered power relations and global justice issues is all but non-existent (see, for example, Bauhardt 2014; Harcourt and Nelson 2015; Littig 2017). Instead, we are calling for a feminist green transformation: an entire paradigm shift that restructures production, consumption, and political-economic relations along truly sustainable pathways, with feminist analysis at the core.9 Just as Indigenous communities have long argued (Kari-Oca Declaration 1992; Kari-Oca 2 Declaration 2012), we need an economic system oriented toward human provisioning and ecosystem health and regeneration, rather than exploitation, extraction, and depletion of natural and human resources

754 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

in the service of profit and gross domestic product (GDP) growth. We need to unapologetically claim the mantle of “realism” for an economic system based on an ethics of care – for people and planet – over the short-sighted, destruc- tive ethic of limitless individualistic acquisition and corporate concentration of wealth; that recognizes interdependence – among people and among nations – as the basis for mutual collaborative action, rather than mutual armament; and that recognizes that the goal of sufficiency, of ensuring liveli- hoods and lives of dignity, will never be achieved in a system that deepens, rather than transforms, inequalities.

Conclusion

The WPS story – the invention of the WPS agenda, the creation of an architec- ture meant to actualize it, the fight to get it implemented, and the many inventive ways in which women around the world have found to employ it in their struggles – is in many ways a heroic one. It is also a painfully frustrat- ing one, if you consider the quantities of time, thought, organization, and energy that have been poured into it, in contrast to how little progress there has been in changing the male-dominated war system and the terrible price that women pay for it, and how very far away we are from the goal of gender-just sustainable peace.

But what must be acknowledged, now more than ever, is that this effort has not only been heroic and frustrating, a story in which our goals can be reached if only we can better mobilize to vanquish those who would stand in the way of WPS progress; it is a story that has to change. It is an agenda that has to change, in part because it was, for complex political reasons, limited even in its own time, and in part because it is now utterly inadequate to the time and the crisis in which we live.

Climate breakdown will multiply and intensify the problems that the WPS agenda aims to solve, it will severely deplete the already anemic resources available to deal with them, and it will rob us of the luxury of time to engage in working for small wins through bureaucratic business as usual. The twentieth anniversary of UNSCR 1325, then, must be seized as a vital opportunity – not only to reflect on the WPS agenda, but also on the ways in which it, and we, are uneasily situated in the current historical moment, and on the urgency of devising new approaches to the challenges to come. Imagine what could happen if even half of the feminist thought, energy, and action that has gone into WPS advocacy were now turned loose on envisioning and effecting the paradigm shifts that are now so des- perately needed.

Our own thoughts about the path forward: we have concluded that we need to develop a feminist political economic analysis of the transnational actors and processes that threaten the sustainability of both peace and the

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 755

planet. We need to map routes of intervention in those processes. And we need to articulate policy alternatives based in transformational approaches to our understanding of the nature and purposes of economic activity, and of humans’ relation to the planet. We have been calling this a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” (Cohn 2017; Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights n.d.). In this short time we have to envision, promulgate and enact the paradigm shift needed to reverse the current path to climate cata- strophe, it is our hope and belief that the Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace can make an important contribution.

Notes

1. The nine successor UNSCRs are 1820 (2008), 1888 (2009), 1889 (2009), 1960 (2010), 2106 (2013), 2122 (2013), 2242 (2015), 2467 (2019), and 2493 (2019).

2. This slippage between motivating goals, formulation of a policy agenda, the architecture developed to achieve it, implementation, and the desired impacts is not a story that is unique to WPS, of course. For example, note the way in which feminist aspirations were restricted by the formulation of the Millennium Development Goals in ways that have hampered socio-economic justice for women (Cornwall and Rivas 2015). Efforts to work with and within institutions always involve the need to translate goals into a language that can be understood and deemed actionable by colleagues – hence the large scholarship on the potential risks and pitfalls of “insider” feminist strategies (Eisenstein 1996; Hawkesworth 2006; Caglar, Prügl, and Zwingel 2013; Eyben and Turquet 2013). Some of this scholarship claims that despite the risks, small reforms can sometimes lead to more radical transformation (see, for example, Cockburn 1989; Eyben and Turquet 2013).

3. The arguments in this section are largely based on, and laid out in more detail in, Cohn (2014) and Cohn (2017).

4. This is something that Kandiyoti (2007) illustrates so well in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq.

5. Of course, it is important to note that not everyone’s lives will be equally affected – that there will be differential impacts both between countries and within countries. Worldwide, it is the people who have the fewest economic, political, and social resources, as well as those whose livelihoods are tied to specific landscapes and those who live in especially vulnerable areas such as coastal or arid zones, who will be among the most impacted (see, for example, UNFCCC 2018).

6. The US military, for example, is the single largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world (see Crawford 2019).

7. For more on the inextricability of the climate crisis and the WPS agenda, as well as reflections on the ways in which some of the same troubling patterns that we have seen in WPS discourse are already emerging in the policy discourse on women and the climate crisis, see Cohn (2020).

8. It is also absolutely not a call for women to be valued as naturally superior stew- ards of the world’s resources; just as WPS advocates have long been wary of the equation of women with peace, we are advocating for attention to climate breakdown while absolutely resisting any equation of women with nature

756 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

(see, for example, Arora-Jonsson 2011; Resurrección 2013; Leach 2015; Kronsell 2019).

9. Here we draw from and seek to contribute to ideas in Nelson (2012), Wichterich (2012), Benería, Berik, and Floro (2015), Leach (2015), Raworth (2017), and Bauhardt and Harcourt (2018), as well as the Kari-Oca Declarations. See also Cohn and Duncanson (2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Carol Cohn is the founding Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights. She works across scholarly, policy, and activist communities to create the multidimensional, feminist gendered analyses that are imperative to finding sustainable and just solutions – not only to wars, but to the structural inequalities and environmental crises that underlie them. Her scholarship has addressed topics such as the gender dimensions of nuclear and national security discourse, gender mainstreaming in international security institutions, gender integration issues in the US military, and the strengths and limitations of the international Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and she has published a textbook on Women and Wars (Polity Press). Her current focus is on bringing feminist political economic analysis into both the Sustaining Peace and the WPS agendas through a collaborative international knowledge-building project to create a “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” (https://genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable- peace). Recent work in that project, co-authored with Claire Duncanson, includes a report, “What Kind of Growth? Economies that Work for Women in Post-War Settings,” and “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States” in the Review of International Political Economy. In honor of the US presidential election, she has published “‘Cocked and Loaded’: Trump and the Gendered Discourse of National Security,” in Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton (Cambridge University Press).

Claire Duncanson is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely on issues relating to gender, peace, and security, and teaches on these subjects to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Her current work aims to bring a feminist analysis to the political economy of building peace, and she works with Carol Cohn on the “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” project. Recent publications include Gender and Peacebuilding (Polity Press), “Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda” in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, and (co-authored with Carol Cohn) “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Post-War States” in the Review of International Political Economy. She is also an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and has co-authored with fellow WILPF member Vanessa Farr on the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Afghanistan for Sara Davies and Jacqui True’s Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 757

References

Abel, Guy J., Michael Brottrager, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, and Raya Muttarak. 2019. “Climate, Conflict and Forced Migration.” Global Environmental Change 54 (January): 239–249.

Anderlini, Sanam Naraghi. 2019. “Civil Society’s Leadership in Adopting 1325.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 38–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arora-Jonsson, Seema. 2011. “Virtue and Vulnerability: Discourses on Women, Gender and Climate Change.” Global Environmental Change 21 (2): 744–751.

Aroussi, Sahla. 2017. “Women, Peace, and Security and the DRC: Time to Rethink Wartime Sexual Violence as Gender-Based Violence?” Politics & Gender 13 (3): 488–515.

Batliwala, Srilatha. 2007. “Taking the Power out of Empowerment: An Experiential Account.” Development in Practice 17 (4/5): 557–565.

Bauhardt, Christine. 2014. “Solutions to the Crisis? The Green New Deal, Degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy: Alternatives to the Capitalist Growth Economy from an Ecofeminist Economics Perspective.” Ecological Economics 102: 60–68.

Bauhardt, Christine, and Wendy Harcourt, eds. 2018. Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care: In Search of Economic Alternatives. London: Routledge.

Bell, Christine. 2015. Text and Context: Evaluating Peace Agreements for Their “Gender Perspective”. Research Paper. New York: UN Women. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2017/8/evaluating- peace-agreements-for-their-gender-perspective.

Benería, Lourdes, Günseli Berik, and Maria Floro. 2015. Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if all People Mattered. London: Routledge.

Beniston, Martin. 2010. “Climate Change and Its Impacts: Growing Stress Factors for Human Societies.” International Review of the Red Cross 92 (879): 557–568.

Berdal, Mats, and Dominik Zaum. 2013. Political Economy of Statebuilding: Power After Peace. London: Routledge.

Borras, Saturnino M., Jr, Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford. 2011. “Towards a Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction.” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (2): 209–216.

BRIDGE. 2014. Gender and Food Security: Towards Gender-Just Food and Nutritional Security. Overview Report. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.

Brzoska, Michael, and Christiane Fröhlich. 2016. “Climate Change, Migration and Violent Conflict: Vulnerabilities, Pathways and Adaptation Strategies.” Migration and Development 5 (2): 190–210.

Buhaug, Halvard. 2015. “Climate–Conflict Research: Some Reflections on the Way Forward.” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 6 (3): 269–275.

Caglar, Gülay, Elisabeth Prügl, and Susanne Zwingel. 2013. Feminist Strategies in International Governance. London: Routledge.

Calzadilla, Alvaro, Katrin Rehdanz, Richard Betts, Pete Falloon, Andy Wiltshire, and Richard S. J. Tol. 2013. “Climate Change Impacts on Global Agriculture.” Climatic Change 120 (1–2): 357–374.

Carrington, Damian. 2019. “Why the Guardian Is Changing the Language It Uses about the Environment.” Guardian, May 17. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the- language-it-uses-about-the-environment.

758 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Cockburn, Cynthia. 1989. “Equal Opportunities: The Short and Long Agenda.” Industrial Relations Journal 20 (3): 213–225.

Cockburn, Cynthia. 2007. From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism and Feminist Analysis. London: Zed Books.

Cohn, Carol. 2008. “Mainstreaming Gender in UN Security Policy: A Path to Political Transformation?” In Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives, edited by Shirin M. Rai and Georgina Waylen, 185–206. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Cohn, Carol. 2014. “Why Is It So Hard to Get Women to the Peace Table? And Why Is That Not Even the Right Question?” Keynote Address Presented at “Addressing the Persistence of Gender Inequalities in Conflict Prevention and Peace Processes” Conference, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland, April 4.

Cohn, Carol. 2017. “Beyond the ‘Women, Peace and Security Agenda’: Why We Need a Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace.” Background Paper, “Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace” Project, Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights, Boston.

Cohn, Carol. 2020. “The Women, Peace and Security Agenda and the Climate Crisis: Inextricable Links.” Presentation at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, March 9, 2020.

Cohn, Carol, and Claire Duncanson. 2020. “Whose Recovery? IFI Prescriptions for Post- War States.” Review of International Political Economy, April, 1–21. Accessed October 26, 2020. doi:10.1080/09692290.2019.1677743.

Cohn, Carol, Helen Kinsella, and Sheri Gibbings. 2004. “Women, Peace and Security Resolution 1325.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (1): 130–140.

Consortium on Gender, Security & Human Rights. n.d. “The Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace Project.” Accessed October 26, 2020. https:// genderandsecurity.org/feminist-roadmap-sustainable-peace.

Coomaraswamy, Radhika. 2015. Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace: A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. New York: UN Women.

Cornwall, Andrea, and Althea-Maria Rivas. 2015. “From ‘Gender Equality’ and ‘Women’s Empowerment’ to Global Justice: Reclaiming a Transformative Agenda for Gender and Development.” Third World Quarterly 36 (2): 396–415.

Crawford, Neta C. 2019. Pentagon Fuel Use, Climate Change, and the Costs of War. Providence, RI: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/ 2019/Pentagon%20Fuel%20Use,%20Climate%20Change%20and%20the%20Costs %20of%20War%20Final.pdf.

Daly, Herman. 1996. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

de Alwis, Malathi, Julie Mertus, and Tazreena Sajjad. 2013. “Women and Peace Processes.” In Women and Wars, edited by Carol Cohn, 169–193. Cambridge: Polity Press.

de Schutter, Olivier (with Global Witness and International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR)). 2016. Tainted Lands: Corruption in Large-Scale Land Deals. Washington, DC: ICAR and Global Witness. Accessed October 22, 2020. https:// icar.ngo/publications-2017-5-9-tainted-lands-corruption-in-large-scale-land-deals/.

Duncanson, Claire. 2016. Gender and Peacebuilding. Cambridge: Polity Press. Duncanson, Claire. 2017. “Anti-Militarist Feminist Approaches to Researching Gender

and the Military.” In The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military, edited by Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson, 39–58. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 759

Duncanson, Claire. 2019. “Beyond Liberal vs Liberating: Women’s Economic Empowerment in the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 21 (1): 111–130.

Eisenstein, Hester. 1996. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Eyben, Rosalind, and Laura Turquet. 2013. Feminists in Development Organizations: Change from the Margins. Rugby: Practical Action Publishing.

Fairhead, James, Melissa Leach, and Ian Scoones. 2012. “Green Grabbing: A New Appropriation of Nature?” Journal of Peasant Studies 39 (2): 237–261.

FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO. 2019. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2019: Safeguarding Against Economic Slowdowns and Downturns. Rome: FAO.

George, Nicole, and Laura J. Shepherd. 2016. “Women, Peace and Security: Exploring the Implementation and Integration of UNSCR 1325.” International Political Science Review 37 (3): 297–306.

Giles, Wenona. 2013. “Women Forced to Flee: Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons.” In Women and Wars, edited by Carol Cohn, 80–101. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Graff, Agnieszka, Ratna Kapur, and Suzanna Danuta Walters. 2019. “Introduction: Gender and the Rise of the Global Right.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44 (3): 541–560.

Guardian. 2019. “Editorial: The Guardian View on a Green New Deal: We Need It Now.” Guardian, May 12. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2019/may/12/the-guardian-view-on-a-green-new-deal-we-need-it- now.

Habtezion, Senay. 2012. Gender, Agriculture and Food Security. Gender and Climate Change Capacity Development Series Africa. Training Module 4. New York: UNDP.

Harcourt, Wendy, and Ingrid L. Nelson, eds. 2015. Practising Feminist Political Ecologies: Moving Beyond the “Green Economy”. London: Zed Books.

Hawkesworth, Mary E. 2006. Globalization and Feminist Activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Imai, Shin, Bernadette Maheandiran, and Valerie Crystal. 2014. “Access to Justice and Corporate Accountability: A Legal Case Study of HudBay in Guatemala.” Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue Canadienne d’Études du Développement 35 (2): 285–303.

IPCC. 2012. Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jacobson, Ruth. 2013. “Women ‘after’ Wars.” In Women and Wars, edited by Carol Cohn, 215–241. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kaldor, Mary. 2012. New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 2007. “Between the Hammer and the Anvil: Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Islam and Women’s Rights.” Third World Quarterly 28 (3): 503–517.

Kapur, Bela, and Madeleine Rees. 2019. “WPS and Conflict Prevention.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 135–147. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kari-Oca Declaration. 1992. World Conference of Indigenous Peoples on Territory, Environment and Development, Kari-Oca and Rio de Janeiro. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.cwis.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/kari-oca.txt.

Kari-Oca 2 Declaration. 2012. Declaration Presented at the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Territories, Rights and Sustainable Development and United Nations

760 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20), Kari-Oca, Brazil. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://www.ienearth.org/kari-oca-2-declaration/.

Kituyi, Mukhisa, and Peter Thomson. 2018. “90% of Fish Stocks are Used Up – Fish Subsidies Must Stop.” United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, July 13. Accessed October 22, 2020. https://unctad.org/en/pages/newsdetails.aspx? OriginalVersionID=1812.

Klein, Naomi. 2015. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Klot, Jennifer F. 2015. “UN Security Council Resolution 1325: A Feminist Transformative Agenda?” In The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Feminist Movements, edited by Wendy Harcourt and Rawwida Baksh, 723–745. New York: Oxford University Press.

Koubi, Vally. 2019. “Climate Change and Conflict.” Annual Review of Political Science 22: 343–360.

Koubi, Vally, Tobias Böhmelt, Gabriele Spilker, and Lena Schaffer. 2018. “The Determinants of Environmental Migrants’ Conflict Perception.” International Organization 72 (4): 905–936.

Kronsell, Annica. 2019. “WPS and Climate Change.” In The Oxford Handbook on Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 726–736. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Landgren, Karin. 2019. “WPS and Gender Mainstreaming.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 110–121. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langer, Arnim, and Graham K. Brown, eds. 2016. Building Sustainable Peace: Timing and Sequencing of Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Peacebuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leach, Melissa, ed. 2015. Gender Equality and Sustainable Development. London: Routledge.

Littig, Beate. 2017. “Good Green Jobs for Whom? A Feminist Critique of the Green Economy.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment, edited by Sherilyn MacGregor, 318–330. London: Routledge.

Martín de Almagro, María, and Caitlin Ryan. 2019. “Subverting Economic Empowerment: Towards a Postcolonial-Feminist Framework on Gender (In)Securities in Post-War Settings.” European Journal of International Relations 25 (4): 1059–1079.

Meger, Sara. 2016. “The Fetishization of Sexual Violence in International Security.” International Studies Quarterly 60 (1): 149–159.

Mehta, Lyla, Gert Jan Veldwisch, and Jennifer Franco. 2012. “An Introduction to the Special Issue: Water Grabbing? Focus on the (Re)Appropriation of Finite Water Resource.” Water Alternatives 5 (2): 193–207.

Méndez Gutiérrez, Luz, and Amanda Carrera Guerra. 2015. Clamor for Justice: Sexual Violence, Armed Conflict and Violent Land Dispossession. Guatemala: Equipo de Estudios Comunitarios y Acción Psicosocial (ECAP).

Millar, Gearoid. 2015. “‘We Have No Voice for That’: Land Rights, Power, and Gender in Rural Sierra Leone.” Journal of Human Rights 14 (4): 445–462.

Mobjörk, Malin. 2017. “Exploring the Links Between Climate Change and Violent Conflict.” In SIPRI Yearbook 2017: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, SIPRI, 287–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

NASA Science. n.d. “Living Ocean.” NASA Science. Accessed October 23, 2020. https:// science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/living-ocean.

Nelson, Julie. 2012. Economics for Humans. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 761

Ní Aoláin, Fionnuala, and Nahla Valji. 2019. “Scholarly Debates and Contested Meanings of WPS.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 53–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oxfam. 2019. Public Good or Private Wealth? Oxfam Briefing Paper. Oxford: Oxfam GB. Peterson, V. Spike. 2009. “Gendering Informal Economies in Iraq.” InWomen andWar in

the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nadje Al-Ali and Nicola Pratt, 35–64. London: Zed Books.

Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Resurrección, Bernadette P. 2013. “Persistent Women and Environment Linkages in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Agendas.” Women’s Studies International Forum 40 (September–October): 33–43.

Rupesinghe, Natasja, Eli Stamnes, and John Karlsrud. 2019. “WPS and Female Peacekeepers.” In The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace, and Security, edited by Sara E. Davies and Jacqui True, 206–221. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ryan, Caitlin. 2018. “Large-Scale Land Deals in Sierra Leone at the Intersection of Gender and Lineage.” Third World Quarterly 39 (1): 189–206.

Selby, Jan. 2019. “Climate Change and the Syrian Civil War, Part II: The Jazira’s Agrarian Crisis.” Geoforum: Journal of Physical, Human, and Regional Geosciences 101 (May): 260–274.

Simić, Olivera. 2014. “Increasing Women’s Presence in Peacekeeping Operations: The Rationales and Realities of ‘Gender Balance’.” In Rethinking Peacekeeping, Gender Equality and Collective Security, edited by Gina Heathcote and Dianne Otto, 185– 199. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stewart, Frances, ed. 2008. Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

True, Jacqui, Christine Chinkin, Madeleine Rees, Nela Porobić Isaković, Gorona Mlinarević, and Barbro Svedberg. 2017. A Feminist Perspective on Post-Conflict Restructuring and Recovery: The Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo: Women Organizing for Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

UNDP. 1994. Human Development Report 1994. New York: Oxford University Press. UNEP. 2016. Global Gender and Environment Outlook. Nairobi: UN Environment. UNFCCC. 2018. Considerations Regarding Vulnerable Groups, Communities and

Ecosystems in the Context of the National Adaptation Plans. Bonn: United Nations Climate Change Secretariat.

UN Women. 2012. Women’s Participation in Peace Negotiations: Connections Between Presence and Influence. New York: UN Women.

Watts, Nick, W. Neil Adger, Paolo Agnolucci, Jason Blackstock, Peter Byass, Wenjia Cai, Sarah Chaytor et al. 2015. “Health and Climate Change: Policy Responses to Protect Public Health.” The Lancet 386 (10006): 1861–1914.

Wichterich, Christa. 2012. The Future We Want: A Feminist Perspective. Publication Series on Ecology Volume 21. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

World Bank. 2012. Hidden Harvest: The Global Contribution of Capture Fisheries. Washington, DC: The World Bank.

WWAP (United Nations World Water Assessment Programme)/UN-Water. 2018. The United Nations World Water Development Report 2018: Nature-Based Solutions for Water. Paris: UNESCO.

762 C. COHN AND C. DUNCANSON

Rapid #: -17537121 CROSS REF ID: 84663

LENDER: BOS :: Main Library

BORROWER: BUF :: Main Library TYPE: Article CC:CCL

JOURNAL TITLE: Global environmental change

USER JOURNAL TITLE: Global Environmental Change

ARTICLE TITLE: “Virtue and Vulnerability: Discourses on Women, Gender and Climate Change.”

ARTICLE AUTHOR: Arora-Jonsson, Seema.

VOLUME: 21

ISSUE: 2

MONTH:

YEAR: 2011

PAGES: 744–51

ISSN: 0959-3780

OCLC #:

Processed by RapidX: 5/5/2021 7:45:48 AM

This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)

Virtue and vulnerability: Discourses on women, gender and climate change

Seema Arora-Jonsson *

Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7005, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden

1. Introduction

Where does gender figure in the debates on climate change? Dual themes recur throughout the existing though limited literature on gender and climate change – women as vulnerable or women as virtuous in relation to the environment. This imagery makes two viewpoints seemingly obvious: women in the global South will be affected more adversely by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the global North pollute more than their female counterparts. Common to both places is that women are not part of decision making bodies as are the men in their societies and that is to the detriment of women. In other words, women in the South are extremely vulnerable to climate change while women in the North are much more conscientious when it comes to dealing with climate change, possessing virtues of environmentalism which their male counterparts with their propensity for long distance travels and meat eating habits do not.

Policy statements and government documents in many countries echo these assumptions. In the United States, where the idea of long term changes in climate were contested until recently (and still is in some quarters), the House of Representa- tives issued a declaration on April 1, 2009 that recognized the disproportionate impacts of climate change on women and the efforts of women globally to address climate change. The

resolution, among other things, encourages the use of gender sensitive frameworks in developing policies to address climate change which account for the specific impacts of climate change on women (Lee et al., 2009). In this article I focus specifically on Sweden and India. Sweden has long been regarded to be in the forefront of progressive policy and action on gender equality as well as climate change legislation. Climate change has brought environmentalism to the mainstream political debates in India like never before. India has pushed for the need to link mitigation of the effects of climate change to development and the need for continued growth. Although equity and social justice are not always on the agenda, the promise of development holds an underlying hope that these issues will be addressed.

Women, as the particularly vulnerable subjects of climate change, is the only mention made to gender in the Indian Government’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC). In that one place, the NAPCC (2008:14) states that, ‘‘The impacts of climate change could prove particularly severe for women. With climate change there would be increasing scarcity of water, reductions in yields of forest biomass, and increased risks to human health with children, women and the elderly in a household becoming the most vulnerable. . . .special attention should be paid to the aspects of gender.’’ The Swedish Bill on climate and energy policy (Regeringens Proposition, 2008:220) echoes sentiments voiced above but with its own perspective: ‘‘Many developing countries are especially vulnerable to climate effects because of poverty, conflicts, lack of gender and social equality, environmental degradation and lack of food’’ (my emphasis). The Bill regards

Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751

A R T I C L E I N F O

Article history: Received 12 May 2010 Received in revised form 6 January 2011 Accepted 9 January 2011 Available online 12 February 2011

Keywords: Climate change Gender Vulnerability Environmental virtuousness North South Development

A B S T R A C T

In the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate – women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment. Two viewpoints become obvious: women in the South will be affected more by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute more than women. The debates are structured in specific ways in the North and the South and the discussion in the article focuses largely on examples from Sweden and India. The article traces the lineage of the arguments to the women, environment and development discussions, examining how they recur in new forms in climate debates. Questioning assumptions about women’s vulnerability and virtuousness, it highlights how a focus on women’s vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from inequalities in decision-making. By reiterating statements about poor women in the South and the pro- environmental women of the North, these assumptions reinforce North–South biases. Generalizations about women’s vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women’s responsibility without corresponding rewards. There is need to contextualise debates on climate change to enable action and to respond effectively to its adverse effects in particular places.

! 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

* Tel.: +46 18 6170000. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected].

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Global Environmental Change

journa l homepage: www.e lsev ier .com/ locate /g loenvcha

0959-3780/$ – see front matter ! 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.01.005

gender equality and women’s role in development as having an important bearing on work with climate change in the South; in a Swedish context gender is seen as relevant only with respect to the transport sector.

These ideas are reminiscent of debates on women and development in the 1980s when women’s work and involvement in environmental management began to gain attention. The recent gender and climate change literature also reiterates ideas about women’s poverty, vulnerability and virtuousness. There are three main arguments in relation to women and climate change. Firstly, that women need special attention because they are the poorest of the poor; secondly, because they have a higher mortality rate during natural calamities caused by climate change and thirdly because women are more environmentally conscious. While the first two refer mainly to the women in the South, the last is especially apparent in the literature on gender and climate change in the North.

Some of these arguments that seem evident in a commonsen- sical way, have not always proven to be empirically rigorous, although many have taken on the stature of truth or fact. In the next section, I examine the premises on which these claims are based, that is, on arguments about women’s poverty and vulnerability. Following that, I unpack these arguments by examining recent research on poverty, on the gendered effects of natural calamities and on women’s purportedly pro-environ- mental behaviour. This leads me to question why, despite unconvincing and inadequate research, assertions about women’s poverty and mortality are so prevalent in relation to climate change and gender. I analyse the consequences of these arguments for future research and alternatively, where we could go from here. In doing so, I highlight how a focus on women and their vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from power relations and inequalities reproduced in institutions at all levels and in discourses on climate change. This focus can lead to an increase in women’s responsibility without corresponding rewards. I end with a discussion on the need for contextualising the debate on climate change in order to be able to take action and respond effectively to the adverse effects of climatic changes.

2. Vulnerable and virtuous

It has been recognized that the effects of climate change will be harshest in tropical countries in the South and will affect the poor the most. This insight has led some to claim that women are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change for a number of reasons. According to Hemmati and Röhr (2007), women represent a disproportionate share of the poor and are likely to be dispropor- tionately vulnerable to the effects of climate change (2007:7). Others note that 70% of the 1.3 billion people in the developing world living below the threshold of poverty are women (Denton, 2002; Röhr, 2006). Johnsson-Latham points to a World Bank study that claims that gender differences are greatest among the poorest families. Women also eat last and least in poor families (2007:42). The Swedish Defence Agency’s base data report professes to present the major gender issues in climate adaptation from a Swedish perspective, ‘Since climate adaptation has a high degree of international interdependence, if gender inequity aggravates climate problems in other countries, this can have significant indirect effects in Sweden’ (Hansson, 2007:9). Similarly Oldrup and Breengaard write, ‘In developing countries, women’s needs are often not taken into consideration, and their participation in the climate change processes and debates is not sufficient at the national level’ (2009:47).

It is also believed that women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men during disasters (e.g. Brody et al., 2008:6). Women’s vulnerability is ascribed to cultural and gender mores in

many texts. One example is the Asian Tsunami where the largest numbers of fatalities were said to be women and children under the age of 15. It has been documented that women in Bangladesh did not leave their houses during floods due to cultural constraints on female mobility and those who did were unable to swim in flood waters (e.g. Demetriades and Esplen, 2008 citing Röhr).

A counterpart to women’s vulnerability is their virtuousness. Women are considered more sensitive to risk, more prepared for behavioural change and more likely to support drastic policies and measures on climate change (Brody et al., 2009:15 drawing on Hemmati’s work). Women’s willingness for attitudinal change is a recurring theme in the literature on countries in the North. According to Johnsson-Latham (whose report commissioned by the Swedish government has been cited extensively by those working on climate change and gender), one must start by asking, who are the polluters? The unequivocal answer there, she believes, is ‘men’ and that men need to start paying for the pollution. In her view, gender specific patterns show in general that the polluter is a man, whether poor or rich (2007:34). She writes that instead of recognizing this, the focus of attention when it comes to dealing with climate change is on technology and technicians as a professional group. This group consists mostly of men – and they are portrayed as the solution to the problem (2007:26). Based on research on transportation in Europe, Johnsson-Latham points out that men own more cars and travel longer distances to work, thus emitting much more carbon into the atmosphere. She writes that women on the other hand, tend to travel shorter distances and most often by public transport, use cheaper alternatives like the bicycle or walk and tend to make socially rational choices. ‘Whereas women represent a more human perspective by more consideration to road safety etc. it is men who dominate decision- making’ (2007:44–60). Similarly, another piece of research found that although women in Sweden did not differ from men in cognitive risk judgments related to climate change, they tended to worry more about the environment (Sundblad et al., 2007). Danish researchers have pointed out that men’s meat consumption surpasses that of women and since livestock rearing accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas consumption, men tend to be more polluting. They also point to studies that show that women’s consumption is more sustainable than that of men (Oldrup and Breengaard, 2009:21–23 drawing on the work of Fagt et al., 2006 on Scadinavian eating habits and the Danish consumer report 2008). In her work, Johnsson-Latham concludes by saying that women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change. However, she mentions that well educated and better paid women travel further (2007). So it would appear that it is in fact women, but mainly poor women, who are most virtuous and conscientious in relation to the environment.

These arguments about women’s vulnerability or virtuousness and their predisposition to being more environmentally friendly resonate with the women and development (WAD) or women, environment and development (WED) debates. Women were portrayed as closer to nature and more environmentally conscious than their male counterparts, a notion that held powerful sway in some development circles since the 1980s. Some of the present research on gender and climate change echoes those notions. But a large part of it also builds on assumptions about women’s poverty and vulnerability to natural hazards.

3. Poverty, natural calamities and women’s behaviour

In this section I examine research on the ‘feminisation of poverty,’ on the linkages between vulnerability and poverty as well on adaptation in face of environmental change. I go on to examine work done on gender and natural calamities, followed by research

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 745

on women’s attitudes towards the environment. The section ends by exploring the implications of this body of scholarship for understanding gender and climate change.

3.1. Poverty and its ‘feminisation’

According to Chant, the assertion that women make up 70% of the poor is anecdotal rather than empirically or statistically rigorous. It is usually coupled with what she considers as the deeply problematic assertion about the ‘feminisation of poverty’ a concept that has been contested by several scholars (Chant, 2010:1). The feminisation of poverty has been used to explain differences between male and female poverty in a given context as well as changes in male and female poverty over time. Typically, this approach has fed the perception that female headed house- holds, however defined, tend to be poorer than other households. Empirical work has however cast doubt on this generalization and shown it to be inaccurate (Medeiros and Costa, 2008; Sen, 2008:6).

No scientific study is ever cited to document percentages such as the assertion that 70% of all poor people are women. Examining data from 1995, Marcoux writes that the 70/30 ratio of poor women to men is implausible given the age distribution of the global population and its household characteristics (1998). There is in fact little gender disaggregated data to support the feminisation of poverty thesis though more would be needed to study the differentiated impacts of poverty on men and women. Apart from that, people participate not necessarily as individuals but as family breadwinners in the labour market or otherwise. It is difficult to generalize about poverty without taking account of the existence and extent of all contributions to household income (Kabeer, 2008).

Chant points out that while on the one hand, the assertion about the feminisation of poverty has been useful in garnering resources for women, on the other, it simplifies the concepts of poverty and gender (2010:1). The unfortunate term ‘feminisation of poverty’, writes Jackson, has come to mean not (as gender analysis would suggest) that poverty is a gendered experience, but that the poor are mostly women leading to the fallacy that poverty alleviation would automatically lead to gender equality (1996:491). Others have also shown that poverty and gender discrimination do not necessarily go hand in hand. Rising incomes have not eradicated discrimination against women. While in no way a universal phenomena, excess girl child mortality in Tamil Nadu in India seems to have appeared most strikingly among upwardly mobile households (Harriss-White, 1999). The 2001 census in India makes it clear that the most adverse sex ratios among children are reported by some of its fastest growing, economically well developed and literate states (Premi, 2001). Sex determination tests have led to female foeticide for those who can afford new reproductive technologies (Patel, 2007).

Gender and poverty are two distinct forms of disadvantage. In her article ‘Gender and the Poverty Trap’ Jackson shows the inconsistencies in the assumption that all women-headed house- holds are poor. Citing the work of Ahmad and Chalk from 1994, she points to the invalidity of the time-series data (due to high intra- group variations) on which assumptions about the poverty of women headed households are based (e.g. World Bank, 1989 and IFAD report). She draws on the work of several scholars (for example, Gillespie and McNeill, 1992; Lipton and Payne, 1994) who have seriously questioned arguments about food bias. She also shows that increases in mortality during famines affect men more than women, that women tend to have a greater life expectancy though they may not have better health, that violence has to do with other things than poverty and points to empirical evidence that shows that gender relations are in fact more equitable in many poor Indian households than in wealthier ones

(1996:491–498). The scepticism about the poverty of women headed households has led to the questioning of the thesis of the feminisation of poverty by several scholars (Kabeer, 2008; Davids and van Driel, 2010). The rising number of female headed households in many regions of the world partly reflects the unwillingness of women to continue accepting the injustice of their situation in conjugal homes. Women headed households have given rise to claims about the ‘feminisation of poverty’ but there is no necessary association between female headship and poverty (Kabeer, 2008:5).

There is a need to separate being poor from being women or the generalization that one often glides into – that all women are poor and that the poor are always more vulnerable. Poverty appears to have a self-evident relationship to vulnerability, since poverty tends to lead to greater vulnerability and vulnerability to climate change often leads to outcomes that perpetuate poverty. But there is no universal and does not have to be, a direct correlation between poverty and vulnerability (c.f. Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007). Vulnerability is generated by multiple processes and different situations as empirical research from different countries suggests (e.g. Eriksen et al., 2005; O’Brien et al., 2007). Eriksen and O’Brien point out that vulnerability varies among groups and individuals as well as over time. They cite examples from South Africa and Mexico where relatively higher-income farmers practising irrigat- ed agriculture are vulnerable to climate and market risks because they are constrained from diversifying their livelihoods. They point out that there is no one to one mapping between poverty and climate change vulnerability and make a case for the need to look at poverty and vulnerability linkages (2007).

Carr’s research on adaptation decision-making through a diversified livelihoods strategy in villages in Ghana’s central region, found that the persistence of certain adaptations have little to do with material outcomes but in fact subsist on and reinforce unequal gender relations. It was clear to the author but also to the village women that access to a little more land would have enabled them to maximize personal incomes that they normally put to the use of the household to address the stresses and shocks endemic to these villages. Yet, the adaptation adopted by the household continued to balance women’s farm size near a threshold of production that allowed them very little surplus that could be used for personal incomes. Women appeared to be complicit in a system that heightened existing inequalities and led to less than optimal adaptations (2008:698).

3.2. Women’s mortality during calamities

The second argument for women’s greater vulnerability is that more women die in natural calamities as for example in the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, the 2003 European heat-wave, and in Indonesia and Sri Lanka during the 2006 tsunami (see Araujo et al., 2008). Neumayer and Plumper’s analyses of a sample of up to 141 countries between 1981 and 2002 indicated that the adverse impact of disasters on females compared to male life expectancy is clearly contingent on the extent of socially constructed vulnera- bility. They show that women died more where they were socio- economically disadvantaged. A systematic effect on the gender gap is plausible when disasters exacerbate existing patterns of discrimination (2007). Years of gender research and empirical examples from around the world have shown that discrimination can take many forms. These are often the result of intersecting axes such as socio-economic status or class, caste, ethnicity, type of employment and can vary in time in the same place. As researchers we need to examine the specific form of vulnerability and discrimination that people face in order to respond to it effectively. For example, research on women’s vulnerability to flooding in Orissa, India showed that it is difficult to speak of gender effects

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751746

without at the same time speaking of caste and class that play a major role in defining women’s vulnerability. Lower caste and lower class households were more vulnerable to the cyclones and flooding in the state due to their unfavorable location by the river. But that vulnerability was also dependent on the particular context. In the floods of 2001 and 2003 poor lower caste women were less vulnerable as they had been able to access government grants to build concrete houses that protected them from the flooding that women from some of the other castes were unable to avoid. Gendered effects were obvious however in ideals of women’s behaviour and their need to maintain caste and honor attributes which were put under stress in such times (Ray-Bennett, 2009).

An exception to the contentions about women’s higher mortality is the case of Hurricane Mitch where more men were said to have died than women. It has been suggested that this was due to existing gender norms in which ideas about masculinity encouraged risky, ‘heroic’ action in a disaster situation (Röhr, 2006). According to Bradshaw, who conducted research in the areas affected by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua, ‘the idea of being able to say with certainty who is the most affected by disasters is interesting given that the impact of any event will be time, place and person specific or depend on a mix of location, event and vulnerability.’ She argues that while poverty is a key component of vulnerability, it is not the only, nor necessarily the best, component in terms of predicting impact. Responses are subjective and will be framed by individual understandings of appropriate behaviour which, in turn, are shaped by cultural norms, including gender norms. Within Latino cultures, for example, the cult of ‘machismo’ may make men not women more likely to suffer loss of life during an event, whatever their relative poverty, due to their socially constructed roles and associated riskier behaviour patterns in face of danger. On the other hand, women’s social conditioning may make them so risk-averse that this becomes a risk in itself as they remain in their homes despite rising water levels, waiting for a male authority figure to arrive to grant them permission and/or assist them in leaving. Such behaviour will affect middle income women who are ‘housewives’ as much, if not more so, than low- income women workers. She writes further, that, ‘there were no reliable data to suggest that women more than men suffered physical damage or injury from hurricane Mitch, nor that more men than women were killed’ (2010:3/5).

The assertion that women are 14 times more likely to die in natural calamities also has an uncertain history. It has been cited in innumerable texts, among them in a U.S. Congress resolution. Several authors cite these numbers as a statement of fact without referencing it while most others refer to an IUCN/WEDO document from 2004. When I wrote to IUCN to ask for the original research for this assertion, I was referred to a report by another author as being the correct source for this statement. On contacting the author, it appeared that the statement was made at a presentation at a natural hazards workshop that took place sometime between 1994 and 1996, with the author subsequently including it in a report. This statement has since then been picked up and presented as a fact in several documents on natural disasters.1

3.3. Women as pro-environmental

The third argument concerns women tending to be more environmentally conscious than their male counterparts. The assumption is especially evident in the research on gender and climate change from Europe, though it has its roots in the gender and development debates as well as some eco-feminist literature. This argument about women’s virtuousness tends to make

assumptions about women’s needs and interests. Although much of the research in Europe is based on quantitative surveys on transport preferences and consumption, the arguments ignore differences between women and tend to club their motivations, perspectives and actions into a homogenous whole. According to Reed, considerable feminist research on women and environmen- tal activism has generated a dualism wherein some women’s activism is considered progressive and pro-environmental, while other activism is considered materialistic and virtually ignored. Consequently, she notes that there is a tendency to predetermine women as economically and/or socially marginal. . .to overdeter- mine women’s identities as pro-environmental and exclude their other identities from consideration. In her research in northern Vancouver, she studies some of these ‘other’ women, the ones who do not normally find space in the literature on women and environment. These women were vociferous supporters of conventional forestry and certainly could not be categorised as pro-environmental. Reed emphasises the importance of examining the embeddedness of women’s responses and shows that women’s identities and agendas are shaped by their circumstances. They do not always ‘play’ their subjectivities and choice of activism but may also be ‘dealt’ them within the confines of households, workplaces, communities, policy debates (such as environmental- ism) and research agendas (2000:365–6/382).

According to Leach, ideas about women’s closeness to nature or their virtuousness in taking care of it were picked up by policy because they served strategic interests in the 1980s. She writes that when translated into development practice, these women-environment links tended to come to mean two things; acknowledging women’s environmental roles so that they could be brought into broader project activities such as tree planting, soil conservation and so on, mobilizing the extra resources of women’s labour, skill and knowledge; or justifying environ- mental interventions which targeted women exclusively, usually through women’s groups. ‘Success’ in the projects was secured at the expense of women while new environmental chores were added to their already long list of caring roles. In addition, it obscured the interests of women not represented in the women’s groups or targeted by the projects and further ignored issues concerning property and power. Fundamentally, Leach argues that programmes ran the risk of giving women responsibility for ‘saving the environment’ without addressing whether they actually had the resources or capacity to do so (2007:72).

Arguments about women’s inherent vulnerability or virtuous- ness are in large part driven by the desire to put women and unequal gender relations on the map in relation to discussions on climate change. After a period of attention to gender issues in the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s were characterised by a focus on poverty, and gender did not figure much in these debates. Similarly, there are hardly any references to gender in the increasingly expert oriented and technical literature on climate change. The policy literature reflects the same trend. In that context it would be reasonable to assume that some gender activists and researchers tend to overemphasise the poverty of women as a way of getting them onto the agenda. According to Röhr, this is what politicians respond to, ‘‘The notion that women are most vulnerable victims of climate change and its impacts is what makes many negotiators receptive to women and gender aspects’’ (2009:59).

My intention here is not to thwart the aim of highlighting questions of women’s vulnerability or virtuousness that are valid arguments in many contexts. The ways in which feminists push for policy change has a lot to do with the pressures they experience in their encounters with development and policy: pressures to simplify, sloganise and create narratives with the ‘power to move’

1 I would like to thank Asli Tepecik Dis for her assistance in tracking down the origins of this quote.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 747

come to depend on gender myths and give rise to feminist fables (Cornwall et al., 2007:12–13). But, if evidence is vague and inconsistent, it is also easily ignored or even ridiculed. When policy makers do believe in women’s vulnerability, do policy prescrip- tions or programmes based on women’s vulnerability translate into the lived realities of the women they talk about? In the following section, I examine the dangers of presenting arguments on unsubstantiated research, the importance of context and embeddedness in the analysis as well as the unintentional reproduction of dichotomies, whether it is about men and women or South and North.

4. Gender and climate change

The literature about climate change and gender has so far been written mainly to lobby for a gender perspective within international politics. It has been marred by a lack of data and evidence. Arguments about women’s poverty and mortality are used to back up claims about the unequal effects of climate change on men and women. Arguments are built on dubious statistical claims which are taken as building blocks for future research or quoted as facts. Many reports and papers frequently do not cite their sources or tend to cite each other. As a result of this, the credibility of gender research is undermined and met with scepticism within the larger research community.

Vulnerable or virtuous women in relation to the environment present a static conception of women’s roles. Women tend to get represented as a homogenous group, suffering because of their marginal social position vis a vis men. As the cites from the policy documents on the first page make obvious, the major problem is considered to be that women are vulnerable, more susceptible to climate change and that this is mainly a problem in the developing world. Addressing power imbalances are not necessarily on the agenda. This insistence on women’s universal vulnerability (at least as far as the developing world is concerned) can have an opposite effect, that is, gender is made invisible in the debates on climate change since it is assumed that we know what the problem is – the vulnerability of women. It also denies them agency while constructing women’s vulnerability as their specific problem. In doing so, it reinforces differences between women and men as given and unchangeable, as for example in the generalization that poor women are always more vulnerable and more likely to die in catastrophes while the major polluters are men. Women are vulnerable in a multitude of situations. However generalizing about it tells us little about the configuration of social relations of power in particular contexts or how the vulnerability is produced for other groups such as certain groups of men. Powerlessness can leave men vulnerable to climate change, albeit in different ways. The spate of farmer suicides in India in recent years, mainly men, shows the stresses that men face in times of food insecurity where they are meant to provide for the family. Generalizations make it impossible to meet the highly specific needs of particular groups of women or men and to take advantage of the potential for climate change mitigation in different contexts.

Research has shown that the transfer of resources to women which comes about as a result of the focus on women as poor and vulnerable do not necessarily benefit specifically women. One of the main policy responses to date – which has been to feminise anti-poverty programmes – seem to have contributed to the problem they are supposedly attempting to solve, that is, to push more of the burden of dealing with poverty onto the shoulders of women (Chant, 2010). It is the terms and forms of participation in programmes and other policy prescriptions that are important. Citing reconstruction efforts after hurricane Mitch, Bradshaw writes that while assumptions about women household heads’ relative poverty may have informed the distribution of resources,

lack of understanding of what informs their gendered experience of poverty meant the resources provided did not tackle the causes of that poverty. While over half the women in the study felt it was women who were participating most in reconstruction, only one- quarter felt women benefited most and few saw any personal benefits, practical or strategic, from their involvement (2010:6). In effect, Bradshaw and several other scholars make the argument that although policy and resources are directed at women they often have an unintended negative impact where greater responsibility for overall poverty is put on women. Poverty reduction measures become a ‘feminisation of responsibility.’ As Chant puts it, a more apposite way of describing the situation might be ‘directing resources through women’ (2010:2).

The transfers of funds often involve the miraculous change of women from ‘victims into heroines’ as they become assigned the role of getting rid of poverty (Davids and van Driel, 2010:221). This transformation from the victim to heroine rings a familiar bell in relation to the North–South discussions on gender and climate change. It reflects not only attempts to put gender and women on the map but also reveals North–South biases while reinforcing them. The corollary to the vulnerable woman in the South is the virtuous woman of the North, environmentally conscious and environmental trailblazer. Due to the relative lack of tangible material poverty, gender is not considered as important or relevant in the Swedish environmental context. This is evident in the Swedish Bill on climate and energy policy that regards gender and social inequalities as a problem in developing countries. The Swedish Defence Agency’s assertion that this inequality in developing countries can aggravate problems in other countries and have indirect effects in Sweden is another reflection of this thinking.2 It is further reinforced by the constant and often unsubstantiated reports on the vulnerability of third world women. It appears that in such thinking there is a need to picture undeveloped and poor third world men and oppressed women to assuage doubts about inequalities in the developed world and the need for strong action in these countries (Arora-Jonsson, forth- coming).

Justifiably, in many countries in the South, natural resources are a question of livelihoods in a more direct way. But the distance of the resource from a direct source of livelihoods should not blind us to the fact that gender in environmental matters is as important in for example Sweden as it is in India. In research carried out with women’s groups in India and in Sweden, the importance of gender- equality and of the relation of third world women to the environment was self evident to development workers, research- ers and others. ‘Development’ and a certain standard of welfare made these issues appear to be less urgent in a wealthier country like Sweden. However, research showed otherwise; first, that questions of gender and power in environmental management are extremely relevant in a poorer country like India but also very much so in a richer country like Sweden. In the latter, power relations can take forms that make gendered discrimination more difficult to contest. Second, development discourses about equality and empowerment of oppressed third world women bear not only on how gender equality is conceptualised and practiced in the South but also shape the space for gender equality in the North.

The rhetoric and discourse of being far ahead in terms of gender equality (in comparison to the rest of the world) that was ubiquitous in policy but also in everyday village life in Sweden came in the way of women organizing in a women’s group. The idea of a women’s group was considered to be irrelevant in a gender equal/neutral society. In India, on the other hand, the discourse of gender discrimination was used by some of women to temporarily garner resources and to build a women’s collective

2 It could provide yet another reason for tightening national borders.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751748

that could challenge mainstream institutions for environmental management.3 Understanding these incongruities brings into question the category of development both in a Southern but especially so in a Northern context where the North and especially Sweden is taken as referent for questions of development and gender equality (Arora-Jonsson, 2009:213–214).

According to Jackson, it is easier to make gender an issue of poverty than to view gender disadvantage as crossing boundaries of class and ethnicity. Moreover, it is much simpler than directing attention to the gendered character of governments or development agencies themselves (1996:501). This is apparent in a recent report that compares men’s and women’s responses to climate variability in conditions of draught in villages in Andhra Pradesh in India. There were differences between men and women depending on roles and activities but those varied in different contexts. Most striking in the report is the gendered difference in relation to institutional bodies and government support. Women were shown to be consistently disadvantaged on several fronts such as extension services, being paid less than men for their work in the National Rural Employment Guarantee projects, information being directed mainly at men with larger farms or more services available to men than women. In other words, the main disadvantage for women appeared to be in relation to institutional support which had major implications for building resilience to long-term climate change (Lambrou and Nelson, 2010). Further, vulnerability for farmers is not only climate related but is very much a condition and response to wider markets and economic instruments that need to be examined (O’Brien et al., 2004). Such institutional disadvantages for different groups of men and women and the unequal connections need to be at the centre of our inquiries.

5. Contextualising vulnerability and virtue

The relegation of gender mainly to vulnerability and partly to virtuousness detracts attention from the problem that afflicts both the North and the South, and that is gender and power inequalities in decision-making in environmental management. Not unsurprising- ly, in discourses around climate change that have hardly any attention to gender, the few mentions that policymakers have chosen to take up are about vulnerability or virtuousness. That helps to put the problem out there, mainly with poor and geographically distant vulnerable woman. The crux of the matter that marginaliza- tion or vulnerability is due to inequalities in power is ignored.

Scholars have shown that efficiency of environmental manage- ment increases with the involvement of women, from recycling plants in Europe (Buckingham, 2010) to community forestry committees in Nepal (Agarwal, 2010). Feminists and others have argued for more women in environmental decision-making, both for reasons of efficiency and equality. However, the inclusion of women and other marginalized groups can be double-edged. The inclusion of women in forestry organizations in India and Sweden was a way of maintaining the status quo rather than questioning inequalities. The women who were to be included were expected to abide by rules and laws over which they felt that they did not have much say. They preferred to participate through their own groups in which they felt stronger and more confident. This was rejected by male-dominated village/forest organizations who regarded the women’s agency and the forming of their groups as a challenge to their organizations (Arora-Jonsson, 2010). A gender analysis thus involves understand- ing, how unequal practices are perpetuated in environmental

decision-making or as in the case from Ghana, understanding the mechanisms that make it possible for men in the households to shape women’s decision-making in their interests. As Carr writes, it is imperative to understand the persistence of current, unjust adaptations that persist in local settings (2008). In Ghana, one could speculate that the acceptance of the unjust adaptation on the part of the women was an exercise in self-preservation in the given circumstances. By not owning and cultivating extra land they may have tried to maintain a measure of control over their labour and time that they would otherwise have had to put at the disposal of the household. It was clear from the studies that men had a great deal of authority over women’s incomes and in times of stress it was women who spent their incomes on the household while men could withhold incomes. Taken for granted assumptions about women’s vulnerability detracts attention from what women are already doing in relation to environmental management or intra-household decision-making.

The examples from Sweden and India earlier demonstrate that the entry of women into existing institutions did not change unequal relations. Institutional change and flexibility in institu- tional forms is needed so that groups can participate in decision- making. Otherwise, insistence on women’s inclusion in existing institutions might just rubber stamp prevalent inequalities (Arora- Jonsson, 2010). Neither does channelling funds to women necessarily change unjust paradigms of environmental manage- ment or adaptation. What would flexible and equitable climate change policies and programmes look like? Scholars have argued for polycentric approaches to policy making (Ostrom, 2010)4 and for democratising policy (Charlesworth and Okereke, 2010). ‘‘Democratisation of policy could mean that decisions take more time, although lack of action to address climate change over the last 20 years suggests that economic methods are little better at achieving action’’ (Ibid:127). Providing for diversity within international policies and programmes is difficult and costly. On the other hand programme failure is also costly.5 The inevitable consequence might be the writing off of gender equality measures when development workers meet the messy realities and incomprehensible choices taken by men and women. Democratic policy-making presupposes that open and reasoned debate is possible. Recent climate debates show how the new media can enable participation but also allow vested interests to destabilize environmental debates and generate confusion and mistrust (Berkhout, 2010).

We need to know how and in what contexts women find themselves to be able to deal reliably with the unequal effects of climate change. Gender is important but needs to be seen in its particular context. For example, on the question of energy, Skutsch writes, ‘‘Basically it is very difficult to make a strong case for a real gender difference, not least because income factors may have a much more important and confounding influence on energy use than gender’’ (2002:33). Gender is thus so much more than poverty and women are not a homogenous category. Women can be rich or poor, urban or rural, from different ethnicities, nationalities, households and families all of which produce specific results. A poor man in India is unlikely to be as polluting as a woman in Sweden or for that matter as much a polluter as a rich woman in India.

It is clear that more context specific case studies are needed to understand the linkages of gender and climate change – comparative case studies that examine not only relationships and adaptations on the ground but also ask new questions from

3 In this particular case resources to finance income generation activities and micro-credit (for poverty alleviation) were used by the women in some villages for other purposes such as strengthening their self help groups and in many instances challenging gender discrimination. However, since this was outside the purview of the original micro credit programme, it eventually became impossible for the donors to continue supporting the groups (Arora-Jonsson, 2009).

4 The thesis of polycentric approaches to address environmental changes is based on extensive empirical work and has the potential to facilitate benefits at multiple scales. The examples presented in the article with regard to climate change however have not proven to be democratic or successful as yet.

5 Thanks to one of the reviewers for pointing this out.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 749

different vantage points. Examining environmental management from the vantage point of women’s groups rather than the existing institutions offered radically new insights (e.g. Arora-Jonsson, 2009). Attention to rural–urban linkages in the examination of an agricultural context, suggested adaptation possibilities outside of the agricultural framework (Eriksen and O’Brien, 2007). We need to direct our attention to connections to the larger political economy and use of discourses that exacerbate and cause vulnerability and inequalities (O’Brien et al., 2004; Arora-Jonsson, 2009). What are the mechanisms that make women make choices that are so obviously discriminatory? What are the alternatives? What would different groups of women or men themselves want? Importantly, we need to study the role of the gendered institutions that men and women have to relate to. Many progressive gender equality policies have foundered on the rocks of gender biased patterns in public decision making or a resistant bureaucracy where profound gender biases are embedded in the justice and public administration systems (Goetz, 2009:5). Attention also needs to be directed to recognizing and understanding the new institutions that have grown up around the paradigm of global environmental change (c.f. Hulme, 2010), to further understand in what way they may reinforce or challenge gender inequalities and how sensitive they are to geographical sensibility.

Marginality needs be viewed through the power relations that produce the vulnerability in the first place. Different power relations are privileged in different situations and class, gender, ethnicity or nationality assume importance depending on the context. The specificity of vulnerability may differ. A generalized belief in women’s vulnerability silences contextual differences. Gender gets treated not as a set of complex and intersecting power relations but as a binary phenomena carrying certain disadvan- tages for women and women alone. The local forms of climate change need to be understood not only as effects but men and women’s actions also as constitutive ingredients of climate changes. We need to be able to see women like men being responsible for as well capable agents in mitigating climate change without losing track of power relations involved, without having to categorise women as vulnerable or virtuous.

A feminist response to global climate change must not only challenge masculine technical and expert knowledge about climate change but also the tendency to reinforce gendered polarities as well as North–South divides that tend to slot women, as vulnerable or virtuous. Unequal gender relations do not cause or aggravate climate change. But gender relations do determine how the environment is managed. Arguments about women’s vulnera- bility in the South and their virtuousness in the North are an effort to keep women and gender on the climate change map from where their presence is all too easily erased. However, it also works to maintain the status-quo and can inhibit substantive change. It is dangerous to attribute responsibility by gender (c.f. Skutsch, 2002:34). It is easy to discredit such assumptions and more importantly we ignore the interrelated factors and axes of power that would help us understand how best to deal with the problems of climate change and its unequal effects.

References

Agarwal, B., 2010. Gender and Green Governance: The Political Economy of Women’s Presence: Within and Beyond Community Forestry. OUP, Oxford.

Araujo, A., Quesada-Aguilar, A., Aguilar, L., Pearl, R., 2008. Gender Equality and Adaptation. Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO)/ World Conservation Union (IUCN).

Arora-Jonsson, S., 2009. Discordant connections: discourses on gender and grass- roots activism in two forest communities in India and Sweden. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35 (1), 213–240.

Arora-Jonsson, S., 2010. Particular and wider interests in natural resource manage- ment. Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research 25 (9), 33–44.

Arora-Jonsson, forthcoming. Gender, Development and Environmental Manage- ment. Routledge. London.

Berkhout, F., 2010. Reconstructing boundaries and reason in the climate debate. Global Environmental Change 20, 565–569.

Bradshaw, S., 2010. Women, poverty and disasters: exploring the links through hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua. In: Chant, S. (Ed.), International Handbook of Gender and Poverty. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

Brody, A., Demetriades, J., Esplen, E., 2008. Gender and Climate Change: Mapping the Linkages. A Scoping Study on Knowledge and Gaps. BRIDGE, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton.

Buckingham, S., 2010. Call in the women. Nature 468, 502. Carr, E.R., 2008. Between structure and agency: livelihoods and adaptation in

Ghana’s Central Region. Global Environmental Change 18, 689–699. Chant, S., 2010. Gendered poverty across space and time: introduction and over-

view. In: Chant, S. (Ed.), The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.

Charlesworth, M., Okereke, C., 2010. Policy responses to rapid climate change: an epistemological critique of dominant approaches. Global Environmental Change 20, 121–129.

Cornwall, A., Harrison, E., Whitehead, A., 2007. Gender myths and feminist fables: the struggle for interpretive power in gender and development. Development and Change 38 (1), 1–20.

Davids, T., van Driel, F., 2010. Globalisation and the need for a gender lens: A discussion of dichotomies and orthodoxies with particular reference to the ‘feminisation of poverty’. In: Chant, S. (Ed.), The International Handbook of Gender and Poverty: Concepts, Research, Policy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, pp. 219–230.

Demetriades, J., Esplen, E., 2008. The Gender Dimensions of Poverty and Climate Change Adaptation. IDS Bulletin, Institute of Development Studies.

Denton, F., 2002. Climate change vulnerability, impacts, and adaptation: why does gender matter? Gender and Development 10, 10–20.

Eriksen, S.H., O’Brien, K., 2007. Vulnerability, poverty and the need for sustainable adaptation measures. Climate Policy 7, 337–352.

Eriksen, S., Brown, K., Kelly, P.M., 2005. The dynamics of vulnerability: locating coping strategies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Geographical Journal 171 (4), 287–305.

Goetz, A.-M. (Ed.), 2009. Governing Women: Will New Public Space for Some Women Make a Difference for All Women? Routledge, New York.

Government of India, 2008. National Action Plan on Climate Change. Prime Min- ister’s Council on Climate Change.

Hansson, S.O., 2007. Gender Issues in Climate Adaptation. Swedish Defence Re- search Agency, Stockholm.

Harriss-White, B., 1999. Gender-cleansing: the paradox of development and dete- riorating female life chances in Tamil Nadu. In: Sundar Rajan, R. (Ed.),Signposts. Kali for Women, New Delhi.

Hemmati, M., Röhr, U., 2007. A Huge Challenge and a Narrow Discourse. Women and Environments. Women and Gender Studies Institute, New College, Univer- sity of Toronto, Toronto.

Hulme, M., 2010. Problems with making and governing global kinds of knowledge. Global Environmental Change 20, 558–564.

Jackson, C., 1996. Rescuing gender from the poverty trap. World Development 24 (3), 489–504.

Johnsson-Latham, G., 2007. A Study on Gender Equality as a Prerequisite for Sustainable Development (What we know about the extent to which women globally live in a more sustainable way than men, leave a smaller ecological footprint and cause less climate change). Environment Advisory Council, Stock- holm, Sweden.

Kabeer, N., 2008. Gender, labour markets and poverty. In: Ehrenpries, D. (Ed.), Poverty in Focus. International Poverty Centre, Brasilia.

Lambrou, Y., Nelson, S., 2010. Farmers in a Changing Climate Does Gender Matter: Food Security in Andhra Pradesh, India. FAO, Rome.

Leach, M., 2007. Earth mother myths and other ecofeminist fables: how a strategic notion rose and fell. Development and Change 38 (1), 67–85.

Lee, B., McCollum, B., Eschoo, A., 2009. Recognizing the Disparate Impact of Climate Change on Women and the Efforts of Women Globally to Address Climate Change. House of Representatives, Resolution 98.

Marcoux, A., 1998. The feminization of poverty: claims, facts and data needs. Population and Development Review 24 (1), 131–139.

Medeiros, M., Costa, J., 2008. Is there really a ‘feminisation of poverty’? In: Ehrenpries, D. (Ed.), Poverty in Focus. International Poverty Centre, Brasilia.

Neumayer, E., Plumper, T., 2007. The gendered nature of natural disasters: the impact of catastrophic events on the gender gap in life expectancy, 1981–2002. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (3), 551–566.

O’Brien, K., Leichenko, R., Kelkar, U., Venema, H., Aandahl, G., Tompkins, H., Javed, A., Bhadwal, S., Barg, S., Nygaard, L., West, J., 2004. Mapping vulnerability to multiple stressors: climate change and globalization in India. Global Environ- mental Change 14, 303–313.

O’Brien, K., Eriksen, S., Nygaard, L.P., Schjolden, A., 2007. Why different interpretations of vulnerability matter in climate change discourses. Climate Policy 773–788.

Oldrup, H., Breengaard, M.H., 2009. Desk Study on Gender, Gender Equality, and Climate Change. Nordic Council of Ministers.

Ostrom, E., 2010. Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change 20, 550–557.

Patel, T. (Ed.), 2007. Sex-selective abortion in India. Sage Publications, New Delhi/ Thousand Oaks/London.

Premi, M.K., 2001. The Missing Girl Child. Economic and Political Weekly 36, 1875– 1880.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751750

Ray-Bennett, N.S., 2009. The influence of caste, class and gender in surviving multiple disasters: a case study from Orissa, India. Environmental Hazards 8 (1), 5–22.

Reed, M.G., 2000. Taking stands: a feminist perspective on ‘other’ women’s activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island. Gender, Place and Culture 7 (4), 363–387.

Regeringens Proposition, 2008. En Sammanhållen Klimat – Och Energipolitik – Klimat. Regeringskansliet, Stockholm.

Röhr, U., 2006. Gender and Climate Change. Tiempo: A bulletin on climate and development, http://www.tiempocyberclimate.org.

Sen, G., 2008. Poverty as a gendered experience: the policy implications. In: Ehrenpries, D. (Ed.), Poverty in Focus. International Poverty Centre, Brasilia.

Skutsch, M.M., 2002. Protocols, treaties and action: the ‘climate change process’ viewed through gender spectacles. Gender and Development 10 (2), 30–39.

Sundblad, E.-L., Biel, A., Gärling, T., 2007. Cognitive and affective risk judgments related to climate change. Journal of Environmental Psychology 2797–2806.

S. Arora-Jonsson / Global Environmental Change 21 (2011) 744–751 751

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Masculinity, Whiteness, and the Warrior Hero: Perpetuating the … Prividera, Laura C;Howard, John W, III Women and Language; Fall 2006; 29, 2; ProQuest pg. 29

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Women, Conflict, and Culture in Former Yugoslavia

Author(s): Jovanka Stojsavljevic

Source: Gender and Development , Feb., 1995, Vol. 3, No. 1, [Culture] (Feb., 1995), pp. 36-

41

Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Oxfam GB

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4030423

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide

range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and

facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access

to Gender and Development

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

36

Women, conflict, and culture in former Yugoslavia Jovanka Stojsavljevic

Conflict signals a shock to the social order; violence against women escalates in the absence of cultural controls, and may be used as a weapon of war, and as a propaganda tool. This article examines these issues in the context offormer Yugoslavia, and discusses women's resistance to nationalist agendas.

T he countries of Slovenia, Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia have had an

extremely turbulent history. As a result, the women's movement in the region has undergone many changes. In some circumstances, it has succumbed or adapted to the dominant culture and the political line taken by the government of the day. At other times, the movement has opposed the regime.

Since the break-up of former Yugoslavia, elements of these different reactions have taken place side by side. It has been tragic to witness women and women's groups, who were once united on the principles of global rights for women, becoming fragmented across the lines of the nationalist agendas of the warring parties. At the same time, it is incredible to see so many women continuing to resist the nationalist agenda, and to defy the state-controlled media propaganda. For three years, women's groups have organised to support survivors of war. They have raised funds to buy safe houses. They have worked relentlessly, without

salaries. Against all odds, women refuse to

hate their fellow people on the grounds of

their ethnic identity, even though they and

their families have now been suffering war

for three years.

The women's movement in former Yugoslavia

Tragically, one of the first events that took

place at the onset of the war was the

disintegration of the women's movement

across male-defined nationalist boundaries.

In 1987, the first National Feminist

Conference of Yugoslavia was held in

Ljubljana. One of the resolutions of this

conference was that women would not

recognise artificial male boundaries; that

they were united in sisterhood, and their common experiences as women over-rode male concerns for territorial rights and

geographical boundaries. It was also resolved that the male power struggles

should not be enacted across women's

bodies. These resolutions have been

challenged by the current civil war.

Gender and Development Vol 3, No. 1, February 1995

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Women, conflict, and culture in former Yugoslavia 37

The women's movement in Yugoslavia

was born during the Second World War,

with the formation of the Anti-Fascist Front

of Women. With the aim of ridding the

territory of fascism, women fought

alongside their male compatriots on the

front line, against the German Nazis, the

Chetniks of Serbia, who were mainly

royalists and supporters of the Orthodox

Church, and the Ustashi, fascists who were

backed by Hitler and formed a puppet

state. In effect, Yugoslavia suffered a civil

war while the world warred around it. As

is the case today, many unlikely alliances

between women were formed across the

territory, as factions who were normally

opposed joined in co-operation to attack

the 'other side'.

After the success of the 'partisans' in

suppressing the fascists, and the

establishment of the Socialist Federal

Republics of Yugoslavia, the Anti-Fascist

Front of Women was disbanded by the

Communist Party, on the basis that, under

communism, women would have equal

rights with men, and so there was no need

to organise separately. However, commun-

ism has never effectively addressed the fact

that societies throughout the world are

patriarchal, regardless of their political and

economic structures. This means that there

are a number of unwritten rules and

regulations, implicit to our cultures, that

explicitly disadvantage women.

In the 1970s, Yugoslavia witnessed the

setting-up of groups of women intellec-

tuals, who discussed and analysed the role

of women in society. These groups were

not involved in any kind of advocacy for

women's rights, nor were they involved in

supporting women whose rights had been

abused. In the early 1980s, a movement of

feminist activists emerged, influenced by

the women's peace movement in the West;

they organised fairly independently, often

in opposition to state institutions. These

feminist groups became actively involved

in advocacy and support work on issues

affecting women's lives, including rape

and domestic violence, pornography, and women's right to employment. The first SOS telephone-helpline for women and children experiencing rape and domestic violence was established in 1986, in Zagreb. Soon afterwards, a refuge for abused women was established.

The present situation

The women's movement in former Yugoslavia has been deeply affected by the nationalist agenda; it has lost the power to articulate any effective and united opposition to the war, and has so far been unable to prevent the widespread use of the violation of women as a propaganda tool to promote a nationalist agenda.

The language of the women's movement is now being used to further nationalist agendas: a leading member of the nationalist faction of the Croatian women's movement is quoted as making a comparison between Serb/male/aggres- sion against Croatia as a woman's body that is being assaulted. This statement caused a crisis which has led to Croatian feminists refusing to share platforms with Serbian feminists at international gather- ings of women opposed to the war, and attacks on feminists from Europe and America who invited women from Belgrade to such meetings.

In both Serbia and Croatia, those feminists who have refused to embrace the resurgence of nationalism and patriotism are accused of being enemies of the State by nationalist feminists, and by the mainstream media. Some have had to take refuge in other countries.

The feminist movement in Serbia has been further demoralised by the collective guilt feminists feel for the actions of the Serbian/Yugoslavian army and the Yugoslavian government. The war in former Yugoslavia first broke out in Slovenia, in June 1991, lasting for ten days.

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

38 Gender and Development

In Croatia, it broke out in August 1991. Even at this stage, people in Bosnia vociferously stressed that it could never break out there. While Yugoslavia disintegrated, political leaders in Bosnia – Karadzic, Izetbegovic and Kljuic – were talking of running a collective presidency representing a multicultural society! War finally came to Bosnia in May 1992.

The war in former Yugoslavia is rooted in an attempt by old guard communists to use the ideology of nationalism to shore up their personal power. The first overtly public signs of this nationalism came in a speech by Slobodan Milosevic, leader of the Serbs, in 1989, in which he called on all Serbs to commemorate the battle of Kosovo and remember that this was the heart of their kingdom, before Ottoman occupation; he asserted that Serbs should never allow themselves to be oppressed again. This speech preceded a violent oppression of the Kosovo miners' strike, and the introduction of what is now effectively military rule.

Women are seen as guardians of their culture; sexual insults may be used if they threaten political agendas which are set by men. During 1987, the year that Milosevic became leader of the Serb Communist Party, and liberals were removed from influential positions, Ali Sukrija, leader of the Communist Party of Kosovo, was quoted as saying 'Serbian women in Kosovo were only fit to be prostitutes in cafes'. Serbian women in Kosovo staged spontaneous demonstrations, calling for intervention from the Yugoslav army to protect them from abuse. Demonstrators carried placards saying: 'We gave up our sons for Yugoslavia, now the Yugoslavian army should protect us!'

In 1990 the constitution of Serbia was changed. Kosovo and Vojvodina were no longer independent provinces of Serbia, except on paper, and the heads of the local communist parties were changed to those who were pro-Milosevic. At the Fourteenth

Congress of Yugoslav Communists,

Slovenians, and Croats walked out as Milosevic sought to gain control of the Yugoslav Communist Party.

Soon after the outbreak of war, women's

groups were organised by the respective

governments, in order to ensure that

nationalist views were articulated to, and

by, women. Thus, while women demon-

strated against their sons being drafted into

the Yugoslavian army, the same groups

kept quiet when men were mobilised into the newly formed Serbian, Croatian or

Bosnian armies. Those women who did

oppose the conscription of their sons into

their own national armies were vilified and

accused of wanting the destruction of their

own people, by not wanting the country to defend itself.

Women's resistance to nationalism

Some excellent work has been carried out

by women's groups who refused the

nationalist agenda, and many new

initiatives have been developed, since the

onset of war. There are now literally hundreds of NGOs in former Yugoslavia;

many of them are women's groups, set up for many different reasons. However, an aim common to all of them is to provide support to women and children who have

suffered sexual violence, 'ethnic cleansing', the separation from, or death of, their loved ones, and the loss of their homes and

livelihoods. Women and children form

approximately 80 per cent of the displaced

population across the territory of former Yugoslavia.

Some women's groups have maintained

a strong political focus for their work,

despite ridicule and attack. The group known as Women in Black, based in

Belgrade, organises weekly demonstrations

against the war; members stand in the

city's central square, dressed in black, in silent protest against the war.

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Women, conflict, and culture in former Yugoslavia 39

1*.

Bosnian refugee in Croatia. In former Yugoslavia, violence against women is publicised for propaganda purposes; the newspaper headline reads 'Through terror to greater Serbia'

Women, war, and sexual violence

Throughout history, sexual attacks on women have formed a common strategy of

male warfare. The aim of this strategy is to humiliate enemy men, and destroy the

fabric of the family and society; a raped woman is no longer viewed as 'clean', and often no longer has a place in her family or community. This view is clearly expressed in an article in one national newspaper in

Serbia, describing a woman's experience of rape by the enemy. The article ended, 'She would be better off dead than alive to shame her husband, her family and her community by giving birth to a child from the seed of the enemy.'

Raping and impregnating women also

serves as a strategy of 'ethnic cleansing': if a man from one nationality makes a woman from the enemy nationality

pregnant, then the child will automatically

take on the nationality of the rapist. In the

old patriarchal tradition, it is the father's

nationality that is important, and defines

the nationality of the child.

In a collective centre in Croatia, where

refugees and displaced people are housed,

a refugee woman was forced to flee again

after other refugees found out that she had

been raped, and would not get an abortion.

Ironically, this is in a country where the

Catholic church has a very strong in-

fluence, and where the government had

attempted, unsuccessfully, to introduce

legislation against abortion.

Despite the widespread incidence of

rape in conflict throughout history, this has

tended not to be recorded, except where it

can be used for propaganda purposes. The

war in former Yugoslavia has highlighted

rape as a strategy of war, and this has as a

result placed rape, occurring in the context

of conflict, on the international agenda.

However, at the height of the war in

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

40 Gender and Development

Somalia, women in that country were also

being used and abused in their own civil

war, but this received no public attention. The international community has work

to do if rape is to be recognised fully as a

human rights issue. Rape of women is not

even mentioned in the Geneva Conven-

tions; and women seeking asylum in

Britain, on the basis of gender-based

persecution, are often rejected on the

grounds that being raped is a side-

consequence of war, arbitrarily meted out,

and so does not amount to 'persecution on

the grounds of political beliefs'.

The reason. wvhy the issue of rape inow

hias a puiblic pra file iniformer

YtNposlavia is ohiiy becauise of its use as a u(ea pan- of propaga-inda.

It could be argued that the reason why

the issue of rape now has a public profile in

former Yugoslavia is only because of its

use as a weapon of propaganda; it suits a

number of political agendas, which concem

both the national and international

communities: namely, geographical bound-

aries, territorial rights, and sovereign states.

It seems that it is not the right of women to

protection from sexual violation that is

important, but the wider political battles that can be fought through their experience

of violation.

The use of rape in conflict to further

these agendas results in further violations

of a woman's dignity and integrity. She

merely becomes the victim or object of her

own experience; her rape is seen as

important only because it is committed by

a man or men from an alien ethnic group, and not because rape is a crime of violence

against her.

Publicity about rape in former Yugo-

slavia has resulted in further insensitivities, or even outright abuse, being aimed at

women who have experienced rape. NGOs

and journalists have flooded into the

territory, saying '1 want to interview a raped

woman', or '1 want to counsel women who have been raped.' Books have been written

with gratuitous details of women's

experiences of rape. I would ask why this is;

surely it is not to improve care and support

for the victims of rape, nor to advocate

women's rights during war, but rather to

prove that one race of men is the aggressor

against another race of men. Invariably,

sensational media coverage of the rape of

women in former Yugoslavia has resulted in

women rape victims becoming unable to

voice their trauma; this additional torment

for women who have already undergone

extreme suffering has attracted condem-

nation from indigenous women's groups

across the territory.

Women's survival strategies

The suffering caused to women by the war

is not limited to rape, 'ethnic cleansing',

loss of homes, livelihoods, family and friends. War causes the destruction of

economies and the social welfare system.

As a result, women are forced to become

single heads of their families and take

responsibility for provision of food,

clothes, and other necessities, as well as

caring for vulnerable members: children,

the elderly, and the disabled.

One of Oxfam's strategic aims in former

Yugoslavia is 'to empower women to

challenge the causes and alleviate the

effects of gender-based suffering caused by

patriarchal structuring of society and

exacerbated by armed conflict'. Funda- mental to this aim is that women's voices

are heard; that women articulate their own

experiences and needs, and formulate their

own strategies for survival. Oxfam is

currently working on an initiative to record

women's testimonies of war. It is a contri-

bution towards ensuring that women's

voices are heard from their own perspec-

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Women, conflict, and culture in former Yugoslavia 41

4~~~~~~t

,~~~~~~~~4 An income-generating project can provide an opportunity for women who have experienced violence to support each other.

tive as subjects of their experience and as a force for change.

A number of other initiatives have been

developed over the past two years to

support women to reconstruct the fabric of

their society. In Tuzla, we have a psycho- social programme, in the form of

occupational workshops where women can

meet and talk, away from the refugee

centres. Here, women can utilise their skills

and earn a small income, by sewing and

knitting warm clothing for other refugees

in central Bosnia. Oxfam is supporting a

similar initiative in Belgrade.

In Croatia, Oxfam has helped to

strengthen and build the capacity of a local women's group, that facilitates self-help and mutual support groups for displaced

women and refugees. We are also preparing a programme that will enable

displaced women who cannot return home,

to achieve sustainable livelihoods through training in micro-enterprise.

Another strategy for achieving our aim

is to facilitate communication and

networking between women's groups

across the territory of Former Yugoslavia.

Apart from planning a regional conference

on violence against women and enabling

local partners to participate in the UN

conference on Women in Beijing, Oxfam

has funded Electronic Witches to link up

Oxfam offices and various women's groups

to E-mail. This will ensure that groups who

are currently isolated, will be able to make

contact, share information, experience and

knowledge with other groups working on

similar issues, both across the territory and internationally.

Jovanka Stojsavljevic is Oxfam's Regional Representativeforformer Yugoslavia.

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:01:39 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia

Author(s): Todd A. Salzman

Source: Human Rights Quarterly , May, 1998, Vol. 20, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 348-378

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/762769

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Human Rights Quarterly

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Rape Camps as a Means of Ethnic Cleansing: Religious, Cultural, and Ethical Responses to Rape Victims in the Former Yugoslavia

Todd A. Salzman*

I. INTRODUCTION

Currently, the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Nether- lands, is trying indicted war criminals in the Bosnia-Herzegovina war. During this conflict an estimated 20,000 women endured sexual assaults in the form of torture and rape.' Although these atrocities were committed on all sides of the warring factions, by far the greatest number of assaults were

* Todd Salzman completed his doctorate in Moral Theology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1994. He taught ethics at the University of San Diego for two years (1995-1997), and is currently an Assistant Professor at Creighton University, Omaha, NE. His interest is in ethical theory, how it pertains to contemporary social issues such as the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia, and what can be done to both prevent such atrocities in the future and to seek justice for the victims of those atrocities.

I dedicate this article to my wife, Katy Salzman, whose support and work in Geneva at UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) were invaluable in providing the documentation for this article. I would like to thank Maarit Kohonen at the United Nations Centre for Human Rights for her assistance in bringing this article to fruition. 1. See Working Paper on the Situation of Systematic Rape, Sexual Slavery and Slavery-Like

Practices During Wartime, Including Internal Armed Conflict, Submitted by Ms. Linda Chavez in Accordance with Subcommission Decision 1994/109, U.N. ESCOR, Comm'n on Hum. Rts., 47th Sess., Agenda Item 16, I] 4, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1995/38 (1995) [hereinafter Working Paped; M. CHERIF BASSIOUNI & MARCA MCCORMICK, SEXUAL VIOLENCE: AN INVISIBLE WEAPON OF WAR IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA 3 (1996) (distinguishing between rape, sexual assault, and sexual violence).

Rape denotes vaginal, oral, or anal sexual intercourse without the consent of one of the people involved. Sexual assault is a broader term, which includes rape and other forced or coerced sexual acts, as well as mutilation of the genitals. Sexual violence is the most general term, used to describe any kind of violence carried out through sexual means or by targeting sexuality.

Id.

Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998) 348-378 0 1998 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

committed by the Serbs2 against Muslim women, though Catholic Croats were targeted as well.3 While in past conflicts rape was sometimes considered an inevitable byproduct of war, and thus largely ignored when it came to punishing the perpetrators, the Bosnian conflict brought the practice of rape with genocidal intent to a new level, causing an outcry among the international community. Evidence suggests that these violations were not random acts carried out by a few dissident soldiers.4 Rather, this was an assault against the female gender, violating her body and its reproductive capabilities as a "weapon of war." Serbian political and military leaders systematically planned and strategically executed this policy of ethnic cleansing or genocide with the support of the Serbian and Bosnian Serb armies and paramilitary groups to create a "Greater Serbia": a religiously, culturally, and linguistically homogenous Serbian nation.5 This article will examine two main issues. First, in section two the Serbs' systematic use of rape camps with the specific intent of impregnating their victims is investigated, along with the cultural, political, and religious foundations that support this usurpation of the female body. The third section will then analyze the "secondary victimization" of these women and the various responses implicitly supporting the Serbian practice and objec- tive.

II. THE SERBIAN USURPATION OF THE FEMALE BODY

In a traditionally patriarchal society, the Serbian government, military, and Orthodox church have explicitly formulated a perception of the female gender and its role and function within society. Essentially, the female is reduced to her reproductive capacities in order to fulfill the overall objective of Serbian nationalism by producing more citizens to populate the nation. Limiting womanhood to a single physiological quality in this way proves nondiscriminatory in that not only are Serbian women thus per- ceived, but non-Serbian women are as well. This attitude has certainly had an impact, conscious or unconscious, on the overall perception and treatment of women, playing a part in the establishment of rape camps and the usurpation of women's bodies to achieve ethnic cleansing.

2. Clearly many Serbs were appalled at the atrocities that took place during the Bosnian war. In this article, "Serbs" refers to those who were politically and militarily responsible for the policy of ethnic cleansing and the atrocities committed against non-Serbs.

3. See BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 10-11. 4. See id. at 8. 5. See id. at 5.

1998 349

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

A. Serbian Usurpation of the Serbian Female Body

Perhaps the traditional role of the Serbian woman is most clearly depicted by the Mother of the Jugovici, the epic heroine from the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, who, in spite of the death of her nine sons in the battle with the Turks, did not weep.6 Her courage, self-sacrifice, altruism, and, most of all, her fertility, have been utilized to inspire and serve as a paradigm for Serbian women and their responsibility as mothers of the nation. According to this twisted reasoning, the necessity of reproduction guarantees Serbian perse- verance against Her aggressors and establishes a greater Serbia, "Mother- Homeland." To shirk one's duty of reproduction amounts to antipatriotism and treason. The assertion of a Sarajevo woman who claimed that she planned to "fire off one baby every year to spite the aggressors" reflects the power of this myth and its message.7 Serbians have waged this propaganda campaign of women's national and social reproductive responsibility on both political and religious fronts with remarkable success, as is evidenced in legislation "encouraging" women's reproductive responsibilities.

1. Governmental Policy and Demography

In October 1992, powerful organs in Serbian society published a document entitled "Warning," focusing on demographic issues.8 Signed by the Serbian ruling party, the Serbian Socialist Party (SPS), the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Serbian Orthodox Church, this document highlighted the imbalance in terms of growth and renewal of various ethnic groups. In particular, "Albanians, Muslims and Romans [sic], with their high birth rate, are beyond rational and human reproduction."9 The SPS conference adopted this document, and the Serbian Parliament enacted a resolution promoting "population renewal," seeking to stimulate the birth rate in some areas while suppressing it in others.10 Perhaps it is by no means coincidental that those areas designated for an increase in birth rates were predominantly developed Serbian areas, whereas the suppression of birth rates was encouraged in predominantly undeveloped Albanian and Muslim areas. In fact, statistics in many areas of the Balkans do reveal higher reproduction rates among non-Serbs,11 but the reasons given for this difference vary depending on the source.

6. See Wendy Bracewell, Mothers of the Nation, 36 WARREPORT, Sept. 1995, at 28. 7. See id.

8. See Zarana Papic, How to Become a "Real" Serbian Woman?, 36 WARREPORT, Sept. 1995, at 41.

9. Id. 10. See id. 11. See VATRO MURVAR, NATION AND RELIGION IN CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE WESTERN BALKANS-THE

MUSLIMS IN BOSNIA-HERCEGOVINA AND SANDZAK: A SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS (1989).

350 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

While numerous sociological, cultural, and historical factors may account for the differences in population growth among the different cultural and religious groups, the Serbian government has focused on ideological and naturalist reasons. Ideologically, non-Serbs reproduce as a political strategy to outgrow the Serbian nation. The naturalist reason asserts that non-Serbs are intrinsically primitive in their ethnic reasoning, and will not adjust or adapt to the Serbian mentality.12 Such political rhetoric instills the fear that the subtle, though very real means of a shift in demography and population growth threatens the Serbian nation and thus promotes a nationalist sentiment. It singles out Serbian women and their responsibility to serve the nation through reproduction to insure population expansion and to provide future soldiers to defend the nation in times of war.13 Furthermore, governmental legislation supporting reproduction found ecclesiological support from the Serbian Orthodox Church.

2. The Serbian Orthodox Church:

Reproduction and Religious Sanctions

In December 1994, Patriarch Pavle, leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, delivered a Christmas message denouncing the "White Plague," that is, the low birth rate among Serbian women.14 This plague results from infanticide "committed by women who choose not to give birth because of their 'contentment.'"15 The "disease" can only be cured by making Serbian women want to bear children. Accomplishing this objective mandates religious sanctions to stigmatize a woman for not wanting to procreate, and declare such an attitude to be a threefold sin: against themselves, the Serbian nation, and God himself.16 The women sin against themselves because "many mothers who did not want more than one child, today bitterly cry and pull their hair in despair over the loss of the only son in the war . . . why did they not give birth to more children and have them as consolation."17 They sin against the Serbian nation because "in twenty years, the Serbs will, if such a birth-rate remains, become an ethnic minority in their own country."18 Finally, they sin against God because "when they come to meet God, those mothers who never allowed their children to be born will meet their children who will sadly ask: why did you kill me? Why did you not let me live?"'9 In a passionate plea, Archbishop Pavle appealed

12. See Papic, supra note 8, at 41. 13. See NORMAN CIGAR, GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA: THE POLICY OF "ETHNIC CLEANSING" 78-80 (1995). 14. See Papic, supra note 8, at 40 (quoting Archbishop Pavle's speech). 15. Id. 16. See id. at 40-41. 17. Id. at 40. 18. Id. 19. Id.

1998 351

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

to the nationalistic sentiment of Serbian women to willfully reproduce for the betterment of the country. In his speech, Pavle drew certain parallels between women, their bodies, the survival of the nation, and the war effort. By not giving birth to more children, women have placed the survival of the nation in jeopardy. Therefore, Serbian women must heed the battle call and respond by offering their bodies as incubators, preferably to male children. This attitude is reflected in the frequently cited aphorism that "for every Serbian soldier dead in battle in Slovenia, Serbian mothers must bear 100 more fighters!"20

Serbian reproduction then has served two particular objectives: to create more Serbs to further the Serbian nationalist ideology, and to create more soldiers to defend the country. The obvious irony of the nationalistic appeal for Serbian women to reproduce so that their (male) children can die for the country is that it somewhat defeats the purpose of the first objective. This irony notwithstanding, the attitude limits women's potential as human beings to their reproductive faculties; they are a means of attaining the end of a greater Serbia. In a very real sense, Serbian women have served as a "weapon of war" for the military agenda of their own country. This attitude and perception of women and their bodies had much broader implications, however.

B. Serbian Usurpation of Non-Serbian Women: Rape Camps as a Weapon of War

1. Serbian Propaganda: Muslims Raping Serbian Women

Propaganda has played a major role in conflicts of the twentieth century both to instill feelings of compassion, sympathy, and solidarity among a people and to incite and justify violence toward a real or perceived enemy. Serbia is no exception. As early as 1981, the media reinforced and exploited Serbian nationalism in its depiction of the uprising of the Kosovo Albanians seeking autonomy from Serbia.21 Though Serbian forces immediately sup- pressed the uprising, the Serbian people heard of an Albanian genocidal plot against ethnic Serbs involving various atrocities, including mass rapes committed against the local Serbian population in Kosovo.22

20. Bracewell, supra note 6, at 28. 21. See Alexandra Stiglmayer, The War in the Former Yugoslavia, in MAss RAPE: THE WAR

AGAINST WOMEN IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA 1, 14 (Alexandra Stiglmayer ed., 1994) [hereinafter MASS RAPE].

22. See Srdjan Vrcan, Faith Under Challenge, 40 WARREPORT, Apr. 1996, at 26. One of the leading papers spreading the alleged persecutions of Serbs in Kosovo was the religious Serbian newspaper Pravoslavlje. In 1982, twenty-one Orthodox priests openly appealed

352 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

Even though these accusations were highly exaggerated, they accom- plished their objective by stirring nationalistic Serbian feelings, uniting the country in solidarity against Albanians initially and, later, against all non- Serbs, and bringing Slobodan Milosevid, the "most zealous advocate of the thesis of the 'genocidal Kosovo Albanians'" into power.23 MiloseviC rapidly developed the plan for a greater Serbia through the calculated use and manipulation of the media to foster popular support. In fact, MiloseviC immediately took over the press and national television.24 Already having successfully roused national Serbian sentiment against the Albanians, the Serbian propaganda machine went into full force when the Muslims and Croats of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence on 3 March 1992.

National television aired what appeared to be Muslims or Croats raping Serbian women when, in actuality, the scenes showed Serbs raping Muslim or Croat women.25 Roy Gutman, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, depicted another case of the blatant use of propaganda to incite the Serbian people when he recounted an interview with Major Milovan Milutinovic.26 When Gutman met with him, Milutinovic was working on a text, "Lying [sic] Violent hands on the Serbian Woman."27 This document maintained that Muslims and Croats were committing genocide against the Serbian people.28 One of the most telling citations from this document deals with the alleged atrocities committed by Muslims against Serbian women:

By order of the Islamic fundamentalists from Sarajevo, healthy Serbian women from 17 to 40 years of age are being separated out and subjected to special treatment. According to their sick plans going back many years, these women have to be impregnated by orthodox Islamic seeds in order to raise a generation of janissaries [i.e., Turkish military elite composed of Christian youth forced to convert to Islam in the middle ages] on the territories they surely consider to be theirs, the Islamic republic. In other words, a fourfold crime is to be committed against the Serbian woman: to remove her from her own family, to impregnate her by undesirable seeds, to make her bear a stranger and then to take even him away from her.29

to Serbian political leaders for better protection of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. This request religiously legitimated these accusations and gave almost unanimous support to the Serbian national political strategy. See id.

23. Stiglmayer, supra note 21, at 14. 24. See id. at 14-15. 25. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Rape, Genocide, and Women's Human Rights, in MASS

RAPE, supra note 21, at 183, 190. 26. ROY GUTMAN, A WrmESS TO GENOCIDE at x (1993). 27. Id. at ix. 28. See id. 29. Id. at x.

1998 353

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UT6 12:34:56 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

What Gutman, the UN Security Council, and the world have come to discover is that this is, indeed, an accurate portrayal of what was taking place, with one minor exception: the perpetrators were primarily Serbs, and the victims were primarily Muslim women and children.

2. Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Serbian governmental and military powers appear to have utilized system- atic rape as a weapon of war30 to serve their overall objective of "ethnic cleansing," a euphemism for genocide. According to a Commission of Experts appointed by former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the expression "ethnic cleansing" is relatively new.31 "Considered in the context of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, 'ethnic cleansing' means rendering an area ethnically homogenous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area."32 Ethnic cleansing is accomplished through the use of "concentration camps, torture, sexual violence, mass killings, forced deportations, destruction of private and cultural property, pillage and theft, and the blocking of humanitarian aid."33

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide, from the Greek word genos (race or tribe) and the Latin suffix cide (to kill), to depict the Nazi atrocities against the Jews.34 He described genocide as the destruction of a nation or ethnic group, although not its total extermination.35 The UN legal definition of genocide likewise reflects this qualification by declaring that genocide is the intent "to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."36 The early formulators of this definition included the phrase "in whole or in part" to emphasize the fact that genocide does not require the aim of killing all the members of a group.37 Some scholars have argued that the Serbian policy towards

30. See BAsSIoUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 21. While the policy of systematic rape by the Serbian military remains to be proven definitively, there is substantial evidence supporting the existence of such a policy.

31. See id. at 7. On 6 October 1992, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 780 establishing a Commission of Experts to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia. Resolution 780 (1992), U.N. SCOR, 3119th mtg., U.N. Doc. S/RES/780 (1992).

32. Final Report of the Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), U.N. SCOR, Annex 1, ? 129, U.N. Doc. S/1994/674 (1994) Ihereinafter Final Reportl.

33. BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 5. 34. RAPHAEL LEMKIN, Axis RULE IN OCCUPIED EUROPE 79-80 (1944). 35. See id. at 79. 36. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 9

Dec. 1948, 78 U.N.T.S. 277, 280 (entered into force 12 Jan. 1951) (entered into force for U.S. 23 Feb. 1989) Ihereinafter Genocide Convention] (emphasis added).

37. Final Report, supra note 32, 1 93.

354 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

Muslims cannot be considered genocide because it was concerned prima- rily with control over territory rather than inhabitants, and the Serbian "intention was to get rid of the Moslems not to exterminate them."38 Nevertheless, several acts committed by the Serbian military constitute genocide as enumerated in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.39 These acts include

killing members of another group on the basis of their religion, physical and mental torture, using measures whose aim is to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children from one group to another.40 Evidence suggests that all of these acts were committed according to a logistically coordinated policy that unequivocally constituted genocide.

In essence, genocide and ethnic cleansing coincided, the goal being the establishment of a greater Serbia-that is, a Serb-inhabited region purged of all non-Serbs throughout Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia. Within the Bosnian, Muslim, and Catholic communities, sexual assault and rape served as particularly effective means of achieving this goal.

3. Rape and Sexual Assault: Evidence of a Policy

According to Ruth Seifert, "[a] violent invasion into the interior of one's body represents the most severe attack imaginable upon the intimate self and the dignity of a human being: by any measure it is a mark of severe torture."41 This violent invasion has occurred against the women on all sides of the conflict in Bosnia: Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. What differentiates the Serbian practice of rape and sexual assault from other assaults is that it is a systematic military policy conceived and planned before the outbreak of the war to effect the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Serbian territory. On the subject of rape and sexual assault, the United Nations Commission of Experts concluded that "the practices of 'ethnic cleansing,' sexual assault and rape have been carried out by some of the parties so systematically that they strongly appear to be the product of a policy."42 In a follow-up report, the United Nations General Assembly asserted that it was "[c]onvinced that this heinous practice [rape and abuse of women] constitutes a deliberate weapon of war in fulfilling the policy of ethnic cleansing carried out by

38. ALAIN DESTEXHE, R%WANDA AND GENOCIDE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 19 (1994). For a critique of his position see David Rieff, An Age of Genocide: The Far-Reaching Lessons of Rwanda, THE NEW REPUBLIC, 29 Jan. 1996, at 27, 34-36.

39. Genocide Convention, supra note 36, art. I1. 40. See Final Report, supra note 32, $ 98. 41. Ruth Seifert, War and Rape: A Preliminary Analysis, in MAss RAPE, supra note 21, at 54,

55.

42. Final Report, supra note 32, 1 313.

1998 355

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Serbian forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and … that the abhorrent policy of ethnic cleansing was a form of genocide."43 Several factors support this allegation of a Serbian rape policy.

a. The RAM Plan

First, and most importantly, documentation exists substantiating the claim of a Serbian military policy to ethnically cleanse Bosnia-Herzegovina, and designating rape as a specific means of attaining this goal. This policy is clearly spelled out in the so-called RAM plan written by Serb army officers around the end of August 1991.44

An Italian journalist and the Ljubljana newspaper DELO both confirm the existence of this plan and its policy to target "women, especially adolescents, and . .. children" in order to cause fear and panic among the Muslims and bring about a Muslim retreat from the designated territories.45 The DELO reports that the Yugoslav National Army UNA) Psychological Operations Department in Belgrade developed a plan to drive Muslims out of Bosnia based on an analysis of Muslim behavior which "showed that their morale, desire for battle, and will could be crushed more easily by raping women, especially minors and even children, and by killing members of the Muslim nationality inside their religious facilities."46 Concrete evidence accumulated by various humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, supports the existence of such a practice. These organizations' reports indicate that the research, planning, and coordination of rape camps was a systematic policy of the Serbian government and military forces with the explicit intention of creating an ethnically pure state.

b. Official Tolerance of Rape

In their final report, the Commission of Experts appointed by the United Nations to investigate allegations of rape and sexual assault in the former Yugoslavia speculated that camp commanders had direct control over those

43. Rape and Abuse of Women in the Areas of Armed Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia, G.A. Res. 49/205, U.N. GAOR, 49th Sess., at 2, U.N. Doc. A/RES/49/205 (1995). See also Preliminary Report Submitted by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, its Causes and Consequences, Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy, Submitted in Accordance with Commission on Human Rights Resolution 1994/45, U.N. ESCOR, Comm'n on Hum. Rts., 50th Sess., Agenda Item 11 (a), 9I 268, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/1995/ 42 (1995) [hereinafter Preliminary Report].

44. See BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 21 n.4; see also BEVERLY ALLEN, RAPE WARFARE: THE HIDDEN GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA AND CROATIA 56-60 (1996).

45. ALLEN, supra note 44, at 57. 46. BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 21 n.4.

356 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

who committed rapes within these camps, indicating that the commanders could have halted the practice and punished the perpetrators if they chose.47 The Commission cited as evidence the fact that during the height of the reported rapes (April to November 1992) the media attention gradually grew from a few reports in March 1992 to a high of 535 stories in January 1993 and 529 in February 1993.48 In the months following these media reports, the number of reported cases dropped dramatically. The correlation between increased media attention and the decrease in reported cases of rape, the Commission speculated, "would indicate that commanders could control the alleged perpetrators if they wanted to. This could lead to the conclusion that there was an overriding policy advocating the use of rape as a method of 'ethnic cleansing,' rather than a policy of omission, tolerating the widespread commission of rape."49

c. Patterns of Rape and Sexual Assault

Perhaps the strongest indication of a Serbian systematic policy is reflected in the five patterns of rape documented by the United Nations Commission of

47. Final Report, supra note 32, I1 253. See also BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 21- 22.

48. Final Report, supra note 32, 1 237. 49. Id. The Commission's tentative conclusion, however, though it implicates those in

authority and points to an official policy of tolerating rape, does not necessarily reflect a decreased number of rapes after international media coverage. One needs only to consider, for example, the rampant spread of AIDS throughout the world, and the relatively sparse media coverage of this disease, to realize that the media by no means provides an accurate representation of what is occurring in reality. Beverly Allen notes that in October 1994, she spoke with Dr. Kozaric-Kovacic who reported that pregnant survivors from rape/death camps continued to arrive in Zagreb and yet there was nothing or next to nothing in the international media acknowledging these events. ALLEN, supra note 44, at 156-57 & n.6. The decline in reports of rapes, then, could be a result of the media's loss of infatuation with the topic. It could also be associated with a silencing of the victims by the perpetrators who feared that they would be called to justice as news of an International War Crimes Tribunal spread in early 1993. On 22 February 1993, the UN Security Council established an international tribunal for the prosecution of persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991. Resolution 808 (1993), U.N. SCOR, 3175th mtg., at 2, U.N. Doc. S/RES/808 (1993), cited in Catherine N. Niarchos, Women, War, and Rape: Challenges Facing The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 17 HUM. RTS. Q. 651, 651n.9 (1995) [hereinafter Resolution 808]. The perpetrators frequently threatened women who were raped that if they told anyone of the incident, either they or their family members would be hunted down and murdered. Thus, a possible interpretation of the decline in rape cases reported by the media is that while the number of rapes did not decrease significantly in conjunction with increased media attention, the tendency for victims to publicly reveal such events decreased because of the perpetrators' threats of reprisal inspired by fear of being called to justice by the War Crimes Tribunal. These are tentative conclusions, the truth of which is difficult to establish.

1998 357

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Experts.50 These patterns required logistical coordination, especially within rape camps where rape was used to impregnate Muslim and Catholic Croat women.

In the first pattern, sexual violence occurred with looting and intimida- tion before widespread fighting broke out in a particular region.51 As ethnic tensions grew, those in control of the local government would encourage paramilitaries, individuals, or gangs of men to initiate a policy of terrorizing local residents. These people would break into homes, steal property, and torture and sexually assault the inhabitants, oftentimes in front of other family members or in public.52

The second pattern of sexual violence occurred during fighting. In the process of attacking a town or village, the forces would rape or sexually assault some women in their homes.53 Once the town was secured, the forces would gather the surviving population and divide them according to sex and age, selecting some women for rape or sexual assaults.54 The forces then transported the remaining population to detention facilities. The psychological impact of these atrocities is evident. Through fear and intimidation, victims and witnesses would be hesitant to return to the scene of such events.

The third pattern of sexual violence occurred in detention facilities or other sites referred to as refugee "collection centers."55 After the population had been divided, men of fighting age were either tortured and executed or sent off to work camps while women were generally sent to separate camps. There, soldiers, camp guards, paramilitaries, and civilians raped or sexually assaulted many of the women.56 Generally, these sexual assaults occurred in one of two ways. The most common practice involved selecting women from crowded rooms, taking them to another location, raping them, and

50. Final Report, supra note 32, 91 244 ("Five patterns emerge from the reported cases, regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrators or the victims."). This indicates that all sides utilized rape as a systematic policy. However, in a later paper, Professor Cherif Bassiouni, who chaired the Commission of Experts, emphasizes that the Serbs ran most of the detention camps where sexual violence occurred. BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 16. Furthermore, ethnic cleansing to create a "greater Serbia" was a specific political and military objective unique to the Serbs. While all sides may have utilized sexual violence to oppress the enemy, and in particular the women of the enemy, it was the Serbian overall objective which utilized sexual violence as a form of ethnic cleansing that has received the greatest attention and provoked the greatest outcry. See id.

51. Final Report, supra note 32, 1 245. 52. See id. 53. See id. 1 246. 54. See id. 55. See BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 17. 56. See Final Report, supra note 32, ? 247.

Vol. 20 358

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

either murdering them or returning them to the collection center. Another, though less frequent practice, entailed raping and sexually assaulting women in front of other detainees, or forcing detainees to rape and assault one another, thus humiliating the victims and instilling terror in the witnesses.57 In this setting, gang rapes were frequently reported as being accompanied by beatings, torture, and other forms of humiliation.58

A fourth pattern of sexual violence occurred in rape camps established in buildings such as hotels, schools, restaurants, hospitals, factories, peace- time brothels, or even animal stalls in barns, fenced pens, and auditori- ums.59 No one was exempt from the punishment in these camps. Frequently, the Serbian captors told women that they were trying to impregnate them. In so doing, they would create "Chetnik babies" who would kill Muslims when they grew up. Furthermore, "they repeatedly said their President had ordered them to do this."60 One woman, detained at a rape camp in the northern Bosnian town of Doboj, reported that women who became pregnant had to remain in the camp for seven or eight months.61 Gynecolo- gists examined the women and those women found pregnant were segre- gated from the rest and received meals and other "special privileges."62 Only after it was too late for these women to get an abortion were they released and usually taken to Serbia.63 The frequently reported intent of Serbian soldiers to impregnate Muslim and Catholic Croats, the presence of gynecologists to examine the women, and the intentional holding of pregnant women until it was too late to legally or safely procure an abortion all point to a systematic, planned policy to utilize rape and forced impregnation as a form of ethnic cleansing.

A fifth pattern of sexual violence occurred in "bordello" camps.6 Rather than a form of punishment, women were held in these camps to provide sex for men returning from the front lines. While many of the women in the other camps were eventually exchanged for other civilian prisoners, these women were generally killed.65

Through an analysis of these five patterns of rape as well as other data,

57. See id. ? 248. 58. See BASSIOUNI & MCCoRMICK, supra note 1, at 17-18. In male camps, this public form of

sexual assault took place as well. In one documented instance, a prisoner was forced to bite off the genitals of another. See id.

59. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at 65. 60. Final Report, supra note 32, 1 248. 61. See Alexandra Stiglmayer, The Rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Mss RAPE, supra note

21, at 82, 119. 62. See Niarchos, supra note 49, at 657. 63. See Stiglmayer, supra note 61, at 118-19. 64. See Final Report, supra note 32, ? 249. 65. See id.

1998 359

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

the Commission detected a number of characteristics indicating an overall Serbian systematic policy including: similar characteristics in the practice of sexual assault and rape in noncontiguous areas; concomitant acts of other international humanitarian law violations; simultaneous military activity; simultaneous activity to displace civilian populations; common characteris- tics in commissioning rape aimed at maximizing shame and humiliation of the victim, her family, and her community; and the timing of the rapes, with the majority of documented cases occurring from April to November 1992.66 Particularly significant is the large number of rapes, "approximately 600 of the 1,100 documented cases," that occurred in detention camps.67 "These rapes in detention do not appear to be random, and they indicate at least a policy of encouraging rape supported by the deliberate failure of camp commanders and local authorities to exercise command and control over the personnel under their authority."68

4. The Genocidal Purpose of Sexual Assault

Beverly Allen rightly points out that although the five patterns of rape delineated by the Commission exemplify various practices of sexual assault, they do not clearly indicate the genocidal nature and purpose of those assaults.69 Consequently, she labels as "genocidal rape" the Serbian military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide and ethnic cleansing, distinguish- ing three forms of this policy. First, prior to the arrival of the official Serbian military (Yugoslav Army or Bosnian Serb forces), Serb militias, civilians, or Chetniks would enter a village and terrorize the inhabitants, especially through the use of public rape and sexual assault.70 Frequently the women recognized their assailants as neighbors, law enforcement personnel, or other members of the community. Recognition seemed an important part of Serbian policy. The persecuted would be less likely to return to their towns and villages if their assailants were local inhabitants rather than from distant

66. See id. ? 252. 67. BAssIOUNI & MCCoRMICK, supra note 1, at 10. This figure differs from that of the Final

Reportwhich states that "out of 514 allegations which are included in the database, 327 occurred in places of detention." Final Report, supra note 32, ] 252 n.71. The discrepancy between these numbers is most likely due to the fact that the database in Geneva was not adequate to handle the immense amount of information accumulated by the Commission of Experts (about 65,000 pages of documents and 300 hours of videotape). The information could only be thoroughly processed subsequently when an adequate database was established at DePaul University under the direction of M. Cherif Bassiouni, the Commission's Rapporteur on the "Gathering and Analysis of Facts."

68. Final Report, supra note 32, 11 252. 69. ALLEN, supra note 44, at 155-56 & n.7. 70. See id. at vii, 62-63.

360 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

territories. Consequently, invading Serbian military personnel would fre- quently employ local Serbs through force, threats, or psychological pressure to participate in the atrocities.71 Word of these atrocities would quickly spread throughout the town or village instilling fear in the inhabitants. Subsequently, official Serbian military forces would arrive offering safe passage for the townspeople out of the village if they agreed never to return.72 In this way, the goal of ethnically cleansing a particular town, village, or region was attained.

The second form of genocidal rape occurred in Serb concentration camps where Bosnian-Herzegovinan and Croatian women (and sometimes men)73 were randomly chosen to be raped. The victim was often murdered after the sexual assault.74

The third form of genocidal rape occurred in "rape/death camps." Bosnian-Herzegovinan women were arrested and imprisoned in these camps and systematically raped for an extended period of time by Serb, Bosnian Serb, and Croatian Serb soldiers, Bosnian Serb militias, and Chetniks.75 Either the women were raped as a form of torture preceding death or with the purpose of forced impregnation. As noted earlier, if a woman became pregnant, she would be held in the concentration camp until it was too late to procure an abortion safely.76 In cases where the victims were murdered following repeated rapes and sexual assaults, the genocidal intent is obvious. Not so obvious, however, is genocide in the form of forced impregnation. Is not the propagation of a species the antithesis of genocide? How would the forced impregnation of Muslim and Croat women serve the objective of creating a greater Serbia?

5. Number of Forced Pregnancies Due to Rape

Even though the exact number of Bosnian women raped by Serbs and the pregnancies resulting from those acts of violence will probably never be known, in January 1993 the United Nations sent a team of five people to investigate reports of the widespread occurrence of rape and, in particular, the systematic use of rape, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the goal of ethnic cleansing.77 Though limited by temporal, personnel, and financial constraints, the team's findings were revealing. The team of experts spent

71. See Stigimayer, supra note 61, at 160-61. 72. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at vii, 62. 73. See BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 17-18. 74. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at 63. 75. See id. 76. See BASSIOUNI & MCCORMICK, supra note 1, at 18. 77. See id. at 7-8.

1998 361

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY'

twelve days (12-23 January, 1993) interviewing physicians and reviewing medical records from six major medical centers in Zagreb, Sarajevo, ZeniCa, and Belgrade. Through their investigations, they identified 119 pregnancies as a result of rape during 1992.78 Of these pregnant women, eighty-eight received abortions.79 In Zenica, sixteen women between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two were more than twenty weeks pregnant and, therefore, could not receive abortions.80

Medical studies estimate that a single act of intercourse results in pregnancy between 1 and 4 percent of the time.81 Due to the trauma of rape, the lower percentage more accurately reflects these occurrences. Conse- quently, this suggests that the 119 pregnancies were a result of approxi- mately 11,900 cases of rape.

In analyzing these figures, there are several variables that must be taken into consideration. First, the majority of women were raped more than once, and, in the case of rape/death camps where some women reported being held for several months, women were raped hundreds of times. Such frequency of repeated rapes on an individual would lower the overall total of women raped.

Second, the team of experts only investigated six medical facilities throughout the former Yugoslavia. Countless other hospitals and clinics exist where women could have aborted pregnancies resulting from rape. In addition, many women did not have access to medical facilities and either tried to induce abortion themselves, gave birth to the baby and abandoned it, or acted as if the child belonged to their husbands to avoid the possibility of being ostracized and rejected. Thus, the number of impregnated women is most likely quite higher than the 119 discovered by the investigative team.

Third, even in the hospitals that the team of experts did visit and investigate, the policy of some personnel is not to inquire of women requesting abortions whether or not they had been raped. Indeed, it seems highly probable that women would not admit to being raped even if asked. Some women did not disclose having been raped until after their request for

78. Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Submitted by Mr. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights, Pursuant to Commission Resolution 1992/S-1/1 of 14 August 1992, U.N. ESCOR, Comm'n on Hum. Rts., 49th Sess., Agenda Item 27, Annex II, 9 9, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/1993/50 (1993) [hereinafter Report on the Situationl.

79. See id. ? ?] 10-14. 80. See id. I 13 (stating that of the nineteen women, sixteen "were more than 20 weeks

pregnant as a result of rape and could not receive abortions."); see also Stiglmayer, supra note 61, at 134-35 (providing contrasting statistics). Stigimayer asserts that out of the 119 pregnancies, 104 women decided to abort the pregnancy. In her table, she lists nineteen abortions out of nineteen pregnancies in Zenita. Id.

81. See Shana Swiss & Joan E. Giller, Rape as a Crime of War: A Medical Perspective, 270 JAMA 612, 613; see also Report on the Situation, supra note 78, 9 3.

362 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

an abortion was denied.82 In some hospitals in Zagreb, doctors actively shielded rape survivors from public exposure.83

Fourth, the investigation took place in the early months of 1992 when the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina was only a year old. Some people maintain that such rape camps still existed as late as the spring of 1996. Thus, there are four additional years where women may have become pregnant due to rape.

The fifth variable to consider is that in 1992 the clinic in Sarajevo that the team of experts visited reported that the number of abortions performed had doubled in September, October, and November (400-500 per month) compared to prewar rates (approximately 200 per month).84 During this time, the number of patient visits decreased by half.85 This indicates a phenomenal increase in unwanted pregnancies. One could speculate that rape accounted for this increase. The report warns that such an analysis might not be accurate, however: "While this increase could reflect a rise in pregnancies due to rape, it could also reflect a more general response to economic and social instability created by war."86 Finally, coercion and intimidation from the fear of ostracism by a woman's family, society, or community, fear of reprisals by their attackers either on themselves or their families and communities, and a sense of futility among the women for any possibility of justice prevented many women from reporting these crimes.

All of these factors combined make it impossible to arrive at any accurate statistics on the number of rapes, the number of rape survivors, and the number of pregnancies that resulted from those rapes. Estimates vary anywhere from 20,000 rape survivors reported by the United Nations Special Rapporteur87 to as many as 50,000-70,000 reported by the Bosnian government.88 The Bosnian government estimated that some 35,000 women, primarily Muslim but also Croat, became pregnant from rape.89 Given medical estimates of the percentage of pregnancies from rape, this would indicate some 3,500,000 incidents! This shocking statistic reveals another shortcoming to obtaining accurate information on the number of rapes and pregnancies resulting from rape; namely, the use of statistics for propaganda to incite the masses. Though the statistics vary, sometimes radically depending on the source, what is undeniable is that the practice of rape,

82. See Report on the Situation, supra note 78, ? 8. 83. See WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES, RAPE OF WOMEN IN WAR: REPORT OF THE ECUMENICAL WOMEN'S

TEAM VISrT-ZAGREB (DECEMBER 1992) 9 (1994) [hereinafter WCC REPORT]. 84. See Report on the Situation, supra note 78, 9 16. 85. See id. 86. Id. T 27. 87. See Working Paper, supra note 1, 9 4. 88. See WCC REPORT, supra note 83, at 9. 89. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at 96.

1998 363

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

and in particular rape with the intent to impregnate the victim, was both widespread and systematic among the Serbian forces, paramilitary groups,90 and civilians.

6. Reproduction as Genocide?

Beverly Allen's third form of genocidal rape,91 rape and forced impregna- tion, is one of the most heinous crimes targeting the female body. Allen is correct in questioning the Serbian logic that motivates this practice: How can it be that rape, enforced pregnancy, and enforced childbirth equal genocide?92

According to Allen, this equation becomes conceivable only if one denies both science and culture.93 Biologically, the fetus shares an equal amount of genetic material between the non-Serb mother and the Serbian father. Culturally, unless that child is raised by the father within a Serbian community, he or she will assimilate the cultural, ethnic, religious, and national identity of the mother. Allen summarizes: "Serb 'ethnic cleansing' by means of rape, enforced pregnancy, and childbirth is based on the uninformed, hallucinatory fantasy of ultranationalists whose most salient characteristic, after their violence, is their ignorance."94 We concur with Allen that this mentality, what we label the genetic and cultural patriarchal myth, is indeed ignorant. However, the acceptance of this myth is not limited to Serbs, but is supported by Muslim and Catholic men and women as well. The idea that the male determines a child's ethnic identity is crosscultural and common, though misinformed. No matter how much one argues against such a perspective, a person's (mis)perceptions often dictate both how he perceives reality and his concrete practices, regardless of the facts.

just as this genetic myth is based on a patriarchal system, so too is the ignorance that it cultivates. In the Balkans, a patriarchal society, the family name passes on through the male, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Even though biologically the child shares an equal amount of genetic material from the male and female, this fact does not overcome the sense that a child

90. These included traditional groups such as "Chetniks," known for their atrocities during WWII, as well as more recent groups such as "Arkan's Tigers" and the "White Eagles." See Mujeeb R. Kahn, From Hegel to Genocide in Bosnia, Some Moral and Philosophical Concerns, 15 INSr. MUSLIM MINORrnY AFF. 1, 6 (1994). Kahn points out that, it "is important to note .. that these professional killers were armed and directed in their 'cleansing operations' directly by the Belgrade government." Id.

91. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at 63; see supra text sec. II.B.4. 92. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at 95. 93. See id. at 96-97. 94. Id. at 97.

364 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

born from rape by a Serb will always be considered Serbian. Culturally, where it is recognized that the baby's father is Serbian, if the child is brought up in the Muslim or Catholic culture he or she will oftentimes not be assimilated entirely within that culture given the circumstances of concep- tion.95 The very practice of rape and impregnation as a form of genocide depends not only upon the perpetrators buying into the genetic and cultural myth, but the victims, their families, and their communities accepting the myth as well. As demonstrated by the response of Catholic and Muslim women who refer to their fetuses as "filth" and "that thing," the Serbs are not the only group who accept this myth.96

A report by the World Council of Churches (WCC) maintained that

the use of rape as a weapon of war is perceived as having its roots in patriarchal systems. Destruction and violation of women can be one way of attacking male opponents who regard the women as "theirs" and whose male identity is therefore bound up with protection of "their" women.97

From the perpetrator's perspective, or the policy that he follows, the resultant child is considered Serbian, receiving its ethnic identity only from the Serbian father. In fact, many of the raped women interviewed reported that their assailants frequently claimed that they intended to impregnate them so that they would have a Serbian or "Chetnik baby."98 When asked about reports of the deliberate impregnation of women to create "Serbian babies," a typical response representative of a patriarchal society was that if the biological father was Serb, the child "would always be considered in some way Serb."99 In this way, Serbian seed becomes implanted and spread through non-Serbian women, even though the resulting baby is only half Serb genetically speaking.

From the victim's perspective, because of the humiliation and terror experienced, and the fact that the perpetrators were often neighbors or people from their community, they do not wish to return to their homeland. Also, many women sustained physical injuries to such an extent through the process of sexual assault, torture, and rape, that they are now unable to conceive. This fulfills one of the UN criteria that defines an act of genocide as one "intended to prevent births within the group."100 In cases where women did become pregnant, the children may serve as constant reminders of their experiences and prolong the intended trauma of this practice.

95. See Stacy Sullivan, Born Under a Bad Sign, NVESWEEK, 23 Sept. 1996, at 50. 96. Id. See also Stiglmayer, supra note 61, at 137. 97. WCC REPORT, supra note 83, at 22. 98. See Stiglmayer, supra note 61, at 92, 96, 104, 109, 118-19, 130, 132, 135. 99. WCC REPORT, supra note 83, at 20.

100. Genocide Convention, supra note 36, art. 2(d).

1998 365

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Genocide is further accomplished through rejection of the victim by her husband because of the disgrace that the rape brings to him and his family. Often blamed for the rape, the woman faces ostracism from her family and community. Furthermore, those women impregnated as a result of rape are often viewed as tainted and unworthy for reproduction. All these compo- nents function to remove non-Serbs from Serbian territories and to break

down the very social fabric of non-Serbian cultures. Not only does the practice of rape and rape for impregnation ethnically cleanse Serbian territories, but it functions to kill, in whole or in part, the non-Serb culture and reproductive capabilities once people have fled Serbian territories. The impact of this practice is far-reaching, and its success is based on the unilateral acceptance of a patriarchal system.

III. THE SECONDARY VICTIMIZATION OF RAPE VICTIMS:

RELIGIOUS, CULTURAL, AND ETHICAL RESPONSES

The systematic rape of Muslim and Catholic Croat women with the explicit purpose of impregnation to create "Chetnik babies," to effect ethnic cleansing, and to attain a greater Serbia is an atrocious usurpation of the female body as a weapon of war. Perhaps the only atrocity that could compare to this is the treatment, perception, and exploitation of these women if and when their experiences become public knowledge. This section examines the religious and cultural responses to these women, the media's treatment of them, and the failure thus far of the international community to bring the perpetrators to justice. All of these elements have contributed to the secondary victimization of these women, thus prolonging their physical, emotional, and psychological healing processes.

A. Religious Responses

1. Islamic Responses

A traditional Muslim aphorism states: "As our women are, so also is our community."101 Islamic religious culture strongly emphasizes the protection of a woman's dignity and honor. Bosnian Muslims frequently recount the story of Emina, a young Muslim woman who attempted to defend her village against loyalist Serbian Chetniks during World War 11. Unable to hold off the advancing Serbs, when she fell into their hands her one request

101. Azra Zahihic-Kaurin, The Muslim Woman, in MAss RAPE, supra note 21, at 170-71.

Vol. 20 366

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

was, "[o]nly leave me my honor; I will forgive you my death."'02 To be raped, humiliated, and defiled was a fate worse than death for this Muslim woman, so high is the virtue of "honor" held within Islam. The point of the story is that a woman's purity in Islam and the Muslim patriarchal culture is not only held sacred, but is seen as an essential element to insure the stability of the society and culture. This is true even though this concept of female honor has come under increasing and justifiable scrutiny.'03 Also relevant is that there is a vast chasm, not always recognized in Islamic sexual ethical mores, between a woman who is violated through rape and a woman who freely engages in a premarital or extramarital sexual relation- ship. The violation of a woman's honor, as is the case for raped Muslim women in Bosnia, produces various, often contradictory, religious and cultural responses.

First of all, the Koran does not extensively address the issue of rape among Muslims, let alone between Muslims and non-Muslims. This may be a result of its rather explicit view of the social roles of women in Islamic culture and the requirement that men accompany women in public.104 This being the case, rape is considered to be a relatively infrequent occurrence. When a rape does occur, society generally concludes that, since the woman was unaccompanied by a male guardian (husband, father, brother), she was "on the make" and perhaps looking for a sexual encounter; in such a case, sexual intercourse, even if violent, could be warranted given the woman's violation of religious customs.105 In the event that a woman accuses a man of rape, the case goes before the religious court. If found guilty, the man faces a penalty of death by stoning or a lengthy jail term. In order to be found guilty, however, four respectable Muslims must have witnessed the event.106 In the unlikely event of producing such witnesses, the woman must further prove that she has lived an exemplary or chaste life.'07 Even though the Muslim jurists who interpret the Koran address the issue of rape and sanction severe penalties for perpetrators of this crime, prosecution of rapists in Muslim society occurs rather infrequently. More likely, the women

102. Id. at 173. 103. See Niarchos, supra note 49, at 672-76; see also ANNE TIERNEY GOLDSTEIN, RECOGNIZING

FORCED IMPREGNATION AS A WAR CRIME UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW 20-22 (1993). 104. See JAN GOODWIN, PRICE OF HONOR: MUSLIM WOMEN LIFT THE VEIL OF SILENCE ON THE ISLAMIC WORLD

56 (1994). In some conservative areas of Pakistan, the traditional chador and chardiwari, "the veil and four walls," is still practiced. According to this custom, a woman should only go out of the house three times in her life: when she is born; when she leaves for her husband's home after marriage; and when she dies and is taken to be buried. See id.

105. See id. 106. See id.at 51.

107. See Women Jailed for Being Raped, MARIE CLAIRE, OCt. 1996, at 74, 75.

1998 367

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

will be accused of zina-sex outside marriage including adultery, fornica- tion, and rape-by her assailant and will herself be sent to jail.108 (This has happened in many rape cases in Pakistan.) This travesty of justice is not unlike the difference between the religious ideals of the Bosnian Muslim community and the actual practices of that community when Muslim women are raped by non-Muslims.

In interviews with Bosnian Muslim religious leaders, the WCC reported that leaders have taken measures to insure that victims of rape will be treated compassionately on several accounts.109 Within the religious com- munity itself, according to Aruna Gnanadason, a member of the WCC commission, religious leaders consider raped women heroines and receive them unconditionally into the communities.110 Her claim, however, con- flicts with reports asserting that raped women are frequently stigmatized and ostracized within these communities. The international community fre- quently voices its concern that, if her experience becomes public knowl- edge, a raped woman will be considered an outcast in certain cultures; her husband will abandon her or, in the case of an unmarried woman, she will be unable to marry if she so desires because of the stigma associated with the event. Muslim leaders, however, assured the WCC commission that "young men of the community have been pledged to marry women victims."111 In the case of impregnation, religious leaders have sympathized with the situation of these women and have condoned abortions up until the 120 day legal limit.112 For those women held past the limit, or those who chose not to abort, there were offers of adoption by international Muslim communities.13 The official WCC report substantiated Gnanadason's claim from a religious perspective. It added, however, that practically and culturally speaking, this openness and receptivity is not always evident.114

108. See GOODWIN, supra note 104, at 51. 109. WCC REPORT, supra note 83, at 9, 20. 110. Interview by World Council of Churches with Aruna Gnanadason, Geneva, Switzerland

(16 July 1996). 111. WCC REPORT, supra note 83, at 9. 112. See id. According to the Hanafi Jurists' interpretation of the hadith (sayings, practices,

judgments, and attitudes of Muhammad), ensoulment takes place 120 days after conception. They allow for abortion during this time "only for juridically valid reason[s]." Abortion, in 1 THE OXFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE MODERN ISLAMIC WORLD 17, 17-18 Uohn L. Esposito ed., 1995). See also Mirjana Rasevic, Abortion as a Method of Birth Control, 31 YUGOSLAV SURVEY 103 (1990) (asserting that abortion is regularly used and accepted as a predominant form of birth control in the former Yugoslavia without any social stigma attached to it); Ivana Filice et al., Bosnia-Herzegovina: Cultural Profile, 6 IN'L J. REFUGEE L. 425, 435 (1994).

113. See WCC REPORT, supra note 83, at 20. 114. See id. at 20, 23.

Vol. 20 368

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

2. Catholic Response

The Croatian Catholic response to victims of rape suffers from similar tensions between religious ideology and cultural practice. In an address by Pope John Paul II to Archbishop Vinko Pulijic of Sarajevo, the Pope called for the entire community to "be close to these women who have been so tragically offended and to their families, in order to help them transform the act of violence into an act of love and acceptance.""1 The terms "rape" and "abortion" are noticeably absent from this document. For rape, the Pope substituted phrases such as "mothers, wives and young women who have been subjected to violence because of an outburst of racial hatred and brutal lust;" for abortion he used the phrase "since the unborn child is in no way responsible for the disgraceful acts accomplished, he or she is innocent and therefore cannot be treated as the aggressor.""6 The omission of these terms seems somewhat curious. One could speculate that because of the political and religious tensions between the various groups in the former Yugoslavia, the Pope consciously attempted to remain diplomatic in his address and avoided terms that would highlight the atrocities committed (rape) and the potential outcome of those atrocities (abortion). Instead, he focused on the need for reconciliation. The call for support and solidarity from the community and the assertion of the sanctity of the family and its role in bringing about healing prove noteworthy. This challenge of solidar- ity, so key to overcoming the factions within families and the social and cultural genocide that rape causes, can also serve to remove the power and genocidal motivation from this practice. If the culture, society, and family do not react according to the Serb's projections, but instead stand by these women and support them in solidarity, an impetus for the practice is removed. The Serbian policy of rape for the purpose of ethnic cleansing is dependent not only upon the complicity of Serbs as perpetrators, but also on the Muslims and Catholics as the victims and the anticipated cultural responses towards those victims. If met with love and acceptance instead of fear and hatred, a link in the chain of genocide is removed.

The major difference between Catholicism and Islam is the possibility of obtaining an abortion in the case of rape. While Muslim religious leaders allow abortion up to the 120 day legal limit in the case of rape, officially, the Catholic church condemns abortion even in the case of rape, and, according to some Croatian women's groups, many Catholic hospitals will not perform this operation. This claim, however, has been disputed by

115. Pope John Paul II, Change Violence into Acceptance, THE POPE SPEAKS, 2 Feb. 1993, at 220.

116. Id. at219-20.

1998 369

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Croatian doctors who maintain that they will perform abortions in cases of rape unless serious medical reasons mitigate against it.17 As mentioned above, of the 119 pregnancies from rape documented by the UN special commission, eighty-eight were terminated by abortions. Thus, while in theory the religious position may dictate against abortion, it is commonly practiced, even in Catholic Croatia.

B. Cultural and Social Practice

Frequently a stark contrast develops between religious ideologies and the actual responses of Muslims and Catholics to rape survivors. Within Muslim, Catholic, and Serbian cultures, victims of rape tend to experience alienation in varying degrees. First of all, many women refuse to discuss the rape because of the shame and humiliation associated with it, as well as the stigmatization from family, friends, and the community. These attitudes do not facilitate an openness to sharing experiences and often hamper the ability to heal emotionally, physically, and psychologically. Also, women sometimes feel responsible in some way for the rape, and this misconcep- tion can be reinforced by attitudes and comments from peers.18 Especially in cultures where women raped in peacetime are frequently blamed for the attack, whether because of the clothes they were wearing or being out alone in public, in a wartime situation women may internalize these specula- tions.119 Often, even other women who have been raped do not encourage peers to talk about the incident for fear that they themselves will be implicated as rape victims and stigmatized and ostracized by their families, husbands, or communities. Fear of reprisals towards detained family members or other women being detained poses another very real threat to these women if they speak about the event.120 Finally, society has developed suspicions as to whether or not women fabricate these events, especially in the Bosnian conflict where propaganda has played a major role on all sides. All of these factors tend to dissuade women from talking about their experiences with friends and family as well as seeking psychological counseling.

117. See Stigimayer, supra note 61, at 135-36. 118. See Ivana Filice et al., Women Refugees from Bosnia-Herzogovina: Developing a

Culturally Sensitive Counselling Framework, 6 INT'L J. REFUGEE L. 207, 213 (1994). 119. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Former Yugoslavia points out that "women's

experience of rape can be intensified by cultural and religious views which often blame the victim." Rape and Abuse of Women in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia: Report of the Secretary-General, U.N. ESCOR, Comm'n on Hum. Rts., 50th Sess., Agenda Item 12, at 60, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/1994/5 (1993) Ihereinafter Rape and Abuse].

120. See Report on the Situation, supra note 78, ? 24.

370 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

Research shows, however, that if supported emotionally by family and friends or peers in refugee camps, the psychological disorders of raped women do not persist as long as those who keep the rape a secret or speak only to a therapist.121 Rape is just one of the many layers of trauma that these women have experienced. They are still attempting to cope with witnessing the torture and execution of fathers, husbands, or sons, the rape of their own daughters or mothers, being detained in a camp, or losing their homes and personal belongings. To heal from these traumas takes love, support, compassion, and acceptance from one's family, friends, and community. Unfortunately, this support does not always exist.

A second consideration that can aggravate the trauma and suffering of the victim is the husband's response to the event. In interviews conducted with rape survivors, one of the recurring concerns is that if their husbands found out about the rape, their husbands would not take them back, or they might be violently abused, or in some cases even killed.122 What causes such responses from the one to whom she should be able to turn for love, comfort, support, and understanding? Although the psychological reasons are complex and beyond full comprehension by this author, some justifica- tions are rooted in the masculine myth perpetrated by a patriarchal ideal that men are responsible for "their" women. This myth, which is not limited to a particular religion, culture, or sociological stratus, demonstrates a model of masculine-feminine relations where men possess, rather than relate with, women. According to this myth, when a "man's woman" is violated through rape, it is often very difficult for him to accept the humiliation of such an event. He has failed to live up to his masculine duty and the obligation to defend "his woman," regardless of the circumstances. Frequently, though illogically, this belief translates into alienation or violence directed toward the only one whom he can punish, the woman. Empathy and compassion for the woman sometimes become displaced by masculine self-pity, humiliation, and suffering as a result of her rape.

The cultural and social practices of alienation and expulsion all too frequently oppose the religious ideology calling for compassion, love, and acceptance of rape victims. The phenomena of secondary victimization caused by this occurrence merely prolongs the recuperation process of victims and implicitly supports the very goal of rape and forced impregna- tion for the sake of genocide. Not only does this violation destroy the

121. See Vera Folnegovic-Smalc, Psychiatric Aspects of the Rapes in the War against the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, in MAss RAPE, supra note 21, at 174, 177.

122. See id. at 179 n.2; LAUREL FLETCHER ET AL., No JUSICE, No PEACE: ACCOUNTABILITY FOR RAPE AND GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA 27 (1993); Stiglmayer, supra note 61, at 137; Seifert, supra note 41, at 61; Lance Morrow, Unspeakable: Rape in Former Yugoslavia's Civil War, TIE, 22 Feb. 1993, at 48.

1998 371

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

women physically, psychologically, and emotionally, but because of the masculine images that prevail in a patriarchal society, it destroys the very fabric of that society. Although patriarchal attitudes typify the Muslim culture, frequently singling out its inability to accept raped women back into its familial and social structure, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs are no less plagued by this phenomenon.123

C. Media, Propaganda, and Exploitation

The media has played a significant role in the Bosnian war. Milosevic used the media for a blatant propaganda campaign to instill fear and hatred and to incite Serbian nationalism, manifested as genocide toward non-Serbs. Not so blatant is the sometimes harmful effect of the media, even by the most well intentioned humanitarian groups, on the very people whom they hope to help.124 The WCC report on raped women in Bosnia, for example, contained as an appendix a letter issued by the Zagreb Women's Lobby entitled, "Letter of Intentions to Women's and Peace Organizations all over the World."125 While praising the support of international women's groups and peace organizations, the involvement of some of these groups with the actual victims has caused some concerns. First, concern exists that the process of helping raped women is being taken over by governmental institutions, and that the occurrence of rape thus will be used in political propaganda to spread hatred and call for revenge against the enemy, thereby encouraging further violence against women.'26 The second con- cern addresses those groups who have encouraged women to share their experiences publicly with promises of help and support, yet do not provide that support to the victims in the long term. The letter criticized this "sensationalistic journalist" approach which has frightened and upset raped women, prolonging their recuperation.'27 The letter continued, "the devel- opment of serious women's support projects needs understanding of the problem, patience and time. Otherwise, the good intentions could turn out to be useless or even harmful, bringing some relief only to the conscience of the support-givers."'28 Tadeusz Mazowiecki of the United Nations and his team of investigators also voiced such concern, reporting that some of the women "felt exploited by the media and the many missions 'studying' rape

123. See FLETCHER ET AL., supra note 122, at 23 n.38; ALLEN, supra note 44, at 92. 124. See Stiglmayer, supra note 61, at 162-63. 125. WCC REPORT, supra note 83, app. VI. 126. See id. 127. Id. 128. Id.

Vol. 20 372

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

in the former Yugoslavia …. There have been reports of women attempting suicide after being interviewed by the media and well-meaning delega- tions."129

An employee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that when news of the widespread, systematic rape of Muslim and Croat women and children by Serbs reached the world, women's groups flocked to Zagreb to obtain information and interviews from women who had suffered these atrocities.30 Often, the presence of these groups left the women feeling exploited and used, without providing extensive care to the victims themselves and without empowering them to regain a sense of human dignity. Physical rape is an atrocity in itself, but the psychological and emotional consequences can be prolonged and exacer- bated through insensitivity toward the victims.13

The point here is not to cast blame on the media and well-intentioned humanitarian or women's groups. It is merely to sensitize them to the delicate nature of the situation and the need for prolonged support and care in the psychological and emotional recuperation of the traumatized women. This recuperation requires limiting the occurrences of secondary victimiza- tion.

While the media and propaganda have had a negative impact on women rape survivors in some respects, they also have had a positive impact by alerting the international community to the atrocities committed, and, in effect, mobilizing aid efforts from the international community on behalf of the victims to try to stop the violence and bring the perpetrators to justice.132

D. No Justice?: International Humanitarian Law and the War Crimes Tribunal

Not only is rape one of the most underreported crimes worldwide, but it is also one of the least punished in the aftermath of a war. Occurrences of rape are frequently considered an inevitable byproduct of war with the non- sequitur, "boys will be boys." As a result, rape as a gender specific war crime often has been ignored or considered under the auspices of human rights violations. In the former Yugoslavia where the woman's body was not

129. Rape and Abuse, supra note 119, I 13. 130. Interview with Anonymous, UNHCR Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland (15 Aug.

1996). 131. See ALLEN, supra note 44, at 92-94. 132. See, e.g., GUTMAN, supra note 26.

1998 373

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

only targeted through rape, but also through forced impregnation as a form of genocide, it is important to recognize this offense as a gender specific crime directed against women for at least two reasons. First, this practice demonstrates a novel and demented form of warfare directly targeting noncombatants on the basis of their gender and reproductive capabilities. International legislation needs to recognize this as a unique and novel weapon of war and a distinct violation of human rights that incorporates rape and genocide into a single practice.

Second, establishing laws that will specifically punish this crime may bring a sense of justice to those who have been violated. Part of the recuperation process of these women, especially to restore their faith in the moral and political order, is that the perpetrators be held accountable.133 To send a clear message that the systematic usurpation of the female body to further one's military objective is morally reprehensible and will not be tolerated, the international community must recognize the unique nature and severity of this crime and prosecute the perpetrators accordingly. There has been an internationally supported move to indict, try, and punish those responsible for these atrocities. The UN Security Council's establishment of a research team in 1991 and an international war crimes tribunal in

February 1993 to investigate these reports and bring the perpetrators to justice, respectively, are steps to correct this void in international law and justice.

1. Rape, Forced Impregnation, and International Humanitarian Law

Several international laws exist under which those responsible for rape in the Bosnian war can be held accountable. The Fourth Geneva Convention

of 1949,134 although it had an implicit precedent from previous codes and declarations, provided the first clearly articulated prohibition of rape as a crime against women in Article 27. While calling for the humane treatment and protection of all people against any act of violence, it specifically states that "[w]omen shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault."'35 In Article 147, the Convention refers to the violations described within Article 27 as war crimes, though it does not specifically

133. See FLETCHER ET AL., supra note 122, at 14. 134. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War

(Geneva IV), adopted 12 Aug. 1948, 6 U.S.T. 3516, T.I.A.S. No. 3365, 75 U.N.T.S. 287 (entered into force 21 Oct. 1950) (entered into force for U.S. 2 Feb. 1956) [hereinafter Geneva IV].

135. Niarchos, supra note 49, at 673 (citing Geneva IV, supra note 134).

Vol. 20 374

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

mention rape.136 In addition, Protocol II of the Geneva Convention'37 contains specific legal sanctions protecting victims of internal armed conflicts while Protocol I protects victims of international armed conflicts from rape.138

Given the genocidal motivation of the rapes, the perpetrators are also subject to prosecution under the Genocide Convention of 1948, in particular, Article II: "Killing members of a [national, ethnical, racial or religious] group; [c]ausing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; [d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; [i]mposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] [florcibly transferring children of the group to another group"'39 are all considered forms of genocide and are punishable under international law. The psychological trauma and physical torture of rape, which sometimes has included foreign objects such as gun barrels, constitute aspects of genocide as well.

Further genocidal consequences of the rapes arise through the reduc- tion of birth rates in non-Serbian societies. For example, the cultural response to women who have been raped could result in the prevention of births: unmarried women will not be married within the community, or those who are married may be rejected by their husbands. In either case, reproduction is impaired within a specific community. In cases where women have suffered physical damage and are thus incapable of reproduc- ing, the genocidal objective is clearly accomplished. Where forced impreg- nation was the goal, children have been considered by both Serbs and non- Serbs to carry the father's genealogy, thus allowing the Serbs to transfer what they perceive as "their children" to the Muslim or Catholic group. Cultural genocide therefore results because the presence of these children and the knowledge of the circumstances under which they were conceived causes strife and resentment within the community and serves as a constant reminder of Serbian oppression and violence. Reports that pregnant Muslim and Catholic women were released from detention camps and sent to Serbia

136. Geneva IV, supra note 134, art. 147, at 388. See Niarchos, supra note 49, at 672-79. See generally GOLDSTEIN, supra note 103 (describing the historical development of international humanitarian law).

137. Protocol II Additional to the Geneva Convention of 12 Aug. 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts, adopted 8 June 1977, U.N. Doc. A/32/144, Annex II, art. 4, 1125 U.N.T.S. No. 17513 (entered into force 7 Dec. 1978), reprinted in 16 I.L.M. 1442 (1977).

138. Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Convention of 12 Aug. 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts, adopted 8 June 1977, U.N. Doc. A/32/144, Annex I, art. 76, 1125 U.N.T.S. No. 17 (entered into force 7 Dec. 1978), reprinted in 16 I.L.M. 1391 (1977).

139. Genocide Convention, supra note 36, art. II.

1998 375

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

to give birth to "Serbian children" further helps to propagate the Serbian population, as the "Serbian child" is not considered tarnished by the mother's genes in Serbia as it is with the father's genes in Catholic or Muslim Croatia. Although international law has clear guidelines for prosecuting those guilty of rape, the intention to rape for the purpose of impregnation, though implicit under genocide, is not explicitly stated as a separate crime under international law. This is a gap that requires an amendment given the atrocities in Bosnia: rape, forced impregnation, and genocide.140

Finally, rape also constitutes a crime against humanity that entails the intention to systematically persecute a particular group. Even though there are numerous stipulations under international humanitarian law to pros- ecute those responsible for rape and even rape for the purpose of impregnation,41 the question is whether or not such prosecutions will come to fruition.

2. Rape and the International Criminal Tribunal

To insure that perpetrators are brought to trial and prosecuted, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 808142 in February 1993, establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The Tribunal's mandate is to prosecute those people responsible for serious humanitarian law violations committed in the former Yugoslavia since January 1991. Articles 2 through 5 stipulate prosecution for sexual assault, including rape.'43 However, the Tribunal has no specific statute condemning forced impregnation, despite the fact that the UN Commission of Experts docu- mented five patterns of rape, one of which explicitly addresses this practice, and several of the women victims interviewed recounted the perpetrators' intent to impregnate them.'44 Notwithstanding any clear prohibition of forced impregnation in international law, the UN Commission of Experts responsible for analyzing the data and considering human rights violations

140. See GOLDSTEIN, supra note 103, at 13 n.32 (noting that a Task Force of the American Bar Association has recently recommended that Article 5(g) of the International Tribunal's statute on rape should read: "rape including enforced prostitution and enforced pregnancy, and other forms of sexual assault") (addition in italics). See also AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION SPECIAL TASK FORCE OF THE SECnoN OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND PRACTICE, REPORT ON THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL TO ADJUDICATE WAR CRIMES COMMITED IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA 15 (1993).

141. See GOLDSTEIN, supra note 103, at 14-28 (discussing extensively the categorization of forced impregnation under numerous violations of international law).

142. See Resolution 808, supra note 49. 143. Statute of the International Tribunal, arts. 2-5, available on <http-/www.un.org/icty/i-

b-ens.htm#2>.

144. See Final Report, supra note 32, 1 248; supra text sec. I1.B.3.c.

376 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Rape Camps as Ethnic Cleansing

of the Geneva Conventions and other humanitarian laws in the former

Yugoslavia concluded that:

[T]here is no doubt about the prohibition of rape and sexual assault in the Geneva Conventions and other applicable sources of the international humani- tarian law. Furthermore, the Commission finds that the relevant provisions of the statute of the International Tribunal adequately and correctly state the applicable law to this crime.'45

Thus, the Commission did not see a need to amend the law to include forced impregnation as a particular violation distinct from rape.

In an address to the New England School of Law on 14 January 1998, David Scheffer, Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, gave an update on the proceedings of the War Crimes Tribunal.146 As of mid-January 1998, seventy-nine individuals have been publicly indicted by the Tribunal: fifty- seven are ethnic Serb, nineteen are ethnic Croat, and three are ethnic Bosniak. Three indictees have died, meaning that there are currently seventy-six known indictees now living. Fifty-four remain at large, and nineteen are in custody at The Hague. The indictments against three ethnic Croats were withdrawn last month and they were released from custody. Of those indictees at large, fifty-two are ethnic Serbs and two are ethnic Croats. Furthermore, only three ethnic Serbs, thirteen ethnic Croats, and three ethnic Bosniaks remain in custody.'47

From the number of indictments, it is impossible to ascertain the indictees accused of rape for the purpose of forced impregnation, as this is not a specific violation under international humanitarian law. Consequently, the numbers of those who committed this crime will probably never be

145. Final Report, supra note 32, q 109. 146. As of May 1995, three indictments had been issued by the Tribunal. Of these, two were

charged with sexual assault. See Rape and Abuse of Women in the Areas of Armed Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: Report of the Secretary General, U.N. General Assembly, 50th Sess., Agenda Item 114(c) of the Provisional Agenda, at 1 28, U.N. Doc. A/50/329 (1995).

147. See David J. Scheffer, Challenges Confronting International Justice, Address at the New England School of Law (14 Jan. 1998) (on file with author). From these numbers, it is clear that ethnic Serbs, while having the greatest number of indictments, have been the least cooperative with the International War Crimes Tribunal. Scheffer notes that what has bedeviled the Tribunal from its creation is "state cooperation." The worst offenders are Republika Srpska and Serbia-Montenegro. Neither has apprehended or orchestrated the voluntary surrender of a single indictee." Id. Thus, while the Tribunal has improved on its number of indictments, as the number of known perpetrators of rape indicates, it still has a long way to go before there is any semblance of justice for the women who suffered atrocities during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. This task is especially difficult given the lack of cooperation among the states harboring these suspected criminals. For information on those indicted and the specific indictments against them, visit the website: <http//www.un.org/icty/i-b-ens.htm#2>.

1998 377

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

known. Nonetheless, given the prevalence of reported rapes and the United Nations' own task force that interviewed victims, collected data and testimonies from eyewitnesses and medical professionals, and identified nearly 800 victims and 600 alleged perpetrators by name, one could question the seriousness of the international effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. No wonder many women have an attitude of "what's the use?" and refuse to come forward to testify. The fear of exposing themselves and reliving the nightmare as well as the risk of reprisals, given the slim possibility of an indictment, let alone the prosecution of the perpetrator, is cause for despair. Not only does this hinder the recuperation process of rape victims, but it also sends a message to the world that women are second class citizens, and sexual crimes against them are not taken seriously by the international justice system. Although the War Crimes Tribunal conducted in The Hague thus far has not given much cause for hope that justice will be served, it is certainly a step forward in recognizing the severity of the crime.

IV. CONCLUSION

The war in the former Yugoslavia has provided documented evidence of rape and forced impregnation used as a weapon of war for achieving ethnic cleansing, and has raised international awareness concerning the usurpa- tion of the female body and her reproductive capacities to fulfill political and military objectives. This evidence proves that not only were women caught up in a circle of violence waged and executed by men in power, but that they were specifically targeted as a means of attaining a military end. This frightening occurrence in war tactics and military strategy has caused the international community grave concern, but much remains to be accomplished to put an end to present violations, to punish the perpetrators, and to prevent these acts from occurring in future conflicts. Man's inhuman- ity to man and woman knows no bounds. To remain passive in light of such injustice is a moral abomination and betrays those who have suffered, and will suffer, from this treatment. Protection against rape and rape for the purpose of impregnation must be insured under international humanitarian law as well as guarantees providing for swift punishment of the perpetrators.

In addition, to reduce the disparity between religious ideology and cultural practice, communities should be sensitized to receive rape victims and their children in love, compassion, and empathy to foster healing not only among the women, but within the community as a whole. The success of genocide in the form of rape and forced impregnation is dependent upon the patriarchal myth that supports its very practice. As is evident from the responses towards many of the women who have suffered this tragedy, this myth is still very much alive.

378 Vol. 20

This content downloaded from 128.205.204.27 on Sun, 13 Jun 2021 17:47:33 UTC

All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Week 7: Gender, Nation and Conflict