BOOKLET I
We then wanted to know, who benefits from these laws? We suspected that formal efforts to advance women’s rights privileged some women over others, and we wanted to understand whether there were any patterns across the six very different countries in the project.
We conducted interviews, surveys, and focus groups to find out how formal policies have impacted women from different backgrounds. We found that these policies do not always work in the ways their advocates have hoped. Our core findings can be condensed in the following learnings.
Rwanda has the highest percentage of women in parliament, but women who challenge the regime, poor women, and women living in rural areas often face major forms of repression and gender violence and cannot access many of the rights they have on paper.
Even though many media accounts depict women during war as suffering and victimized, across all 6 countries in our project, we were in awe of the stories women shared of the ways they organized during war to protect their communities and carve out spaces for cultural expression and care. We found that women often survive war by creating coalitions, building solidarity, and utilizing creative ways of challenging different armed actors while protecting their loved ones. We saw how some women have entered politics and taken on leadership roles in post-war recovery efforts. Many of these women have benefited from some of the post-war gender reforms adopted by their governments.
We also found that some reforms had disappointing impacts. Instead of serving women from all backgrounds, across our six country cases, women associated with dominant factions in the war benefited disproportionately from gender equality efforts. In Rwanda, women affiliated with the ruling party were more easily able to access certain rights than other women. In Colombia, women were most easily able to enter politics or access other opportunities when they were associated with powerful families and their business interests. We call this pattern the political instrumentalization of rights reforms, where those in power champion women’s rights as a way of advancing their own priorities – not women’s interests more broadly.
In some countries, these patterns can reinforce the social and political inequalities that led to the wars in the first place. When this happens, reforms that aim to build more inclusive societies fall short of fundamentally transforming the ethnic, political, and gender hierarchies that already existed. Supporting women from some social or political groups over others can undermine prospects for longterm peace, particularly when their identities and affiliations map onto divisions that were salient during the war. We call reforms that focus on gender equality but ignore other inequalities single-axis organizing.
In an effort to recognize the devastating toll war violence has taken on women’s lives, the last three decades of legal reform have emphasized conflict-related violence faced by women, such as torture, sexual violence, and forcible displacement. International, state, and local actors more easily recognize women who suffered these types of injuries as ‘victims.’ However, when women endure violence at the hands of security actors or their own family and community, their suffering may be dismissed, even when it is a direct result of war. Additionally, women’s lack of access to food, water, and healthcare, including maternal healthcare, are not understood as violence that is worthy of equivalent redress. We identify these patterns as hierarchies of violence, because some forms of violence women experience are considered more pressing and deserving of remedy than others.
After war, some people are more identifiable as victims than others, not because of the violence they suffered but because of who they are. In identity-based wars, individuals from groups framed as aggressors in the conflict are often not acknowledged as victims. For instance, Hutu and Serb women who suffered violence were generally not seen by the courts or public as victims, even when they were civilians who did not participate in the war at all. Similarly, Tamils who were killed or violated by the Sri Lankan army were framed as legitimate military targets, and thus Tamil women who lost loved ones, or who experienced abuse, are not seen as victims deserving of repair. This enables people from certain identity groups to more easily be seen as ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty.’
Additionally, some categories of victims are perceived by society to be innocent or more deserving than others based on their ethnicity, age, gender, caste, or other characteristics.
Women and younger victims were considered more entitled to reparations than men in our Nepal and Colombia survey, regardless of the type of violence or perpetrator. This perception of women and children as more deserving, innocent, or in need can mask the vulnerability of men and LGBTQI communities during war.
We call these patterns hierarchies of victimhood, in which people’s identities shape the way they are seen as victims – or not – after war. These hierarchies profoundly shape people’s access to justice and repair.