GENDER and ARMED CONFLICT

Overview Report

Amani El Jack

BRIDGE (development - gender)

Institute of Development Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1273 606261
Fax: +44 (0) 1273 621202
Email: [email protected]
Website: http://www.ids.ac.uk/bridge/
Amani El Jack (author) is a PhD candidate in Women’s Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada.
Her specialist areas include research on gender and small arms and light weapons (SALW). She has
been active in the SALIGAD project, which is coordinated by the Bonn International Center for
Conversion (BICC) and monitors the availability and circulation of SALW in countries in the Horn of Africa
that are a part of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). As part of this project, she
conducted fieldwork with Sudanese women to determine how gender ideologies have affected the
proliferation of SALW in the Sudan. El Jack’s other specialist areas include the gendered implications of
development-induced displacement (DID) and human security.

Judy El-Bushra (external advisor) has worked in the field of community development in Africa for 20
years, specialising most recently in research on gender, conflict and development. Her interests include
the role of culture, such as theatre, in development and conflict transformation. She was formerly director
of the research and policy programme at the Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development
(ACORD) and has written extensively on gender and conflict for ACORD, Oxfam and International Alert,
among other organisations.

Lata Narayanaswamy (editor) is a researcher within the BRIDGE team. Her research interests include
gender inequality and poverty, strategies of grass-roots organisations for tackling the root causes of
inequality and poverty and the role of men within the gender and development paradigm.

Emma Bell (editor) is a research and communications officer at BRIDGE. She has authored and edited
a number of publications, including reports on gender and globalisation; gender and participation;
Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs); HIV/AIDS; and violence against women.

Credit is due to BRIDGE team members Susie Jolly, Hazel Reeves and Charlie Sever for their editing
and substantive input into this report, and to Emily Hayes for copy-editing.

© Photos by Jenny Matthews. Jenny Matthews is a documentary photographer working with Network
Photographers. Since 1982, she has been working on a world wide project looking at Women and War.
Many of these photos featured in her book Women and War, published by Pluto Press in 2003, and were
also part of a photo exhibition in London, UK, co-sponsored by ActionAid on the same theme.

BRIDGE is grateful for the financial support of the following organisations: the Government of Canada
through the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the Department for International
Development, UK (DFID), the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
through the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ), the New Zealand Agency for International
Development, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), the Royal Danish Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Swiss
Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

BRIDGE was set up in 1992 as a specialised gender and development research and information service
within the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK. BRIDGE supports gender mainstreaming efforts of
policy-makers and practitioners by bridging the gaps between theory, policy and practice with accessible
and diverse gender information.

Other publications in the Cutting Edge Pack series:

• Gender and Budgets, 2003
• Gender and HIV/AIDS, 2002
• Gender and Cultural Change, 2002
• Gender and Participation, 2001

These packs, along with all other BRIDGE publications including In Brief, can be downloaded free from
the BRIDGE website at www.ids.ac.uk/bridge. Paper copies will be available for sale through the IDS
virtual bookshop at www.ids.ac.uk/ids/bookshop/index.html, or from ITDG, 103-105 Southampton Row,
London WC1B 4HH, UK (tel: +44 (0) 20 7436 9761; fax: +44 (0) 20 7436 2013; email:
[email protected]). A limited number of copies will be available on request to organisations based in
the South (contact BRIDGE for more details: [email protected])
© Institute of Development Studies August 2003 ii
ISBN 1 85864 463 1
Contents

Acronyms ....................................................................................................................................................2
Execitive Summary.....................................................................................................................................3
1. Introduction.............................................................................................................................................6
1.1 Why study gender and armed conflict?..............................................................................................6
2. Understanding armed conflict...............................................................................................................8
2.1 Causes of armed conflict....................................................................................................................8
2.2 Types of armed conflict ......................................................................................................................9
2.3 Stages of conflict ................................................................................................................................9
3. Gender dynamics of armed conflict .................................................................................................. 11
3.1 Gender relations and conflict........................................................................................................... 11
3.2 Women and conflict......................................................................................................................... 11
3.3 Men and conflict .............................................................................................................................. 12
4. Gendered impacts of armed conflict ................................................................................................. 14
4.1 Forced displacement ....................................................................................................................... 14
4.2 Gender-based violence (GBV) ........................................................................................................ 16
5. Protecting human rights and promoting gender equality ............................................................... 21
5.1 Human rights versus human security.............................................................................................. 21
5.2 International laws, resolutions and conventions.............................................................................. 23
5.3 Why are there difficulties in implementation and enforcement? ..................................................... 24
6. Gender in conflict interventions ........................................................................................................ 26
6.1 Humanitarian assistance ................................................................................................................. 26
6.2 Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) .................................................................. 28
6.3 Peacekeeping and peace-building .................................................................................................. 31
7. Mainstreaming gender and women’s organising............................................................................. 33
7.1 What is gender mainstreaming? ..................................................................................................... 33
7.2 How do you mainstream gender in conflict and post-conflict interventions? .................................. 33
7.3 Examples of mainstreaming gender in post-conflict structures....................................................... 35
7.4 Women’s organising........................................................................................................................ 36
8. Conclusions and recommendations.................................................................................................. 41
8.1 Recommendations .......................................................................................................................... 41
References ............................................................................................................................................... 45

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Acronyms
ACORD Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development
AWAG Abused Women and Girls
AWCPD African Women’s Committee on Peace and Development
AWID Association for Women’s Rights in Development
BICC Bonn International Center for Conversion
CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
CIDA Canadian International Development Agency
DAC Development Assistance Committee
DEVAW Declaration of the Elimination of Violence Against Women
DID Development-Induced Displacement
DDR Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration
DFID Department for International Development, UK
ECOSOC United Nations Economic and Social Council
EU European Union
GBV Gender-Based Violence
GTZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammensarbeit/German Technical Co-
operation
ICC International Criminal Court
IDP Internally Displaced People
ILO International Labour Organisation
NAWOCOL National Women’s Commission of Liberia
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
NRA National Resistance Army
NURC National Unity and Reconciliation Commission
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
RAWA Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan
SALW Small Arms and Light Weapons
SFOR Stabilising Forces
STI Sexually Transmitted Infection
UN United Nations
UNDP United Nations Development Program
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women
UNMIK United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UNTAET United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor
USAID United States Agency for International Development
WHO World Health Organization

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Armed conflict negatively affects women and men and results in gender-specific disadvantages,
particularly for women, that are not always recognised or addressed by the mainstream, gender-blind
understandings of conflict and reconstruction. Gender inequality reflects power imbalances in social
structures that exist in pre-conflict periods and are exacerbated by armed conflict and its aftermath. The
acceptance of gender stereotypes is one of the main reasons that such gender blindness persists.

Stereotypical perceptions of roles

Stereotypical interpretations shape and are shaped by social, political, economic, cultural and religious
contexts. Armed conflict encourages expectations that men will fight and women will support them on the
‘home front’. The popular perception is that men are soldiers or aggressors and women are wives,
mothers, nurses, social workers and sex-workers. It is true that it is primarily men who are conscripted
and killed in battle, but women make up the majority of civilian casualties and suffer in their role as
caregivers, due to a breakdown of social structures (Byrne 1996). However, women are also combatants,
as evidenced in Sri Lanka and Liberia, and men are also victims. These realities have consequences for
gender relations, which often go unnoticed and unresolved.

Gendered impacts of armed conflict

The impacts of armed conflict on gender relations are significant. Forced displacement and gender-
based violence (GBV) are two examples of impacts that are not inevitable outcomes of armed conflict,
but rather are deliberate strategies of war that destabilise families and communities. Physical and sexual
violence, particularly towards women and children, occur with greater regularity during and after armed
conflict. Women experience rape and forced pregnancy, forced sex work and sexual slavery, often at the
hands of ‘peacekeepers’, police or occupying forces, as occurred in Bosnia. Although men are the
primary perpetrators of violence towards women and children, it is important to note that men too are
subject to victimisation and violence, including sexualised violence.

International laws and institutions

Gender differences are entrenched within public and private institutions that intervene to end armed
conflict and build peace (El-Bushra 2000a, Kabeer 1994). International organisations such as the United
Nations (UN), governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) vary from ignoring women or
taking a gender-blind approach, to treating women stereotypically. Still others look at women without a
consideration of women’s relative inequality in the context of gender relations.

Often where the term ‘gender’ is used, the focus still tends to be on women and girls without taking into
account the ways in which gender inequality and power imbalances between women and men
exacerbate their disadvantage. Impacts of armed conflict such as forced displacement and GBV are not
understood as human rights violations, but rather as cultural or private issues that are best left alone.
Furthermore, many governments have yet to ratify the international commitments designed to protect the
human rights of women and girls during and after armed conflict. Lack of recognition or enforcement
prevents any real progress towards gender equality.

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Mainstreaming gender concerns into conflict resolution and interventions
Interventions, such as humanitarian assistance and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration
(DDR) programmes for ex-combatants, exacerbate gender inequality if they are administered in gender-
blind ways. Mainstreaming gender awareness into the structures that govern armed conflict and post-
conflict reconstruction requires better cooperation between international institutions, states and NGOs. If
we are to build more equal post-conflict societies, it is particularly important to involve women’s
organisations at the decision-making level in the formation of political and legal structures.

Indeed, the all-encompassing upheaval caused by armed conflict creates the potential to redefine gender
relations in the post-conflict period in more gender equitable ways. But without greater support for
organisations and interventions that promote gender equality in all sectors, there is a high risk that long-
standing patterns of oppression will be re-established.

Recommendations
The report makes a number of recommendations:

Take the lead from the local: Interventions need to be based on context-specific evidence about what
women and men are doing, and not on stereotypical interpretations of gender roles and relations that
presume to know what they should be doing. Interventions should involve local organisations –
particularly women’s groups – in decision-making capacities. Outreach and support designed to assist
families and communities adjust to shifting gender roles and relations should be assessed on the local
level to ensure they are appropriate to the particular community or region. The programmes of states and
international organisations must also reflect the concerns and priorities expressed by local populations.

Improve implementation of existing international laws by international institutions and states, particularly
in terms of recognition of impacts of armed conflict such as forced displacement, impoverishment and
GBV as violations of human rights and not as private, cultural concerns that are unavoidable outcomes of
war. Implementation and enforcement of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 would represent
a significant step forward.

Increase funding to specialised services that deal with the distinct needs of women and men who suffer
violent impacts of armed conflict such as rape and torture. For women, specialised services must include
counselling and outreach to manage gynaecological/reproductive health concerns related to rape, forced
pregnancy and sex work. More health and counselling services should also be made available for men
who move away from masculine, stereotypical gender roles or resist violence and combat and, as a
result, become victims of physical and sexual violence.

Involve women and provide gender training: The involvement of women is necessary but does not in
itself guarantee that gender concerns will be addressed or that women are automatically gender-aware.
Training in identifying and addressing gendered concerns is important for everyone involved in post-
conflict reconstruction. Peacekeepers in particular must receive tailored gender training in order to build

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trust with communities, as well as to minimise the threat of sexual and physical violence from
peacekeepers themselves.

Without a proper understanding of how gender roles and relations are shifting, we jeopardise the goal of
a sustainable and peaceful post-conflict society. Greater cooperation is needed between all the actors
involved in conflict and post-conflict reconstruction to address the power imbalances that lead to gender
inequality. Without significant steps towards gender equality, there can be no real or meaningful peace.

Executive summary written by Lata Narayanaswamy.

‘To the railway station – the only hive of activity – in the midst of desolation, the surreal scene of 326
women rebuilding a station which has no trains … They are mostly widows, some of whose husbands
have been taken to filtration camps. Ask why they are doing it. They reply, so that the city will exist
again’.
Grozny, Chechnya, 7 June 2000 © Jenny Matthews (Matthews 2003: 178).

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1. Introduction

___________________________________________________________________________________

1.1 Why study gender and armed conflict?

Armed conflict exacerbates inequalities in gender relations that existed in the pre-conflict period. This
study explores the impact of armed conflict on gender relations, analysing the distinct ways that both
women and men are affected. It highlights the gender-specific disadvantages experienced by women and
men that are denied by conventional interpretations of armed conflict and post-conflict reconstruction
processes.

Interventions must account for the diverse realities of women and men, who may simultaneously play the
roles of activists and parents, soldiers and victims. Recognising and addressing this diversity is vital to
establishing more sustainable, gender-equal societies in the aftermath of conflict. Women experience
significant disadvantage in the course of armed conflict, but it does not necessarily follow that men are
always the perpetrators and therefore the winners, and women the losers. This report shows that both
women and men experience armed conflict in distinct ways that in turn may alter gender relations.

The inequality that women experience during and after armed conflict in all societies derives from
dominant understandings of gender roles. ‘Gender’ refers to the perceptions of appropriate behaviour,
appearance and attitude for women and men that arise from social and cultural expectations. In the
context of armed conflict, the perception persists of women as wives, mothers and nurturers, whereas
men are cast as aggressors and soldiers. Although women and men do often assume these traditional
parts, there is a tendency in the mainstream literature to exaggerate the extent to which they play
stereotypical gender roles in armed conflict. The reality is that women are also active as soldiers and
aggressors, while men may be both victims as well as combatants.

Gender relations, then, refers to the ways women and men interact. A key focus of this report is to
explore the impact of armed conflict on gender relations in terms of how power dynamics between
women and men are affected by the distinct types of disadvantage that armed conflict imposes. Existing
analyses of armed conflict and post-conflict resolution are weak in various ways – some ignore women
while others take a gender-blind approach or define the role of women in stereotypical ways. Still others
look at women without considering gender relations.

Where the term ‘gender’ appears, its usage often implies that women (and girls) are predominantly
‘victims’ who experience ‘special’ circumstances and have ’special’ needs, while men are depicted as the
‘perpetrators’. But the term ‘gender’ should not be used in such a limited fashion. Rather, it should allow
us to understand that women and men function in a variety of roles – stereotypical or otherwise – and to
examine how changes in these roles affect gender relations.

The destabilisation of gender relations that frequently accompanies armed conflict and its aftermath also
opens up potential opportunities. Following the upheaval of war, we have a clean slate to start again and
ask some fundamental questions about what kind of society we want and how gender relations will

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function within it. In other words, it is a time when ‘social upheaval might open a door to the changes we
hope for’ (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002: 11). The reality is, however, that sometimes these changes are
not forthcoming, as we will see later on in this report.

In order for social upheaval to lead to more equitable relationships between men and women, it is
advisable to first perform a gender analysis. This allows us to identify the nature of existing power
relations between men and women in a particular society and to understand how conflict and its
aftermath affect these relations. It also highlights the fact that marginalised groups who do not readily
conform to female and male stereotypes, such as male pacifists or women in the military, experience
conflict in diverse ways.

A mother may be a breadwinner and an activist, and this engagement in both stereotypical and non-
stereotypical roles has consequences for gender relations in her household. Interventions designed to
assist her that are not gender-sensitive may assume, for instance, that her needs are limited to those of a
mother. This type of interpretation denies that people, women in particular, take on multiple roles and
responsibilities and experience a wide range of negative impacts in times of social upheaval.

A gender analysis allows a more nuanced understanding of how women fulfilling multiple roles
simultaneously affects gender relations in the household and in society. The language of gender moves
away from stereotypical interpretations of what women and men should do and what they should need, to
accepting and supporting what women and men are doing and what they do need.

This report addresses the following concerns:

• Intersections of gender and armed conflict. Section two provides an overview of the types and stages
of armed conflict. The analysis is continued in Section three, which covers the gendered dynamics of
armed conflict. In Section four, we look at the gendered impacts of armed conflict, illustrated with the
examples of gender-based violence (GBV) and forced displacement.
• Tools to mainstream gender. Section five presents and critiques the theoretical frameworks,
international laws and other guidance currently used to implement more gender-sensitive
approaches to armed conflict.
• Making the case for gender-sensitive approaches. Using the critiques from the previous chapters,
Section six examines the consequences for gender relations of humanitarian assistance,
disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and peacekeeping/peace-building, rounding
out the case for a more gender-sensitive approach to all aspects of conflict and post-conflict
resolution/peace-building.
• Strategies for improvement. Section seven provides an overview of some of the practical tools
available to mainstream gender into the institutions that govern armed conflict and its aftermath.
Three examples of successful gender mainstreaming programmes provide insights into how
mainstreaming may be achieved in practice. Finally, this section looks at how women’s organisations
have responded to the lack of attention paid to the gendered dimensions of armed conflict. Section
eight offers conclusions and recommendations for action.

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2. Understanding armed conflict

___________________________________________________________________________________

2.1 Causes of armed conflict

The causes of armed conflict are often linked with attempts to control economic resources such as oil,
metals, diamonds, drugs or contested territorial boundaries. In countries such as Colombia and the
Sudan, for example, oilfield exploration has caused and intensified the impoverishment of women and
men. Entire communities have been targeted and killed, displaced and/or marginalised in the name of oil
development. The control of resources, like the exercise of power, is gendered. Those who do not have
power or resources – groups that are disproportionately, though by no means exclusively, made up of
women – do not usually start wars.

Unresolved struggles over resources, combined with the severe impact of displacement, impoverishment
and increased militarisation in zones of conflict, serve to prolong existing armed conflicts. Moreover,
conflict tends to cause and/or perpetuate inequalities between ethnic groups and discrimination against
marginalised groups of women and men, thereby paving the way for the outbreak of future conflicts.

Armed conflict as the world moves into the 21st century is growing in its complexity. At the international
level, inequality in the distribution of power and resources has become more pronounced. Coupled with
structural inequalities between and within nation-states, this disparity has led to more regional conflict, as
well as an escalation of international armed conflicts. Furthermore, the nature of warfare itself has
dramatically changed due to the development of increasingly sophisticated weapons technology. Nations
have placed greater emphasis on increasing and/or reinforcing military strength. This worsens existing
constraints on women’s rights, which in turn exacerbates inequalities in gender relations.

At the same time as increased militarisation has further limited the rights of women within countries,
gender equality has been co-opted at the international level to justify military intervention into sovereign
nations. The liberation of women from the oppressive Taliban regime, for example, constituted one of the
justifications for the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. But in the five years prior to the invasion,
there was a consistent lack of regard for the plight of women, despite attempts by both local and
international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to draw attention to the violation of Afghan
women’s human rights.

In reality, military interventions are NEVER the answer to resolving gender inequalities. Armed conflict
and its aftermath either cause gender inequality or exacerbate existing gender inequalities, which are
further compounded by divisions on the basis of race, class, caste, sexuality, religion or age.

War and justice for women … like oil and water

War exacerbates women’s suffering. In their roles as mothers, nurturers and caregivers, women
invariably account for a large proportion of civilian casualties. Women in Afghanistan, for example, have
constituted the majority of civilians injured or killed as a result of the mis-targeted bombing of houses,

8
hospitals and other civilian structures (Malakunas 2001). The destruction of resources and the poisoning
of farms have endangered all civilians' lives (Edwards 2001). Furthermore, even though women assume
non-stereotypical roles as combatants, policy-makers and/or heads of households, attempts to have their
voices heard in official processes are often dismissed. Few resources are made available to address and
prevent gender-specific violations such as rape and forced marriage.

2.2 Types of armed conflict

Distinctions between international/inter-state and national/civil conflicts have been made by a number of
scholars (Byrne 1996). Recent insights suggest, however, that contextualising these distinctions is critical
to ensure gendered impacts are fully considered. It is important to recognise national/civil conflicts are
not only internal but transnational in nature, insofar as they take place within a particular international
context.

Regardless of the type of conflict, the concept of men going to war at the ‘front’ and women staying
safely at home with children and the elderly does not reflect the reality of war. In fact, the distinction
between ‘conflict’ and ‘safe’ zones, whereby the home and workplace are viewed as safe, is a long-held
myth, and has been problematised by feminists for some time (Byrne 1996; Cockburn 1998; El Jack
2002; Giles and Hyndman forthcoming). In conflict zones, war comes to women as they work on their
land. War targets their homes – abducting, displacing and/or killing them along with their children (El
Jack 2002).

2.3 Stages of conflict

As Byrne (1996: 8) states, conflict may be said to have the following stages:
1. Run-up to conflict (pre-conflict)
2. The conflict itself
3. Peace process (or conflict resolution)
4. Reconstruction and reintegration (or post-conflict)

Types of gender inequality and appropriate responses to particular gender-specific needs differ
depending on the stage of armed conflict. This breakdown allows us to hypothesise about the likely
impacts at a given stage and design an intervention that takes account of the gendered dimension. The
potential for designing detailed and tailored responses, however, is limited by the shifting boundaries of
armed conflict itself. As Cockburn and Zarkov (2002: 10) tell us:

…war can surely never be said to start and end at a clearly defined moment. Rather, it seems part
of a continuum of conflict, expressed now in armed force, now in economic sanctions or political
pressure. A time of supposed peace may later come to be called ‘the pre-war period’. During the
fighting of a war, unseen by the foot soldiers under fire, peace processes are often already at work.
A time of postwar reconstruction, later, may be re-designated as an inter bellum – a mere pause
between wars.

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An additional concern in this breakdown is that the tendency to consider conflict and post-conflict
reconstruction as real, identifiable and autonomous stages creates a conceptual divide. What constitutes
peace from a feminist perspective may differ from mainstream views because for many, particularly
women, peace does not simply mean the end of the armed conflict, but a time to address the structural
power imbalances that caused the conflict in the first place. What is required, then, is a more nuanced
interpretation of these stages, where interventions that address gender inequality in armed conflict reflect
the fact that events occur simultaneously and stages overlap.

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3. Gender dynamics of armed conflict

___________________________________________________________________________________

3.1 Gender relations and conflict

Gender relations are typically characterised by unequal access to, or distribution of, power. Given that
gender discrimination is so prevalent, it influences other dynamics of armed conflict. More specifically,
gender analysis in armed conflict highlights the differences between women and men in terms of their
gendered activities, their needs, their acquisition and control of resources and their access to decision-
making processes in post-conflict situations (UNDP 2002).

Men of combat age are most often the ones who are conscripted and therefore killed or injured during
battle. Women, however, are the main victims of war. This is either directly as fatalities and casualties or
indirectly through the breakdown of family and community structures (Byrne 1996).

3.2 Women and conflict

Women in war zones may face contradictory demands from government and society. On one hand, the
nation calls upon women to participate in nationalist struggles in their capacity as members of the
national collective. In various war zones, women have been mobilised in armed conflict because their
support, labour and services have been needed. At the same time, the construction of women as
‘mothers’ and ‘guardians of the culture’ within nationalist liberation movements has often constrained
their activism in conflict and post-conflict reconstruction processes (Stasiulis 1999).

The construction of the identities of women in their gendered roles as ‘mothers’ and ‘guardians of the
culture’ implies they are ‘victims’, thus justifying the intensified use of power and violence to ‘protect’
them. Often there is a perception that this ‘protection’ has failed, as is the case where public acts of
physical and sexual violence such as rape occur. Sexual crimes, which disproportionately affect women,
may be carried out in full view of family and community, thereby rendering the victims as ‘tainted’ and
unworthy of protection (Bennett et al. 1995).

No sex please, we’re fighting!

A notable exception to the exclusion of and discrimination against female combatants occurred in Tigray,
a province of Ethiopia. The Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was formed in 1975 to fight for a
democratic Ethiopian state. They actively encouraged women to join the fighting. Education for women
and child-care were provided to facilitate their participation. Sexual relations were banned with the aim of
concentrating energies on the struggle. Exceptions were later made to allow for marriage and children.
One woman recounts: ‘The no-marriage law had a positive role: between men and women there was
talk, not sexual activity. A man would look at a woman in relation to her job, not in relation to whom she
goes with’. (Adapted from Bennett et al. 1995: 9)

Examples of women’s initiatives to achieve peace are often cited as evidence that women are innately
nurturing in contrast to men, who are characterised as innately aggressive and warlike. Yet research by

11
feminists in the North and the South has challenged the so-called peaceful nature of women by
examining their involvement in national liberation struggles, their direct and/or indirect support of armed
conflicts and their contributions to war and militarism generally (Babiker 1999; Byrne 1996; Cockburn
2002; El-Bushra 2000; Moser and Clark 2001; Kelly 2000).

Women as aggressors
The stereotype of women as innately nurturing does not always reflect experience on the ground. The
abundant examples of women as active combatants or supporters of ‘oppressive’ states show
assumptions about the behaviour of women or men can be very shortsighted and naive:
• Women became members of the Nazi party in large numbers and served in the extermination camps.
• Pinochet’s regime in Chile in the 1970s received support from middle-class women.
• Protestant and Catholic working-class women have been present in mobs in Northern Ireland.
• Women have served in, as well as rallied around, the US military.
• There are instances where women have condoned the use of rape against ‘enemies’ and those
constructed as ‘not proper women’. (Adapted from Jacobs, Jacobson and Marchbank 2000: 12-13)

Whether in their traditional and perhaps stereotypical capacity as wives and mothers, or in their roles as
aggressors and supporters of conflict, women continue to experience discrimination, due to the unequal
power structures that govern their relationships with men.

3.3 Men and conflict

Women and men experience violence differently during and after conflict, in their capacities as both
‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ (Moser and Clark 2001: 7). Sexual violence is largely inflicted on women, but
men and boys are also raped during armed conflicts in a form of violence designed to shatter male
power. Yet even when there has been documentation of men’s experiences as victims of abuse on the
battlefield, men continue to be described as ‘masculine heroes’ (Moser and Clark 2001: 3). Zarkov (2001)
argues that in the case of the former Yugoslavia, the refusal to identify men as victims of sexual violence
during armed conflict was rationalised in terms of power relations during war as well as in the subsequent
nation-building process, which dictated who could be labelled victims of sexual abuse. In other words, a
woman can be a victim but a man is never a victim, which is a denial of one of the gendered realities of
armed conflict.

It is not only in terms of sexual violence that men suffer. Men also experience human rights abuses that
are different from but equally unjust to those afflicting women, whether as prisoners of war, as soldiers or
as people who diverge from gender norms (e.g. homosexuals, male pacifists). Men are also directly
targeted in armed conflicts and they make up the majority of casualties caused by small arms and light
weapons (SALW). The increasing number of households headed by women in conflict zones is an
illustration of men’s specific vulnerability (El Jack 2002).

Masculinity and armed conflict: Do the two go hand in hand?

The connection between ‘masculinity’, militarisation and armed conflict is significant. Feminist analyses
identify military structures as patriarchal, male institutions run by and for men, based not on ‘biological

12
traits of men but … on cultural constructions of ”manliness”’ (Turshen and Twagiramariya 1998: 5). In
many cultural contexts, being a ‘proper man’ is also defined by the ability to use a weapon (Jacobs et al.
2000: 11).

Does this mean that men are inherently violent? NO – male violence directed at other men, women or
children is a reflection of ‘masculine expectations’ imposed by societies and reinforced by states keen to
manipulate these expectations for their own political ends (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002; Dolan 2002;
Jacobs et al. 2000). Men who feel they are unable to fulfil their ‘masculine’ roles as protectors or
aggressors may vent their frustrations on their families. This leads to further violence and a lack of
understanding of personal and women’s needs, and how these change in the face of conflict.

The fact that war is usually perpetrated by men does not prove men are inherently violent. War is waged
by those who have power, and men are usually in the most powerful positions. There have also been
cases of female leaders in power, such as Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, engaging their
countries in conflict.

13
4. Gendered impacts of armed conflict
___________________________________________________________________________________

Gender inequalities are exacerbated during periods of armed conflict and continue during post-conflict
reconstruction. Both women and men suffer war abuses and traumas, disruptions and loss of resources.
The impact of these losses is experienced in different ways and women are often disproportionately
affected.

States and organisations persistently fail to enforce international laws and conventions designed to
protect the human rights of women and promote gender equality. Assistance providers, be they
governmental, non-governmental or multilateral, have been slow to tackle the escalation of women’s
human rights abuses, particularly during and after armed conflict. Decision-makers sometimes
discourage or even prevent the development of gender-sensitive initiatives.

One reason gendered initiatives lack support is the divide in thinking between technical and social
support. Technical support refers to assistance with immediate needs such as re-establishing running
water, sewage systems, health facilities or electricity supply. Social support, by contrast, refers to
assistance with longer-term issues that are harder to tackle, with fewer quantifiable results, and are
therefore considered to be lower priority, such as schooling, training and social service provision. Both
types of support, however, bring into question social, cultural and religious practices. But during periods
of conflict, it is considered inappropriate to address gender relations. The result is that the effect of
technical interventions, such as large-scale sanitation projects, on the dynamics between men and
women, is not raised (Williams 2002).

Regardless of the geographical, economic, political or social context, armed conflict makes it more
difficult to access food, health, education and other basic goods and services. This section analyses two
specific impacts of armed conflict – gender-based violence (GBV) and forced displacement. In exploring
these issues, it also seeks to demonstrate how war exacerbates pre-conflict conditions characterised by
inequality and lack of access to resources.

4.1 Forced displacement

‘Forced displacement is the clearest violation of human, economic, political and social rights and of the
failure to comply with international humanitarian laws’ (Moser and Clark 2001: 32). People have often
been uprooted from their homelands due to political, religious, cultural and/or ethnic persecution during
conflict. Whatever the cause, displacement is a source of human rights violations and results in distinct
types of disadvantage for both women and men.

Internally displaced people (IDPs) are not protected by international law

Displacement does not necessarily mean that people leave or are forcibly removed to destinations that
are far from their homes during and after armed conflict. Armed conflict in the 1990s saw millions of
people internally displaced, or still living within the borders of their country. The UN Refugee Convention
of 1951 protects refugees outside of native borders, but does not cover IDPs. The international

14
community has limited options to protect people displaced within their own borders, if their home country
is not willing to cooperate. The legal status of IDPs continues to be a serious concern (Adapted from
World Health Organisation 2001: 23).

Displacement is often viewed as a temporary or transitory phenomenon. However, experience in

countries such as Peru, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Sudan shows it is actually a prolonged process.
Globally, many generations have been displaced as a result of armed conflict, with a significant number
of those affected having being displaced more than once and for significant periods of time (Indra 1999).

Displacement disproportionately disadvantages women, because it results in reduced access to

resources to cope with household responsibility and increased physical and emotional violence (El Jack
2002). Displacement also implies social exclusion and poverty – conditions that are themselves likely to
prolong conflict.

Forced displacement is frequently used as a strategy of war that targets gender relations through family
breakdown and social destabilisation. Displacement often leads to shifts in gendered roles and
responsibilities for both women and men. Demographic change due to conflict has led to more women
becoming heads of households. This has contributed to changes in the division of labour that have
created new opportunities for women but in some respects further marginalised their place in society.

Displacement does not affect all women the same way. In Sudan, for example, ethnic groups such as the
Dinka, Nuer, Nuba as well as other groups in the South and the Nuba Mountains, are marginalised due
to their minority status. Women from these groups constitute an increasing number of war fatalities and
casualties. Furthermore, the added responsibilities women have in productive, reproductive and
community work are often transferred to younger girls and boys within the family. In particular, younger
girls have to assume more responsibilities such as caring for children, the elderly and the sick, along with
managing burdensome domestic work. This shift of responsibility impacts on the welfare and future of
female household members (ibid).

Despite experiences of vulnerability and trauma during the process of displacement, some women
benefit from displacement. They may be given priority for training and development programmes in
health and education, as well as in income-generating activities. The skills women gain enable them to
assume new roles within their households, becoming the main breadwinners when men have been killed
or have problems finding employment after removal from their homes and communities. This shift in
responsibilities represents a move away from stereotypically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ roles. Men
however may react to these changes with depression, alcoholism and an escalation of violence against
women in public and private (de Alwis and Hyndman 2002).

Greater autonomy does not necessarily translate to gender equality

Case studies conducted by the Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development (ACORD) in
Angola, Sudan, Somalia and Uganda show that although conflict has broadened women’s economic
roles and given them greater autonomy, it has rarely led to increased political influence or greater gender

15
equality. Everyday relationships within the household were about the only place where change was
observed, but it would be too soon to say whether this would last in the long-term (El-Bushra, El-Karib
and Hadjipateras 2002: 5).

The relatively small gains women obtain during displacement do not necessarily translate to more
equitable gender relationships. Advancement of ‘women’s interests at a superficial, women-focused level
that fails to challenge overall paradigms of gender differences leaves women with new roles to fulfil but
no institutional leverage to fulfil them effectively’ (El-Bushra 2000b: 6). Furthermore, there is concern that
existing international laws and resolutions use the term gender but actually focus specifically on women.
Although this is important, they simply do not provide the tools to understand gendered impacts,
minimising the potential to foster more equitable gender relations.

4.2 Gender-based violence (GBV)

Physical and sexual violence, particularly against women, continues to be a well-documented feature of
armed conflict. This report understands GBV to be violence, sexual or otherwise, which plays on gender
norms and gender exclusions to break people down both physically and psychologically. Although it is
most often women who are targets of GBV, both women and men may be victims and subject to rape;
increased rate of HIV infection, as well as other sexually transmitted infections (STIs); damage to
physical and psychological health; disruption of lives; and loss of self-confidence and self-esteem.

Violence against women

Conflict worsens existing patterns of sexual violence against women in two main ways. Firstly, incidences
of ‘everyday’ violence, particularly domestic violence, increase as communities break down during and
after conflicts (UN 2002). Secondly, ‘everyday’ violence escalates in the context of masculine and
militarised conflict situations. The establishment of rape camps and the provision of sexual services to
occupying armed forces in exchange for resources such as food and protection are two examples of
GBV during and after conflict. Conflict breeds distinct types of power relations and imbalances. In the
context of conflict, for instance, violence against women is more than the exercise of power over women.
By raping women, who represent the purity and culture of the nation, invading armies are also
symbolically raping the nation itself.

Some types of GBV are experienced almost entirely by women and girls during and after conflict,
such as forced prostitution and sex work; increases in trafficking for sexual or other types of
slavery; and forced pregnancy. Also, the impact of GBV has distinct consequences for women and
girls including sexual mutilation; sterility; chronic reproductive/gynaecological health problems; and
marginalisation from family and community due to stigma associated with sexual abuse (UN 2002).

In conflict zones, sexual violence has become a weapon of ‘ethnic cleansing’, as seen in Bosnia-
Herzegovina and Kosovo, where rape was used by Serbian police and paramilitary forces to punish
women belonging to the Kosovo Liberation Army (Human Rights Watch 2000). Given that rape had been
used in Bosnia, it became a causal factor in conflict-related displacement in Kosovo.

16
Rape as a weapon of war
‘Women recounted to Human Rights Watch their fear that they and their daughters would be raped.
Rumors of rape circulated wildly as families attempted to flee their homes. Older women often dressed
their daughters in loose clothing and headscarves in an attempt to disguise young girls as grandmothers.
Other mothers smeared dirt and mud on their daughters' faces to render them unattractive. As one
mother told Human Rights Watch, ‘I was most afraid for my daughter[s]. I lost eighteen kilos during the
war because I was afraid that my daughters might be raped’. In the words of another woman, ‘The girls
were afraid of the police and put on scarves. The police took off their scarves and pinched their cheeks
and told them not to act like old women. The girls were screaming’. According to a doctor in Pristina,
‘Rape was our greatest fear. Our main goal was to get our daughters – aged twenty-five, twenty-one,
fourteen, and ten – out of the country’ (Vandenberg 2000).

Through the lobbying efforts of women’s organisations, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal
Court (ICC) now recognises and prosecutes sexual and gender violence as war crimes and crimes
against humanity. According to the statute, these criminal offences include ‘rape, sexual slavery
(including trafficking of women), enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, other
forms of grave sexual violence, and persecution on account of gender’ (Human Rights Watch 2002).

After incidences of sexual violence, women are often rejected by family or community. Despite pity for
the trauma the women have suffered, society marks the victims as ‘damaged goods’ (Bennett et al. 1995:
9). Women also have particular healthcare needs as a result of these violations. For example, they
require additional nutritional and health support if they are pregnant or lactating. Food scarcity and
inequalities in food distribution are exacerbated during periods of armed conflict, rendering women and
girls more susceptible to malnutrition (UN 2002). The increase in the rate of HIV infection in conflict
zones is also a worrying trend – women face an increased risk, and therefore need special psychological,
health and social support.

HIV/AIDS: A growing epidemic in the midst of armed conflict

HIV infection is increasing in conflict and post-conflict areas. Many conflicts are raging in areas where
HIV infection is already very high (Smith 2002: 1). Disruption and displacement caused by conflict may
lead to changes in sexual behaviour, an increase in the rate of sexual abuse (e.g. by armed forces), and
to decreased access to blood screening facilities (ibid). Studies conducted in Rwanda and Sierra Leone
found sexual favours were often demanded in exchange for food, which led to an increase in the number
of women’s sexual partners (Benjamin 2001).

HIV infection is often considered to be primarily a medical issue that is not a priority in conflict. Its
pervasive links to unstable social, economic and political circumstances are overlooked (Smith 2002: 2).
Given the degree of stigma that persists for those infected with HIV, both women and men are not likely
to talk openly about their concerns. Consequently, there is an even greater need to reach out to those
affected. This is particularly the case with women, who are typically unable to access medical services.

17
Men as direct and indirect targets
Although men are most often the perpetrators of rape and violence in armed conflict and women the
victims, men themselves may also be subject to physical and sexual abuse. Sexual abuse, torture and
mutilation may be directed at men either as detainees or prisoners of war (UN 2002). In Northern
Uganda, research conducted in the early 1990s showed an increased prevalence of sexually transmitted
infections (STIs) among men, ‘allegedly due to indiscriminate rape of men’ by the National Resistance
Army (NRA) (Dolan 2002: 74).

ACORD’s experience of running workshops on sexual violence confirms the difficulty of quantifying the
extent of male rape because victims are reluctant to speak out (Dolan 2002). Dolan argues that ‘the level
of stigma attached [to male rape] is even higher than that associated with female rape’, and ‘undermining
men’s sense of masculinity becomes a key channel for men to exercise power over other men’ (2002:
75). In this sense, rape or violent sexual abuse as demonstrations of ‘masculinity’ or power are
potentially weapons that can victimise both women and men in conflict zones.

Men are also the indirect targets of violence against women. The rape of women has long been
considered a public act of aggression, where raping and ‘dishonouring’ women is a way of ‘violating and
demoralising men’ (Bennett et al. 1995: 8). Women are perceived to be the preservers of family honour,
and often symbolise a nation’s racial purity and culture. The ‘abuse and torture of female members of a
man’s family in front of him is used to convey the message that he has failed in his role as protector’ (UN,
2002: 16). It represents an attack on the entire country at the same time it violates women’s human
rights.

Although men are likely to be the aggressors, we cannot ‘make assumptions about the behaviour of men
as a group … some men do not benefit, and may indirectly suffer, from acts of sexual violence carried
out against female family members’ (Jacobson et al. 2000: 2-3). This is not, however, to minimise the
greater suffering that women directly experience as a consequence of sexual abuse, but rather to
illustrate that GBV disrupts and destabilises gender relations in often irrevocably damaging ways that
negatively impact everyone.

A weapon of war shrouded in silence

‘[Women who were] raped during the war tell their close friends. You hardly hear of women coming out in
public to talk about all those things that happened to them. They would rather suffer in silence until they
can get over it. They try to live with it or live with the idea that it didn’t happen to them alone. If hundreds
of other girls can live with it, you can also live with it and, gradually, it vanishes away … but most of the
raping was done in the open. A particular rebel may like your daughter, and right in front of you – the
mum, the dad, the other sisters and brothers – it will be done openly. So that was how many girls got to
know that their friends were raped.’ (Extract from the narrative of Agnes from Liberia in Bennett et al.
1995: 39)

GBV and gender relations

How does GBV impact on gender relations? One impact is visible in the private or domestic sphere,

18
where women are likely to experience increased violence, not only at the hands of occupying or state
forces, but also by men in the household in the post-conflict period. Women in war zones often
experience physical and sexual abuse by male spouses who have been demeaned by the armed conflict
and crippled by guilt and anger for having failed to assume their perceived responsibility of protecting
their women (El Jack 2002). It is important to remember, however, that increased GBV during and after
conflict often reflects patterns of violence that existed in the pre-conflict period.

Notions about ‘public’ versus ‘private’ domains present barriers to dealing with victims of physical and
sexual violence. Violence is considered to be a private issue, both within and beyond armed conflict. The
divide between public and private renders many of these problems ‘invisible’ – ‘either literally, since it
happens behind closed doors, or effectively, since legal systems and cultural norms too often treat it not
as a crime, but as a family matter, or a normal part of life’ (WHO 2003). This is further complicated during
armed conflict because physical and sexual violence, particularly against women, often occur in public or
in full view of family and/or community. For both women and men, however, recovery from the trauma is
often hindered by an inability to discuss it because it is considered a private matter.

Sex work and sexual slavery during periods of conflict also have consequences for gender relations.
Women in conflict zones are sometimes driven to provide sexual services to soldiers in order to survive.
But as the box below demonstrates, men are unwilling to accept women’s changed roles, leading to long-
term resentment and family disruption.

No small sacrifice: Sex work and armed conflict

‘Men feel the women are responsible for what happened, that we did it wilfully. They consider us
prostitutes. During that period, they were helpless. They were like babies. They were not able to look
after their families any more. A wife had to sacrifice herself, the marital contract, everything, to save the
family, yet the men are not grateful … We sacrificed ourselves, our image in society, our integrity,
everything, to save their lives and the children. So, my reaction to Liberian men is equal. Just as they
think of me as trash, a prostitute, I think of them as animals … They have forgotten all the suffering we
went through for them.’ (Excerpt from the narrative of Agnes from Liberia in Bennett et al. 1995)

The process of armed conflict itself can lead to particular types of GBV due to the shifts in gender
relations, particularly when women are active as combatants or dissenters in a conflict. Women who do
not fulfil stereotypical roles are seen as deserving of violent torture or abuse.

Tortured for ‘betraying her womanhood’

Nora Miselem is a women’s rights activist and one of only four survivors of nearly 200 people in
Honduras who were kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured as part of state-imposed terror in the 1970s and
1980s. Backed by successive American governments, dictatorships in Guatemala, Nicaragua and El
Salvador prevented popular socialist movements from taking root, resulting in the migration of scores of
refugees fearful of persecution. Many ended up in refugee camps on the border of Honduras and El
Salvador. Nora’s account of her experience follows:

19
‘They said they were going to sterilize me, because I didn’t deserve to have children – that idea they
have of a woman as some sublime being whose sacred role is bearing children. According to them, I was
breaking with the tradition of what a woman was supposed to be. And they were going to punish me,
from their point of view, so I wouldn’t be able to have children. A woman like me didn’t deserve to be a
mother … I had given birth to a little boy, my first, but he had died at the age of two … so the
psychological torture was well aimed, … they said: You know why your son died, don’t you? Because
you got involved in all this stuff. Implying that I hadn’t been a good enough mother.

‘It was there in that torture chamber that I learned about the special treatment they reserve for women.
That whole double morality thing. Because on the one hand they said I didn’t deserve to have children,
that I was a bitch and they were going to sterilize me. But at the same time, individually, whenever one of
them had me alone, he’d try to rape me. He’d come in, put the hood on me and a rubber bag – like a tire
that chokes you – and those electric shocks in my vagina ...

‘They’d tell us we were traitors to our womanhood, as they conceived of that. How can a woman be
involved in this sort of thing, they’d ask, along with men, no? [They told] us that war is a man’s business,
or fighting against war is something for men alone to be involved in ...

‘They can’t stand it when they see a woman who thinks for herself, who wants to change the course of
history, who wants to change her country’s future. That was the tone when they were all torturing me
together. But when each of them would come in by himself, he would tell me he wanted me to have his
child. I want to have a child with you, he’d say, mocking me with that. I had to struggle, so they wouldn’t
be able to penetrate me. And morally speaking, they were never able to … I was physically overpowered
by them, but not morally or emotionally or ideologically overpowered. The only recourse I had was to
attack their morale, because they wanted to rape a woman who was afraid. But my words were not the
words of a woman afraid.’ (Extract from the narrative of Nora Miselem in Randall 2003: 28-29)

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5. Protecting human rights and promoting gender equality
___________________________________________________________________________________

The ongoing violation of human rights, and especially women’s human rights, in conflict zones continues
to occur despite the existence of international laws and conventions designed to prevent such violations.
We need then to understand:
1. What frameworks underpin international laws, rights and conventions related to armed conflict? How
gendered are these?
2. What do international laws, conventions and rights actually protect?
3. Why are these international laws and commitments weak in practice?

The first section of this chapter looks at human rights and human security approaches, which form the
basis of many international laws and commitments.

5.1 Human rights versus human security

Human rights
Historically, mainstream definitions of human rights, while seemingly gender neutral, have been
predominantly based on men’s experiences. Article two of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human
Rights recognises human rights as a universal ideal of respect for humanity that all people are entitled to,
but does not make any specific mention of women. Indeed, few governments and NGOs are committed
in domestic or foreign policies to women’s equality as a basic human right (Peters and Wolper 1995). In
zones of conflict, the denial of women’s human rights has reinforced oppression and discrimination.
When combined with other forms of power imbalance, this denial has more devastating consequences.

An emphasis on human rights is important but insufficient in dealing with issues related to gender
equality. Violations that occur during all stages of armed conflict are often considered simply to be the
consequences of war and not necessarily human rights violations, and are frequently overlooked:
• Although armed conflicts violate the basic right to life and security, women experience specific
vulnerabilities and violence including forced pregnancy, sexual mutilation and sexual slavery at the
hands of soldiers (Anderlini 2001). Similarly, men may be physically or sexually abused or
experience trauma after witnessing this type of abuse against family members. These types of
violations are seen as ‘private’ issues or unavoidable outcomes of conflict as opposed to human
rights violations.
• Human rights are also violated in conflict through imprisonment, torture, disappearances and forced
conscription but, again, these acts are considered to be inevitable outcomes of war rather than
violations. Women and men experience violations of human rights in distinct ways. Men of combat
age constitute the majority of those killed during fighting, endure imprisonment and are forcibly
conscripted. Meanwhile, women and children in conflict zones constitute the majority of civilian
casualties as well as the majority of those displaced and impoverished (Byrne 1996).

21
• Political representation and participation are basic human rights. But whether in conflict or not,
political institutions frequently exclude women. Women are under-represented in national and
international organisations in both conflict and post-conflict arenas (UNDP 2002). This violation of
human rights is not defined as such, but rather, is seen as a reflection of ‘normal’, patriarchal
structures of power in play. Therefore, it is rarely questioned, particularly during armed conflict.

In short, human rights approaches will continue to overlook serious violations unless they recognise the
gendered effects of armed conflict as basic rights violations and not as private, normal or inevitable
consequences of armed conflict.

Women’s rights in Afghanistan

In post-conflict, post-Taliban Afghanistan, the effort to redefine women’s rights as human rights and not
as ‘private’ or ‘cultural’ matters is an ongoing struggle. The new Karzai government claims to have
overturned Taliban laws and says it now upholds international human rights laws. However, the
opportunity for significant post-conflict changes to gender relations seems diminished. As was the case
under the Taliban regime, many women continue to be imprisoned for travelling without male
accompaniment or marrying without male permission.

Whilst a government-endorsed poster campaign encourages parents to put girls in schools, female
teachers are being threatened with death and schools are being firebombed. Despite a shortage of
doctors, Najiba Asseed, a woman who returned to Kabul University Medical School, faced severe
opposition from her husband and death threats from her brother. She applied for a divorce to the new
Women’s Ministry, but was encouraged to ‘quit medical school, go back to her husband and have
children’ (Garapedian 2002).

Human security
Human security relates to the safety of people (particularly disadvantaged people) from ‘such chronic
threats as hunger, disease and repression . . . [and] from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of
daily life – whether in homes, in jobs or in communities’ (UNDP 1994: 23).

The human security approach is based on the assumption that all people ‘have basic human rights and
should enjoy these rights regardless of who and where they are’ (ibid). In the context of gender, the term
implies that all women and men are entitled to security, including economic security, food security, and
health and environmental security (ibid). Feminist perspectives on human security draw a further link
between sustainable development, social justice and the protection of human rights and capabilities as
central aspects of any discussion of human security (AWID 2002).

A human security focus for studying gender and conflict is significant because it establishes a link
between gender equality and human security. Unlike a focus on rights, the human security approach
implies that anything that threatens security is a violation of human rights, including gender-specific
violations long considered to be normal, private or inevitable outcomes of war. However, even with the
security framework, in practice there will still be resistance to recognition of these violations.

22
A human security approach is also problematic, insofar as it can be appropriated by states and
multilateral organisations for their own agendas (Enloe 1993). The attacks on the World Trade Center in
the US on 11 September 2001, for example, have become a pretext for the racist depiction of Muslims
and people from the Middle East in the name of ‘homeland security’. Current developments within US
foreign policy strongly suggest that human security will continue to be used to justify wars such as those
against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.

5.2 International laws, resolutions and conventions

The human rights of women (and girls) are embodied in a number of international human rights
instruments and international humanitarian laws. These instruments collectively condemn all forms of
violence against women. Many of them also contain specific references to the inclusion of a ‘gender
component’ in ‘peace and security’, most notably UNSC Resolution 1325, the Windhoek Declaration:
Namibia Plan (UN 2000).These laws and resolutions stress that those negotiating and implementing
peace agreements should adopt a gender-sensitive perspective and address the protection and rights of
women and girls during conflict and in post-conflict reconstruction.

International laws and conventions that protect women’s human rights

Significant international human rights instruments and international humanitarian laws relating to the
human rights of women include the following:
• Charter of the United Nations (1945)
• United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
• Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966)
• OHCHR Declaration on the Protection of Women in Emergency and Armed Conflict (1974)
• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) (1979)
• The Nairobi Forward-looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women (1985)
• The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Policy on Refugee
Women (1990)
• UN Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993)
• UN Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993)
• Beijing Declaration & Platform for Action (1995)
• Optional Protocol to CEDAW (1999)
• Windhoek Declaration: The Namibia Plan of Action on ‘Mainstreaming a Gender Perspective in
Multidimensional Peace Support Operations’ (2000)
• UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (2000)
• European Parliament Resolution on Gender Aspects of Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding (2000)

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What is UN Security Council Resolution 1325?
In October of 2000, the UN Security Council held a debate on Women, Peace and Security, which led to
the passage of Security Council Resolution 1325 on 31 October 2000. Among other things, the
Resolution recognises that an understanding of the impact of armed conflict on women and girls and
effective institutional arrangements to guarantee their protection and full participation in the peace
process, can significantly contribute to international peace and security. The UN calls on all parties
involved in conflict and peace processes to adopt a gender perspective. This will include supporting local
women’s peace initiatives and indigenous processes for conflict resolution. The NGO Working Group on
Women, Peace and Security is working to ensure the implementation and raise the visibility of UNSC
Resolution 1325 and incorporate more women in peace and security issues. The complete resolution is
available in the Supporting Resources Collection that accompanies this report or online at
www.un.org/events/res_1325e.pdf.

5.3 Why are there difficulties in implementation and enforcement?

Although the importance of these laws, resolutions, conventions and commitments must not be
understated, they are limited in their application. International commitments are difficult to enforce in
practice because of the limited interpretations of human rights that deny various forms of gender-specific
violations, as discussed in the previous section. Also, a range of cultural, historical and patriarchal
justifications exist for the exclusion of gendered concerns in both human rights and human security
approaches. This oversight is reflected in the use of language in international laws, in that emphasis is
placed on women and girls in isolation as opposed to gender and gender relations. Furthermore, many
states have yet to ratify these international commitments. Finally, despite the availability of this
information, communication and information sharing with respect to these laws and commitments within
organisations and between policymakers and grassroots organisations has been poor.

The language of ‘gender’ in Resolution 1325

UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women Peace and Security is undeniably a breakthrough for establishing
broader human rights guidelines, particularly for women’s human rights, at the international level.
Unfortunately, the resolution does not provide much guidance on what a ‘gender perspective’ consists of,
and where the term ‘gender’ is used, it is used interchangeably with ‘women and girls’. It denies many of
the gendered concerns that arise in armed conflict. These concerns require an understanding of how
existing power imbalances between women and men are experienced during and after armed conflict
and how these inequalities might be removed to improve gender relations.

Even where equal rights and security are recognised in theory, the practice remains unequal because
women and men do not have equal opportunities to claim these rights, due to differential access to
economic, political and legal resources. At all levels, there is a need for laws, resolutions, strategies and
interventions that specifically target the differential access to resources and opportunities.

Implementing and institutionalising gendered human security and human rights approaches into policies
requires the commitment of resources and the development of strategies that effectively overcome

24
gender bias. Civil society, particularly women’s organisations, can play a role in raising awareness and
ensuring governments and NGOs are held accountable.

Improving enforcement: The Gender Audit

One way women have mobilised to improve enforcement is through ‘audits’ of states and multi/bilateral
organisations engaged in post-conflict reconstruction processes. International Alert, for example, has
been bringing together women’s NGOs and civil society organisations for the Gender Peace Audit
Project. It consists of an ongoing process of systematically documenting women’s experiences of war
and peace-building through national and regional consultations, thereby creating tools for awareness-
raising and advocacy. The Project uses UNSC Resolution 1325 as a framework for promoting women’s
human rights and recognising the role of women in post-conflict resolution and reconstruction.

Woman teaching on the psychological effects of conflict, Uganda © Jenny Matthews (no date)

25
6. Gender in conflict interventions
___________________________________________________________________________________

Gender power imbalances are entrenched within public and private institutions, including governmental
and non-governmental development organisations that intervene to end armed conflict and build peace
(El-Bushra 2000a; Kabeer 1994). El-Bushra (2000b: 4) argues that these institutions ‘must be challenged
if gender injustice is to be transformed into equality of treatment, opportunity and rights’.

Gender approaches should be incorporated into institutional planning, management, execution and
evaluation (UNDP 2002). In some cases, organisations such as the United Nations Development Fund
for Women (UNIFEM), Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK, Canadian
International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development/Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC), have tried to mainstream gender.
However, bureaucratic problems such as lack of communication between policy-makers and
management, as well as a lack of funding and training, have hindered these efforts (El-Bushra 2000a).

A gender analysis must extend beyond addressing women’s immediate needs, such as food, water and
health services toward women’s longer-term needs, including equal representation in decision-making
processes and leadership roles. It should also recognise how shifts into non-traditional roles affect power
balances and gender relations.

In practice, a gender analysis of conflict interventions reveals a persistent lack of attention to gender
concerns. Regardless of the stage of the conflict, mainstream interventions appear short-term in their
scope, and designed to deal mostly with stereotypical needs and concerns. The subsequent sections of
this report will deal with interventions that address one ore more aspects of the phases of conflict and
reconstruction: humanitarian assistance; disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR); and
peacekeeping/peace-building.

6.1 Humanitarian assistance

Humanitarian aid consists of a wide range of emergency goods and services provided during conflict and
in post-conflict reconstruction including emergency loans; medical services; community organisation;
protection; training; shelter; clothing; household equipment; seeds and tools; and food. This assistance
may also extend into the longer-term, where states, bi/multilateral organisations and NGOs provide
technical, educational and professional expertise to rebuild communities.

According to the European Community (EC), humanitarian assistance aims:

… to prevent or relieve suffering, [and] is accorded to victims without discrimination on the

grounds of race, ethnic group, religion, sex, age, nationality or political affiliation and must not be
guided by, or subject to, political considerations … humanitarian aid decisions must be taken

26
 impartially and solely according to the victims’ needs and interests …’ (EC Council Regulation
1257/1996, as cited in Stevenson and Macrae 2002).

The ‘impartial’ assessments of victims’ needs and interests as outlined in the definition, however, risk
being gender-blind in their delivery. Given that gender discrimination is often characterised by uneven
resource distribution, the manner in which resources are allocated, either directly as aid or indirectly as
assistance, may greatly affect gender relations. Unfortunately, the interventions of humanitarian groups
often demonstrate a lack of sensitivity to gender. Groups that are marginalised – whether by sex, race,
class, ethnicity, religion, culture, nationality, sexuality or political affiliation – may be further
disadvantaged by humanitarian aid and assistance programmes that assume a stance of supposed
‘neutrality’ (de Alwis and Hyndman 2002: 28).

Although gender relations have the potential to be greatly improved through long-term interventions
aimed at the social and economic integration of women, long-term development assistance has
decreased while funding for complex humanitarian emergencies has increased proportionately. In fact, in
the 1990s, international aid for regions in conflict grew five-fold to US$5 billion a year while long-term
development aid significantly dropped (Boutwell and Klare 2000). Donor governments have shown a
preference for funding international organisations that manage emergency, short-term humanitarian
crises, with proportionately less concern for the post-conflict reconstruction period. In other words, there
is even less money available for long-term assistance and where it is available, gender equality becomes
a considerably lower priority on the post-conflict agenda.

Providing immediate necessities such as food, shelter and income-generating activities is critically
important to conflict-torn societies, particularly for women who often are left with the responsibility of
providing for their families. But initiatives that place a disproportionate emphasis on immediate or short-
term needs rather than long-term development are not enough to transform gender relations and improve
women’s lives.

The International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) decision to provide short-term income-generating

opportunities for women in post-conflict situations recognised that equipping women with resources does
not in itself result in economic success or social acceptance (Bouta and Frerks 2002). Given that power
imbalances between women and men are exacerbated in conflict and post-conflict periods, gender
equality will only be advanced if support is given to women, men and communities adjusting to post-
conflict circumstances. However, given its short–term nature, humanitarian aid is often unable to deliver
this level of support.

Humanitarian aid delivered by organisations or states also tends to shy away from challenging GBV. In
principle, the acceptance of rape as a war crime, coupled with the extensive media coverage of rape as a
weapon of war in Bosnia and Rwanda, brought GBV into the public domain and made it an acceptable
focus for humanitarian intervention. In reality, however, reporting and recognising these crimes can be a
challenge, especially when one considers that in the majority of cases, the victim knows her (or his)
attacker or the violent event occurs in the domestic setting. International organisations continue to

27
demonstrate a reluctance to address these issues, deeming them ‘too difficult, too complicated and too
private’ (Williams 2002: 99). Likewise, humanitarian agencies are unwilling or unable to manage soaring
rates of HIV infection in conflict situations, particularly among women (Smith 2002).

Even when NGOs are geared to longer-term development and openly committed to ‘gender
mainstreaming’ and ‘gender sensitivity’, their approach may be flawed. Some deal with gender issues
superficially by hosting ad hoc staff workshops or merely by adding women’s points of view to a larger
strategy, which as a whole remains conventional in its gender insensitivity (de Alwis and Hyndman 2002).

In Sri Lanka, NGOs providing emergency relief focused on income-generating activities directed to
women such as poultry rearing, home gardening, and sewing, thereby reinforcing stereotypical gender
roles for women and earning them lower returns. Unlike their male counterparts, women were
‘encouraged to be nurses and typists (supportive roles) rather than doctors or office administrators’ (de
Alwis and Hyndman 2002: 12). Training women in non-traditional roles, however, will not result in greater
gender equality unless women, men and communities are supported through outreach or training to
come to terms with the changes in post-conflict society.

Gender inequality in humanitarian aid in Kosovo

Oxfam was involved in the emergency humanitarian efforts in Kosovo in 1999. Oxfam has made
considerable efforts to mainstream gender and integrate ‘hard’ (technical) and ‘soft’ (social) elements of
humanitarian assistance. This resolve, however, crumbled in the face of high media interest as large
sums of money were diverted to Oxfam to spend fast.

In Kosovo, this initially resulted in gender inequalities in the recruitment and pay of staff: young educated
male Kosovar refugees working with the water engineers were paid, while young educated female
Kosovar refugees were not, an oversight that was later rectified. The stereotypical gender divide in the
division of work, however, remained unchanged, with ‘hard’ programmes such as water engineering
being staffed almost exclusively by men, while ‘soft’ programmes including gender, disability, social
development and hygiene promotion, employed almost exclusively women. The water programme teams
each had access to their own new vehicles – highly desirable resources during the crisis period –
whereas social development, gender, hygiene promotion and disability teams had to share one old,
broken-down vehicle (Adapted from Williams 2002: 96).1

Where priority has been given to women in assistance programmes this has, at least on a superficial,
short-term level, lessened their disadvantaged status and increased women’s means to support
households and communities. However, where such prioritisation is not accompanied by an examination
of gender power structures, programmes may fail to challenge women’s inequality (El-Bushra 2000b).

6.2 Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR)

DDR is a programme designed to re-integrate ex-combatants back into post-conflict society. The

1
Please see the Case Study on ‘Oxfam, gender, and the aftermath of war – Kosovo’ in the Supporting
Resources Collection of this pack for a more detailed look at Oxfam’s work in this region.

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integration of gender-aware frameworks into DDR is necessary in post-conflict reconstruction because it
enhances the equal participation of women and men in negotiating conflict resolution and peace-building
processes, either as ex-combatants, or as family and community members receiving ex-combatants. One
of DDR’s most important functions is arguably the provision of training and support for ex-combatants to
help them understand the way their society has changed as a result of conflict and how they might re-
integrate into post-conflict social structures.

The UN has recognised that ensuring ex-combatants, their families and receiving communities and those
assigned to re-integrate them have an understanding of the gendered dimensions of armed conflict and
post-conflict reconstruction, is essential to lasting peace and development. This is illustrated in Point 13
of UNSC Resolution 1325, which calls for ‘all those involved in the planning for disarmament,
demobilization and reintegration to consider the different needs of female and male ex-combatants and
to take into account the needs of their dependants’ (UN 2000).

Female ex-combatants
Women combatants are often more marginalised than other groups of women in conflict and post-conflict
societies due to their involvement in direct military combat, which is stereotypically understood to be a
male domain. Unlike male ex-combatants, female ex-combatants are often excluded from participating in
new political structures and overlooked by veterans’ organisations (Farr 2002).

Female combatants challenge gender roles

‘Before the struggle started our society was very conservative and rigid. Women had no place among
men. They would not talk with their head[s] up. Who thought that they would take up arms? But in the last
10 years there has been a tremendous change. We see young women in the battlefield fighting equally
with the men … Now women all over the world participate in armed struggles. Why not our women?
Instead of dying screaming, being raped by an aggressor army, it is a relief to face the army with [your
own] weapon.’

‘Our women have proved that they can do anything … Our women are going to police work. This was not
there before … I appreciate their heroic acts, self-confidence and the sacrifices they have made for the
land of their own. They protect not only the land, but also the entire women of this land’. (Excerpt from
narrative of Kokila from Sri Lanka, in Bennett et al. 1995: 146)

Although some women cite positive experiences as combatants and/or perceive the work of female
combatants as a step forward, these changes are not often sustainable due to the gender-blind
administration of DDR. In the absence of gender-sensitive approaches, reintegration services may be set
up for men but not for women.

Reintegration and rehabilitation: Only for men?

‘I know some [organisations] that deal with former combatant boys. They help to rehabilitate them, send
them to school, help them to be engineers, teachers, whatever [they] want to be. They provide food,
clothing, [and] medical facilities. But I don’t know of any kind of rehabilitation centres for women. Most of

29
the women only tell their friends [that they were combatants]. You hardly find women combatants saying
that the government should try to help them.’ (Excerpt from the narrative of Agnes from Liberia, in
Bennett et al. 1995: 37)

In the few cases where women have received equal demobilisation grants, such as in Eritrea, little
attention has been paid to the complexity of gender roles, priorities and responsibilities.

Demobilisation grants in Eritrea

Female and male ex-combatants have been given demobilisation grants without consideration of their
post-conflict gendered roles and obligations. Single mothers, for example, spent demobilisation grants on
immediate family needs such as food and medication. After their money was used up, these women
became impoverished and vulnerable. Their male counterparts in contrast, invested the money in farming
and trade, or they put it in the bank. Given an overall lack of resources, coupled with ongoing political
marginalisation, women’s organisations such as those in Eritrea were unable to offer appropriate support
or guidance for these women involved in DDR (Roche 1999), nor could they mobilise to challenge this
gender-insensitive approach to DDR.

Changing gender relations in post-conflict society

It is not only ex-combatants who require support and assistance. Many women in receiving communities
become heads of households in the absence of male breadwinners. Male ex-combatants, expecting to
return to their role as breadwinner, are confronted with the reality that women are managing on their own
and this shift away from stereotypical female and male roles is not easily reversed. Meanwhile, women,
having performed in a non-stereotypical role as combatants, may expect to maintain the leadership or
independence they gained during conflict, whereas men expect them to come home and continue to fulfil
the stereotypical role of wife/nurturer/mother.

There is a lack of counselling or other services that take account of these gendered consequences of war
on ex-combatants and receiving communities. There is clearly a need for gender-sensitive DDR that
accounts for the shifts away from stereotypical roles caused by armed conflict. Without training and
support to understand the impact of armed conflict on gender roles, gender relations amongst ex-
combatants and their receiving families and communities will undoubtedly worsen.

Gender equality in DDR – Rwanda

The post-conflict administration of Rwanda is often cited as an example of successful gender
mainstreaming. As with many other aspects of reconstruction in Rwanda, DDR had a significant gender
component. DDR took place in demobilisation camps, where, for instance, 90 men between the ages of
19 and 30 would be resident for three months of re-integration training. As part of this, they received
gender training to inform them of changes in Rwandan society, such as the passage of new laws that
gave women inheritance and property rights (UNIFEM 2002).

Although excluded from senior positions of power, women’s involvement in DDR is substantial. Women
have been involved, for example, in DDR programmes for former child soldiers in various conflict zones.

30
UN peacekeeping troops in Bosnia also worked with local women in acquiring SALW and other illegal
weapons from ex-combatants.

Inclusion of previously marginalised women and men is fundamental to the successful implementation of
DDR. However, such inclusion has not been prioritised in post-conflict policies, legislation or institutions
at both national and international levels. The lack of enforcement of Point 13 of UNSC Resolution 1325 is
due to many factors including a lack of capacity, funding and staff training.

6.3 Peacekeeping and peace-building

Generally, women are thought to be lacking in expertise to function in the public arena and are excluded
from those processes and institutions considered to be political. This under-representation extends into
peacekeeping and those peace-building activities that are widely considered to be political, such as
formal peace negotiations, mediation and diplomacy.

Peacekeeping refers to a UN military and civilian presence that, with the consent of the parties involved,
controls conflicts and their resolutions, while ensuring the safe delivery of humanitarian aid (UN 1995).
Peace-building includes building legal and human rights institutions as well as fair and effective
governance and dispute-resolution processes and systems (Morris 2000).

Peace-building is generally perceived to be the ‘softer’ or feminised side of post-conflict reconstruction. If

women are associated with anything at all in post-conflict reconstruction, then it tends to be in peace-
building activities such as primary health care delivery, counselling and education services, or assistance
with the provision of basic needs or income generation. Conversely, peacekeeping is highly masculinised
and militarised. Male involvement in peacekeeping involves patrolling streets and borders, maintaining
control and protecting people, primarily women and children.

This interpretation of peacekeeping and peace-building as distinct and separate elements, where women
are protected and men are protectors, misrepresents the reality. Women are also active as
peacekeepers in the military and men are part of peace-building activities. Moreover, these elements are
not separate but intersect in ways that result in distinct injustices that reflect unequal power in gender
relations. The most notable example occurs in the case of ‘peacekeepers’ who abuse their power by
physically or sexually violating local populations, particularly women (Bennett et al. 1995: 8).

The belief that peacekeeping and politicised elements of peace-building are mutually exclusive
male/female domains diminishes peace-building efforts and exacerbates inequalities in gender relations.
Women’s organisations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, for instance, were keen to work with the Stabilising
Forces (SFOR), or peacekeepers. They wanted to deal with a variety of issues related to post-conflict
reconstruction including the following: sex work (where SFOR personnel were often involved as clients);
female trafficking and sexual health; and assisting displaced refugees (Cockburn and Hubic 2002).

The head of one women’s organisation argued there was a persistent ‘masculine undervaluing of women
and the feminine’, while politics, reconstruction and ‘soldiering’ were seen as ‘men’s work’ (ibid: 110).
This lack of cooperation between the predominantly male peacekeepers and the female peace-builders

31
rendered gender-specific concerns an even lower priority and diminished the chances for more equal
post-conflict outcomes. As the following box demonstrates, cooperation between governing elements and
women’s organisations can help promote gender equality as part of a sustainable peace.

Cooperation gets the job done

In post-conflict Rwanda, cooperation and collaboration between the government’s Ministry of Gender and
Women in Development (MIGEPROFE) and women’s NGOs has created unique opportunities for
lobbying and advocacy work on gender issues. The achievements of these constructive partnerships
include greater attention to gender in policies and programmes generally; changes to property laws in
order to recognise women’s rights; the incorporation of gender into decentralisation processes; and an
increase in the number of women in public policy positions. It proves that working in cooperation
establishes the basis for a more sustainable, gender-equal reconstruction process in the aftermath of
conflict (UNIFEM 2002).

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7. Mainstreaming gender and women’s organising
___________________________________________________________________________________

7.1 What is gender mainstreaming?

The UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1997 defined gender mainstreaming as follows:

In any area and at all levels, a gender mainstreaming perspective is the process of assessing the
implications for women and men in any planned action, including legislation, policies or
programmes.

It is a strategy for making the concerns and experiences of women as well as men an integral part
of design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political,
economic and social spheres, so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not
perpetuated.

The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve gender equality (UNDP 2002: 8).

Gendered rights and security approaches should form the basis for broadening existing definitions of
human rights. Mainstreaming gender into these approaches would allow us to go beyond passive
‘vulnerable group’ and ‘victim’ characterisations that deny the reality that men are also victims and
women are also aggressors during and after armed conflict. As we will see later on in this section,
women’s organisations have begun this process by lobbying national and international governments and
bodies to recognise the contributions of women as active peace-builders.

7.2 How do you mainstream gender in conflict and post-conflict interventions?

The ECOSOC definition of gender mainstreaming is supported by a number of guides, manuals and tip-
sheets commissioned by various international NGOs and multilateral organisations, such as the UN, on
all aspects of armed conflict, including humanitarian interventions, DDR and peacekeeping.

These publications offer checklists, charts and forms to guide practitioners on how to establish gender-
sensitive conflict and post-conflict interventions. The guidance and the questions posed are often quite
general, but nonetheless provide a valuable starting point in trying to institutionalise gender sensitivity
from the ground up.

Interventions must account for the political, social, cultural and economic contexts of a particular
operation. They should focus on issues such as power and resource allocation in the household;
religious/cultural roles of women and men; women’s participation in public and private institutions; boys’
and girls’ access to education; and differences in the ways women and men access economic
opportunities.

The identification of local resources/infrastructure/organisations that can contribute to the intervention,

either through direct involvement, or through the contribution of expertise, is also considered vital to the

33
success of the intervention. Specific reference is often made to the gender balance of any groups
involved and how power appears to be allocated within them. Emphasis is placed on the importance of
nurturing, supporting and consulting local gender expertise in the form of women’s organisations, such as
all-women news conferences, roundtables and meetings.

Gender training for staff and awareness in programme setup are also essential to ensure international
and local staff are sensitive to the gender-specific issues in post-conflict reconstruction – from access to
health, food, water and other resources to economic opportunities and female leadership at the
policy/decision-making level. Programmes must provide support for non-stereotypical areas of peace-
building, such as, for instance, training in non-traditional skills for women and physical and sexual
violence counselling for men.

This summary is by no means exhaustive, but provides a starting point in thinking about the ways in
which specific aspects of interventions in armed conflict can incorporate more gender-sensitive
approaches.

History repeats itself

A vast amount of information is available on the importance of including women in all stages of peace-
building and problems that have occurred due to the exclusion of women, such as in Kosovo and
Afghanistan. Nevertheless, of 250 delegates attending meetings on the constitutional future of post-war
Iraq in April 2003, only six were women.

Dr. Shatha Beserani, an Iraqi doctor living in London and the founder of the Iraqi Women for Peace and
Democracy Campaign, told BBC News Online that the participation of women was not prioritised: ‘At
meetings in London, we have tried to raise it but the men say they want to go concentrate on the
essential issues. It is just seen as secondary. But if we don’t push it now it will be difficult to do it later’.

Elisabeth Rehn, a consultant who authored an extensive report on women, war and peace for the UN,
expressed shock at the disregard for UN resolutions that protect and encourage the role of women in
conflict reconstruction (Adapted from Westcott 2003).

However, an exclusive focus on women, either as facilitators or as recipients, should not be mistaken for
‘mainstreaming’ gender. The involvement of women is not in itself enough to ensure gender sensitivity.

Mainstreaming gender does not mean simply the inclusion of women!

De Alwis and Hyndman (2002: 13) point out that in Sri Lanka, many humanitarian organisations raised
concerns about the lack of sensitivity on issues related to women’s welfare. Their efforts to raise
awareness led to the appointment of women as gender coordinators. However, contrary to expectations,
this resulted in greater gender insensitivity, due to a lack of training for the coordinators on gender-
specific issues. Training was deemed unnecessary because it was assumed that female gender
coordinators were naturally more sensitive to gender issues. For this same reason, gender coordinators
solely worked with women’s groups or on women’s projects. Their dealings with men were infrequent and

34
they were given little opportunity to challenge men to be more aware of the need to reform gender
inequity.

7.3 Examples of mainstreaming gender in post-conflict structures

There are instances where existing conceptual approaches, in conjunction with enforceable guidelines,
resolutions, declarations and institutional practices, have met with some success in post-conflict
reconstruction situations, most notably in the work of the Gender Affairs Unit set up by the UN in the
reconstruction of East Timor. The relative success of this office in mainstreaming gender throughout the
peace-building process demonstrates a gendered response is possible in practice.

The Gender Affairs Unit in post-conflict East Timor

The Gender Affairs Unit was established by the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).
The unit focused on capacity-building and raising awareness of the link between gender equality and
sustainable development, as well as the need to take positive action towards gender equality as a goal.
The office conducted workshops and training sessions, as well as establishing networks for gender
mainstreaming within UNTAET as well as in East Timorese society more broadly. The objectives for
gender mainstreaming and strategies for implementation were based on the experiences and priorities
raised in consultation with local women and women’s groups (UN 2002: 81).

The administration of post-conflict Rwanda has also emerged as a good practice example of gender
mainstreaming. Continuous efforts have been made to ensure gender cuts across all policies and priority
areas. Moreover, all government departments must report on how gender equality is being addressed in
programmes and how budgets are being developed in gender-sensitive ways.

Gender and justice in post-genocide Rwanda

The gacaca is a traditional, communal judicial system that was re-introduced to relieve the burden on the
national courts. It nominates 19 ‘judges’ or respected people at the village level to hear cases. In 2002,
over 115,000 defendants accused of genocide-related crimes were shifted to the gacaca.

Gender equality issues have featured prominently in the re-establishment of these village courts, which
have traditionally been male-dominated. Although women were initially prevented from testifying in the
traditional gacaca, they are now allowed as full participants. They are also being encouraged to join as
judges, with 27 per cent of gacaca posts reserved for women. With assistance from the National Unity
and Reconciliation Commission (NURC) and support from UNIFEM, training has been provided to these
women judges. Bilateral donors such as Belgium and Canada are also supporting increased efforts to
involve women in the gacaca judicial process (UNIFEM 2002).

The partnership between women’s NGOs and government has created high expectations for what
women’s organisations can collectively achieve, but this recognition is not being matched by a growth in
funding or other resources. Consequently, it is increasingly difficult for these organisations to work at the
same pace (UN 2002). The Rwandan experience is proof that more funding and resources should be

35
devoted to promoting partnership with women’s organisations, which contribute not only to the basic
needs of post-conflict society, but are also instrumental to the development of gender-sensitive legal and
political structures.

Independent organisations such as Oxfam have also had some success in mainstreaming gender into
institutional practice at the grassroots level.

Mainstreaming success: Lessons from Oxfam’s field office in Sierra Leone

Recent feedback from Oxfam’s long-term humanitarian interventions in post-conflict Sierra Leone
suggests mainstreaming gender is a slow but steady process that requires commitment from every
individual in the organisation.

After piloting a very ambitious gender programme, field-level staff realised that, in fact, it was time to ‘go
back to basics’ and provide gender training for all staff. Basic gender training encouraged a shared
understanding of why participation of both women and men is important. It also highlighted the harmful
effects of stereotypes and the value of work sharing.

Although understanding and acceptance of these principles is still variable, the field staff have generally
noted a positive change in the attitudes, beliefs and practices of community members. For instance, it is
now taken for granted that women will be involved in community assessments and consultations, both
with men and also separately. There is also growing enthusiasm for achieving gender equality among
field staff.

The Sierra Leone programme identified four key ways of addressing gender equality in a humanitarian
programme: gender training; commitment of management/leadership to gender equality; implementation
of gender-equal recruitment techniques, including training for women in non-traditional roles; and
development of the capacity of external partner agencies to implement and enforce gender equality
agendas (Adapted from Williams 2003).

7.4 Women’s organising

UNSC Resolution 1325 is clear on the need to protect women’s rights and support the work of women’s
organisations in peace-building efforts. Despite these commitments, the gendered ways that women and
men, but particularly women, actively engage with, and are victimised by, armed conflict and
reconstruction, remain unrecognised by gender-blind interpretations of war and its aftermath. Women’s
organisations continue to protest these injustices at the local, national and international levels. These
ongoing efforts have laid the groundwork to have gender mainstreamed more effectively into institutions
that govern during periods of armed conflict and reconstruction. Recognising the relative inequality faced
by women during and after armed conflict is an important step to mainstreaming gender. Only then will
the impacts on women and gender relations be put into context.

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The importance of supporting women’s organising efforts has been recognised by Point 15 of UNSC
Resolution 1325, which officially endorses the need to promote gender equality through consultation with
local and international women’s NGOs in the processes of post-conflict reconstruction (UN 2000).

Poetry as a rallying force

In periods of conflict, poetry has been used not only as a means of expressing grief but as a force for
mobilising women to actively resist conflict and oppression. Through contributions from poets and
activists in Afghanistan and around the world, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA) uses the medium to raise awareness of life in an oppressive state. The poetry
collected by RAWA recognises and inspires women’s active roles as objectors opposing these violations.
An extract from a poem by Meena, the founder of RAWA who was assassinated by Afghan Intelligence in
1987, follows:

I’ll never return

I’m the woman who has awoken
I’ve arisen and become a tempest through the ashes of my burnt children
I’ve arisen from the rivulets of my brother’s blood
My nation’s wrath has empowered me
My ruined and burnt villages fill me with hatred against the enemy,
…
I’ve learned the song of freedom in the last breaths, in the waves of blood and in victory
Oh compatriot, Oh brother, no longer regard me as weak and incapable
With all my strength I’m with you on the path of my land’s liberation.
My voice has mingled with thousands of arisen women
My fists are clenched with the fists of thousands compatriots
Along with you I’ve stepped up to the path of my nation,
To break all these sufferings all these fetters of slavery,
Oh compatriot, Oh brother, I’m not what I was
I’m the woman who has awoken
I’ve found my path and will never return.

(The full text of the poem is available at rawa.fancymarketing.net/ill.htm.)

There is a distinction between women’s actual engagement in peace-building and the integration of
women’s rights in the peace process. It is, after all, possible to enforce the international laws and
conventions that protect women from GBV and recognise the disadvantages experienced by women
during and after armed conflict, without actively involving them in the political process. Although
recognition on its own is important, it would still deny women the opportunity to work alongside men in
shaping conflict resolution processes in more equitable ways. Long-term peace that is gender equal must
go beyond protecting but still excluding women, to actively engaging women in the decision-making
structures that govern peace itself.

Women’s work in peace-building mostly capitalises on stereotypical interpretations of gender roles

because, typically, it is only in their capacity as wives and mothers that women gain the attention of
soldiers and politicians. Women’s presence in the official peace process remains marginal and the
process of negotiating gendered relations of power in the context of armed conflict is an ongoing
challenge.

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A message to the women of Iraq from the women of Kosovo
Just after the ‘end’ of the conflict in Iraq, the Kosovo Women’s Network in April 2003 circulated an open
letter via email entitled A cautionary tale from Kosovar women to women in post-war Iraq. Excerpts are
reprinted below.

‘We have a briefly recounted but very complex story to tell to the women of Iraq …

‘We greeted joyfully the decision that put Kosova under a UN administration. [The] UN was to us the
revered international organization that developed and passed key documents that stipulated women's
rights and promoted their integration in all levels of decision-making. But, when we returned home we
were, unfortunately, disappointed by the UN Mission in Kosova (UNMIK). We were eager to work with the
international agencies in developing effective strategies for responding to the pressing needs of Kosovar
women, but most of those agencies did not recognize that we existed and often refused to hear what we
had to say on decisions that affected our lives and our future.

‘Some of the international staff came to Kosova thinking and assuming that this is an extremely
patriarchal society where no women's movement can flourish. And there were those who wanted us to do
all the groundwork for them [like] find staff and offices, set up meetings and provide translations, but were
not interested in listening to us... They had their own fixed ideas and plans and their ready-made
programs that they had tried in other countries and did not want to change their plans to respond to the
reality of our lives.

‘Instead of dedicating all our energy to helping women and their families put together lives shattered by
war, we had to spend efforts in fighting to be heard and in proving to UNMIK that we knew what was best
for us, that women in Kosova were not just victims waiting to be helped – they could help themselves, as
they did in the past, and they could be key and effective actors in building their own future.

‘We did not give up. We met with UN officials, wrote letters, went to meetings to present our ideas,
knowledge and expertise. We talked to donors and built alliances with those international organizations in
Kosova and abroad that genuinely saw and related to us as partners in the common efforts to advance
[the] women's cause in our country. This is part of an on-going multi-layered struggle that women's
groups in Kosova have been engaged in during the last four years, a struggle to be part of the decision-
making process from day one, a struggle to get better organized and become more effective, a struggle
to take the place we deserve in shaping our life and the future of our society.

‘We urge and encourage women in Iraq to organize ... and be part of the rebuilding of their country.’

The fact that women support conflict along religious, ethnic and nationalist divides raises the question of
whether it is possible for women to unite around gender-specific concerns to fight patriarchy and
oppression. There are many examples, however, of groups of women that have managed to prioritise
gender-specific concerns over political allegiances in order to address women’s human rights issues in a
unified fashion.

38
Palestinian and Israeli women work together
Jerusalem Link, a partnership between the Israeli organisation Bat Shalom and the Palestinian
Jerusalem Centre for Women, is one example of women successfully bridging the divides between
politics, armed conflict and gender equality. Whilst the two organisations work principally to address the
concerns of women in their own societies, Jerusalem Link is able to prioritise women’s human rights
more generally as an important element of any lasting peace settlement.

Established in 1994, the partnership project marks the first time that a Palestinian and an Israeli
organisation have worked so closely together for the advancement of women’s and human rights in the
region, as well as for the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The two organisations jointly run
programmes promoting peace, democracy, human rights and women's leadership. Their work includes
campaigning on International Women’s Day; raising awareness through Palestinian/Israeli Women's
Public Media Dialogue; facilitating an International Women’s Peace Commission; and lobbying of
international organisations and national governments to promote the inclusion of women in decision-
making processes. See www.batshalom.org/english/jlink/index.html for more information.

The importance of recognising, encouraging, supporting and strengthening the capacity of women in
conflict and post-conflict situations cannot be overstated. As the box below illustrates, women mobilise
and take the initiative in periods of armed conflict in order to survive and/or to fight for their rights. As they
move into non-stereotypical roles with support from family and community, the basis for the protection of
women’s human rights and the groundwork for a longer-term shift towards more equal gender relations
are made possible.

Addressing the multi-faceted needs of women: The Liberian experience

The National Women’s Commission in Liberia (NAWOCOL), an NGO made up of 78 women’s groups,
developed in the post-war period to address the myriad needs of women. It encouraged grassroots
working groups to come together around income-generating activities - from garden projects to peer
counselling. Progress has been made in educating women about their rights, providing training for
income-generating activities and enabling women to take control and move away from stereotypical
roles. Although there is cause for optimism, women require government support and some men remain
sceptical. Generally, it is clear that this work has paved the way to rebuild Liberian society in a more
gender-equitable fashion.

Below we reprint an extract from the testimony of Rose, a former Secretary-General of the Commission
in Monrovia, discussing the multiple programmes in place to assist women in the post-conflict period
(extracted from Bennett et al. 1995: 41-5):

‘The idea for the Abused Women and Girls (AWAG) programme came right after the ceasefire in 1990. A
group of women including myself attended a workshop run by Save the Children, UK … We talked about
the Ugandan experience where women were raped and molested … We were moved because we knew
that these things had happened [in Liberia] … We decided to form an association called the Association

39
for Women in Crisis. Its aim is the rehabilitation of victimised women, abused women and girls, through
trauma counselling... [and] group therapy …’

‘We have health education, talks about family planning, nutrition, hygiene, sanitation and general things.
Besides that, we have preventive education and counselling about HIV/AIDS … We have increased
awareness about HIV/AIDS, but we are short of films and [other] educational materials.

‘The HIV counsellors have meetings with women’s groups, in the schools, in the churches. In one month
they see about 2,000 or 3,000 people, distribute [information] materials as well as condoms. We also talk
about [taking] care of a victim, and about the psychological effects on a victim’s family. All the myths
about AIDS are cleared away.

‘Women took up arms and they’ve disappeared … We are trying to develop a programme to identify
these girls, [help them find] their productive capacity [and] rehabilitate them through counselling and
training ...

‘Women are becoming independent of men. We love the men, we need them – they are our husbands,
brothers, fathers, uncles – but we are not waiting for them like before to be the only providers. Men have
come to appreciate this role and they talk about it with admiration. They [also] fear it, but they are willing
to go an extra mile with the women. It is now common to hear a man say, “We wish to have a woman
president”. That’s how far the women have gone. In Liberia, women have proved themselves. But
somehow, the suppression is there. It’s camouflaged. You don’t see it but it’s there.

‘In the refugee camps outside of Liberia, the women are learning masonry and carpentry and about
building their own homes …You could not find that before ...

‘All is not rosy, because our government has to back us, and we have to have a unified country. The
government has been sensitised now to plan for gender issues.’

Women are active not only at the local or community level, but at the national and international levels as
well. In Africa, for instance, women’s groups have formed the African Women’s Committee on Peace and
Development (AWCPD), now a part of the African Union (formerly Organisation of African Unity). Its
mandate is to broaden the peace agenda to include issues such as land reforms, economic and social
justice and equal participation for women in political processes generally. The inclusion of rape and GBV
as war crimes and crimes against humanity in rules and statutes governing the ICC is due to the
contribution of international women’s groups led by the New York-based Women’s Caucus for Gender
Justice.

From the local to the international sphere, women’s activism is laying the groundwork for mainstreaming
gender in all aspects of armed conflict and post-conflict reconstruction.

40
8. Conclusions and recommendations
___________________________________________________________________________________

The primary objective of broadening our understanding of the intersection of gender and armed conflict is
to recognise and address forms of gender-specific disadvantage that are overlooked by conventional,
gender-blind representations of armed conflict and its aftermath.

As this report has demonstrated, the diverse experiences and needs of women, who invariably function
in both traditional and non-traditional roles, have generally not been recognised. Similarly, the distinct
disadvantages faced by men have been misunderstood. In the case of gender-based violence (GBV), for
instance, female victims are shunned by family and community while male victims are unable to access
counselling or other services. The denial of these and other traumas impedes our understanding of
gender relations, blinding us to the ways in which we may promote gender equality and thereby
contribute to the establishment of sustainable, peaceful post-conflict societies.

Real peace does not only mean the end of armed conflict, but rather the establishment of durable and
inclusive social institutions. Conventions designed to protect the human rights of marginalised groups,
particularly women, during and after conflict do exist. However, the negative impacts of war, such as
forced displacement and GBV, continue to destroy families and communities. Interventions such as
humanitarian aid, DDR and peacekeeping, are meant to alleviate suffering and assist in the
reconstruction process, but where administered without regard to gender, they may actually exacerbate
inequality.

The social upheaval caused by conflict creates the potential to redefine gender relations. Without
appropriate funding, support and resources dedicated to promoting gender equality in all aspects of
reconstruction, however, there is a risk that old, oppressive and discriminatory patriarchal institutions and
practices will be re-established, as opposed to transformed, in the aftermath of conflict.

8.1 Recommendations
The issues raised in this report may be addressed by the detailed recommendations below:

More context-specific evidence is required to understand the diverse roles and needs of women
and men during and after armed conflict. Such evidence must be based on what they are doing
and not on stereotypical interpretations of gender roles and relations that presume to know what
they should be doing:
• The notion of what constitutes traditional and non-traditional gender roles may vary slightly between
cultural, economic, political, social and religious contexts. Researchers and practitioners engaged in
conflict studies and/or programmes must consider how stereotypical interpretations of gender in
these various contexts reinforce as well as challenge our understanding of the diverse roles and
needs of women and men during conflict and in post-conflict reconstruction.

41
• International institutions, states and NGOs need to move beyond perceptions of women solely as
victims and men solely as perpetrators of violence. The focus should instead be on the power
imbalances reflected in the gendered roles of women and men during conflict and post-conflict
periods. The effects of these imbalances on gender relations may then be assessed.
• Research should focus on the ways in which armed conflict and its impacts, such as forced
displacement, alter gender relations within the family and community. Improved outreach and
counselling services must be made available to address the distinct needs of women and men who
experience negative impacts of armed conflict. This is particularly important if we are to address the
often unrecognised gendered needs of women and men who have suffered traumas such as GBV.
• Researchers and practitioners must pay more attention to how the notion of masculinity limits our
understanding of the diverse roles and needs of men and also how it affects women and gender
relations. Heightened awareness of this male diversity will contribute to the development of gender-
sensitive post-conflict interventions.

The escalation of all types of physical and sexual GBV during and after armed conflict must be
addressed:
• More funding should be made available to research and document the impact of all forms of GBV –
including imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery and forced sex work – on women, men and
gender relations.
• Increased funding and other necessary resources should be dedicated to finding and promoting
effective outreach services that respond to the needs of victims of GBV, including specialised and
localised access to healthcare, ongoing counselling, outreach and support. This is particularly
important for women, since women’s unique gynaecological and reproductive health concerns
related to forced pregnancy and sex work are invariably overlooked. Funding should be geared
towards organisations that are able to provide training in the consequences of GBV and other types
of violence.
• Increased funding and resources must also be dedicated to addressing the needs of men who
diverge from stereotypical masculine gender roles, particularly those who are victims of, or who
resist, violence. This may be done by tying outreach for men into existing health and support centres,
or through the creation of new services that address GBV against men.

The institutions governing armed conflict and post-conflict reconstruction will be in a better
position to address gendered needs through better implementation and enforcement of existing
international laws and commitments:
• International institutions and governments must recognise impacts of armed conflict such as forced
displacement, impoverishment and GBV as violations of human rights and not as private or cultural
concerns, or merely inevitable outcomes of war.
• International institutions and governments must also recognise, implement and enforce laws and
commitments that recognise gender issues as important, legitimate concerns and provide greater
protection for women and girls, who frequently experience significant disadvantage. The recognition,
ratification and enforcement of UNSC Resolution 1325 would be a significant step forward.

42
• All types of GBV should be criminalised and all states must ratify the new ICC statute, which stresses
that GBV and rape are war crimes and crimes against humanity.
• Implementation and enforcement of international commitments such as Resolution 1325 would also
ensure the presence of gender-aware female activists at the peace table. Mechanisms such as all-
women short lists of candidates or reserved seats for female participants at peace negotiations would
represent significant steps forward in promoting gender equality.

All interventions designed to alleviate suffering and ‘normalise’ life in a post-conflict society must
take account of gendered concerns:
• Agencies should try to provide humanitarian assistance that is long-term and includes training for
women in non-traditional roles. Training must be provided in conjunction with outreach and support to
help families and communities adjust to shifting gender roles and relations. Without such measures,
the potential for gains in gender equality to be sustainable in the long-term is limited.
• Gender-sensitive DDR should be encouraged through increased funding for local organisations that
provide gender-specific training and support for ex-combatants and their families to re-integrate into
post-conflict society. These services should recognise the changes in gender relations that take
place during periods of conflict as both women and men assume new roles.
• Researchers are needed to catalogue the experiences and attitudes of male and female ex-
combatants and the families/communities receiving them. This will help to determine the best means
of addressing the different needs of ex-combatants and their families, and the effect of the return of
combatants on gender relations.
• Peacekeepers must receive tailored gender training in order to promote healthier relationships and
establish trust with local communities. There must also be better reporting and policing mechanisms
to address both the threat and the occurrence of sexual and physical violence associated with
peacekeepers and those charged with protecting post-conflict areas.
• All staff and volunteers deployed in conflict and post-conflict interventions must be trained to
understand and manage the gendered implications of post-conflict reconstruction in the social,
political, economic, religious and cultural contexts in which they are operating.

More emphasis should be placed on the concerns and priorities expressed by local populations,
particularly women:
• Mainstreaming gendered concerns requires the involvement of local organisations and the use of
local infrastructure to ensure solutions are appropriate to the post-conflict society. States and
organisations such as the UN must encourage the role of women’s organising and the importance of
including local women’s voices in the formation of post-conflict political and legal structures in
practice.
• Civil society organisations, particularly women’s organisations, need increased funding and
resources. Women’s organisations in conflict zones around the world engage in a wide range of
activities, from meeting basic needs for local communities to lobbying for changes to political and
legal structures that are not gender equal. International institutions and states engaged in post-

43
 conflict reconstruction can support, promote and enhance the role that women’s organisations play
through invitations to peace conferences, as well as greater funding and resources.
• Women’s organisations also need resources for capacity-building to train and prepare women to
participate at the decision-making level of official peace negotiations. It is important to recognise local
women’s organisations have knowledge related to the specific economic, political, cultural, social and
religious contexts that underpin gender inequality in a particular community or region. Therefore, they
should also be involved in a decision-making capacity in the design, planning and implementation
and evaluation of post-conflict reconstruction. Delegations and international donors must ensure the
participation of women’s organisations in peace processes.
• Systematic and context-specific gender-sensitivity training must be provided to peacekeepers and
NGO staff who are interested in engaging local populations, particularly women and girls, more
effectively in reconstruction processes.
• When women are recruited, there needs to be an awareness that participation of females will not in
itself guarantee that gender concerns will be addressed or that equality will definitely result. Women
are not automatically gender-aware and therefore, every recruit, regardless of sex, must receive
training in how to identify and address gender concerns.

Through the mobilisation of and cooperation between all actors concerned with armed conflict and
reconstruction, we have a better chance of addressing the power imbalances that lead to unequal gender
relations and establishing a long-lasting, sustainable peace.

44
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G E N D E R A P P R O A C H E S
I N C O N F L I C T A N D
P O S T - C O N F L I C T S I T U A T I O N S
U N ITE D N ATI O N S D EVELO P M E N T PR O G R A M M E
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

1 P R E FA C E

2 I N T R O D U C T I O N

3 O B J E C T I V E S

4 Chapter 1 K E Y C O N C E P T S A N D I S S U E S
Gender analysis
Gender policies
Evolution of policy approaches towards women and development
Myths about gender mainstreaming

10 Chapter 2 W O M E N S ’ R I G H T S A R E H U M A N R I G H T S
Political participation as a basic human right
Economic and social rights
Violence against women
Women and armed conflict
Women’s human rights instruments

16 Chapter 3 T O O L S F O R G E N D E R M A I N S T R E A M I N G
Gender analysis
The Capacities and Vulnerabilities Framework
Checklist
Engendering the project cycle

27 B I B L I O G R A P H Y

P H O T O C R E D I T S :
cover top left: Pedro Cote/UNDP
top right: Trygve Olfarnes/UNDP
center: J. Mia Foster/UNDP
lower left: Ky Chang UNMIK/DPI
lower right: J. Hartley/UNICEF
3 Tala Dowlatshahi/UNDP
7 UN Photo Archives #61899
8 top left: UN Photo Archives #89992
lower left: UN Photo Archives #202396
lower right: David Beatty, UNDP Sri Lanka
10 Ky Chang UNMIK/DPI
12 Emma Robson/ UNDP
 P R E FA C E

T
he purpose of this manual is to support and UNDP’s mandate in crisis and post-conflict situations
strengthen the capacity of UNDP staff working offers the organization a unique opportunity to
on recovery and rehabilitation activities in crisis contribute to this positive change. In countries
and post-conflict situations to mainstream gender undergoing a transition phase, UNDP can foster the
equality objectives. While the traditional perception nascent dynamism for social change, engage national
of women in crisis and post-conflict situations is that stakeholders in the planning and execution of institu-
of victims of war, the active role women in fact play in tional reforms to empower women and promote
such situations is being increasingly recognized. gender equality. This is best done by mainstreaming
Crises can break down social barriers and traditional gender into all phases of UNDP interventions – from
patriarchal patterns, thus providing windows of vulnerability assessments, mission planning, programme
opportunity for the reconstruction of a more just and implementation and policy advice to monitoring and
equitable society where women’s human rights will be evaluation of impact on gender relations.
protected and gender equality will become the norm
in institutional and social frameworks. It is hoped that these guidelines manual will serve as an
important tool to assist staff in ensuring the incorpora-
Arising opportunities must be seized not only to tion of an effective gender perspective in the planning
promote the social rehabilitation of a country, but to and implementation process of recovery programmes.
encourage and support new institutional structures, The manual was made possible through substantial
legislation and its enforcement for the protection of support from the Emergency Office of the Directorate
women’s political, economic, social and cultural rights. General for Development Cooperation of the Italian
The transitional recovery phase can thus prove to be a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and benefitted from the
particularly critical period for positive transformation of valuable input of Augusta Angelucci, Gender and
gender relations, providing opportunities to increase Vulnerable Groups Specialist, UNDP Rome Liaison
women’s skills and income-earning opportunities and Office and the UNDP Bureau of Development Policy’s
their overall empowerment. Gender in Development Advisors.

Julia Taft
Assistant Administrator and Director
Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery
United Nations Development Programme

“Peace is inextricably linked to equality

between women and men in development.
Armed and other types of conflicts, wars of
aggression, foreign occupation, colonial or
other alien domination, as well as terrorism,
continue to cause serious obstacles to the
advancement of women.”
– R eport of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Whole of the
Twenty-third Special S ession of the General Assembly

1
I N T R O D U C T I O N

T
his manual was compiled during a seminar Second chapter
entitled “Approccio di genere in situazioni In the second chapter, the relevant international
di emergenza, conflitto e post-conflitto” instruments protecting the rights of people affected
(Gender approach in emergency, conflict, and post- by war and other emergency situations are presented.
conflict situations), which was held in Rome on 2-6 Relevant passages are quoted and explained. The full
April 2001. The seminar was organized by the UNDP text of these instruments can be found in the annexed
Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery in Rome CD-ROM.
and the Emergency division of the Italian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs and included participants from various Third chapter
Italian non governmental organizations (NGOs) and The third chapter contains information that can be
UN agencies directly involved in emergency, crisis used as reference in programming and organizing
response and recovery operations. humanitarian interventions with a gender perspective.

During the seminar, a needs assessment session was CD-ROM

held and participants expressed their interest in hav- The annexed CD-ROM contains case studies,
ing a “how to” manual that could help them better exercises, legal instruments, a bibliography and a list
integrate a gender approach during humanitarian, of Web sites to help expand your knowledge of the
recovery and development activities. The manual is integration of a gender approach in emergency
divided into three chapters: situations.

First chapter
The first chapter contains information on the
approaches to women and gender issues over the last
20 years. It provides the basic concepts necessary to
understand how to address gender issues and improve
the impact of humanitarian assistance.

“In war-torn societies, women often keep

societies going. They maintain the social
fabric. They replace destroyed social
services and tend to the sick and wounded.
As a result, women are the prime advocates
of peace”
– UN S ecretary General Kofi Annan

2
 O B J E C T I V E

T
he purpose of the manual is to increase the ■ use specific tools and frameworks to conduct a
effectiveness of humanitarian and recovery gender analysis and data collection in order to
interventions through the integration of a have a more accurate representation of the context
gender perspective. in which women are operating;

We believe that this manual will help readers to: ■ develop mechanisms to ensure that the resources
and needs of both women and men are addressed
■ appreciate the concept and scope of gender; in all stages of programme (protection and
assistance) planning, management and evaluation
■ appreciate the evolution of approaches to gender systems;
equality issues over the years;
■ develop strategies to protect and assist women,
■ recognize that interventions can be more effective recognizing that most of them are facing new
if they integrate a gender perspective; situations (single household, single motherhood,
widow);
■ identify the underlying principles and correspon-
ding international instruments which establish the ■ incorporate a gender perspective in all program-
human rights of people involved in emergency, ming phases;
conflict and post-conflict situations, and give
particular attention to those issues that directly ■ improve the efficiency and effectiveness of protec-
address women’s rights; tion and assistance programmes by ensuring that
adequate attention is given to the needs and
■ ensure that the legal rights of women are understood resources of all members of the target population;
and that adequate measures are taken to respond;
■ encourage each staff member of each team to
■ identify the particular elements that characterize a ensure that the integration of a gender dimension
gender approach at all levels of humanitarian and takes place in their area of competence.
recovery assistance;

3
1 K E Y C O N C E P T S A N D I S S U E S

T
he traditional perception of women in conflict Gender roles:
and post-conflict situations is as victims of war. ■ Define what is considered appropriate for men and
However, the active role women play in such women within the society, social roles and division
situations is slowly starting to be recognized.1 of labour;

Before outlining the strategies to integrate a gender ■ Involve the relation to power (how it is used, by
perspective in emergency and transition situations, it whom and how it is shared);
is necessary to review some basic concepts related to
gender and conflict. ■ Vary greatly from one culture to another and
change over time;
When discussing gender, we generally refer to the
social differences and relations between men and ■ Vary from one social group to another within the
women, which are learned and transformed. The term same culture;
gender does not replace the term sex, which refers
exclusively to biological differences between men ■ Race, class, religion, ethnicity, economic circum-
and women.2 stances and age influence gender roles;

Gender ■ Sudden crisis, like war or famine, can radically and

■ Socially constructed rapidly change gender roles.

■ Difference between and within cultures For example, understanding gender differentiation
and gender discrimination helps us to understand
■ Includes variables identifying differences in gender on various grounds. After a crisis, women
roles, responsibilities, opportunities, needs and ex-combatants who have engaged in liberation
constraints struggles have discovered old attitudes may return and
the changes that occurred during the crisis, such as
Sex loss of property or death of a spouse, may also have a
■ Biologically defined permanent impact.4

■ Determined by birth Gender and Culture

Culture is part of the fabric of every society. It shapes
■ Universal the way things are done and our understanding of
why this should be.5 Gender identities and gender
■ Unchanging relations are essential facets of culture as they deter-
mine the way daily life is lived not only within the
family, but also in society as a whole. Gender influ-
Changes in gender relations due to crisis situation
ences economics, politics, social interactions and
individual needs. It undergoes variations over time
■ Demographic profile changes: in armed conflict
and across culture. It is an active force in the forma-
situations, more women than men survive
tion of the family, the community and the nation.
■ Changes in division of labour between men and
women that can be long term or even permanent

■ Increased political participation and organization:

women in particular learn to gain greater confidence
and see benefits of working with other women3

1 Cammack D., P romoting Gender Sensitive Operations, WFP Nairobi, 2000.

2 ILO, ABC of Women Workers’ Rights and Gender Equality, ILO Geneva, 2000.
3 Morrison P.T., in Weaving Gender in Disaster and Refugee Assistance, InterAction, USA, 1998.
4 Oxfam, The Oxfam Training Manual, Oxfam UK and Ireland, 1994.
5 www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/equality

4
The following table highlights ways in which gender differences and inequalities may be relevant in conflict
situations. It is not a complete list, but it provides suggestions for further reflection.6

Elements of conflict situations and possible gender dimensions

Pre-conflict situations
Elements of conflict situations Possible gender dimensions

Increased mobilization Increased commercial sex trade (including child prostitution) around
of soldiers military bases and army camps.

Nationalist propaganda Gender stereotypes and specific definitions of masculinity and femininity
used to increase support are often promoted. There may be increased pressure on men to ‘defend
for military action the nation.’

Mobilization of pro-peace Women have been active in peace movements – both generally and in
activists and organizations women-specific organizations. Women have often drawn moral authority
from their role as mothers, but they have also been able to step outside
traditional roles during conflict situations, taking up public roles in relief
and political organizations.

Increasing human Women’s rights are not always recognized as human rights.
rights violations Gender-based violence may increase.

During conflict situations

Psychological trauma, Men tend to be the primary soldiers/combatants. Yet, in various conflicts,
physical violence, women have made up significant numbers of combatants. Women and
casualties and death girls are often victims of sexual violence (including rape, sexual mutilation,
sexual humiliation, forced prostitution and forced pregnancy) during
armed conflict.

Social networks disrupted Gender relations can be subject to stress and change. The traditional
and destroyed – changes in division of labour within a family may be under pressure. Survival strategies
family structures and often necessitate changes in the gender division of labour. Women may
composition become responsible for an increased number of dependents.

Mobilization of people The gender division of labour in workplaces can change. With men’s
for conflict. Every day life mobilization for combat, women have often taken over traditionally male
and work disrupted. occupations and responsibilities. Women have challenged traditional
gender stereotypes and roles by becoming combatants and taking on
other non-traditional roles.

Material shortages Women’s role as provider of the everyday needs of the family may mean
(shortages of food, health increased stress and work as basic goods are more difficult to locate.
care, water, fuel, etc) Girls may also face an increased workload. Non-combatant men may also
experience stress related to their domestic gender roles if they are expected,
but unable, to provide for their families.

Creation of refugees People’s ability to respond to an emergency situation is influenced by

and displaced people whether they are male or female. Women and men refugees (as well as boys
and girls) often have different needs and priorities.

Dialogue and Women are often excluded from formal discussions given their lack of
peace negotiations participation and access in pre-conflict decision-making organizations
and institutions.

6 Woroniuk B. Gender Equality & Peace-building Operations: An Operational framework, Cida, Canada, 2000.

5
 Elements of conflict situations and possible gender dimensions (cont.)

During reconstruction and rehabilitation

Elements of conflict situations Possible gender dimensions

Political negotiations and Men and women’s participation in these processes tends to vary, with
planning to implement women often playing only minor roles in formal negotiations or policy
peace accords making.

Media used to Women’s unequal access to media may mean that their interests, needs
communicate messages and perspectives are not represented and discussed.

Use of outside investigators, Officials are not generally trained in gender equality issues
peacekeepers, etc. (women’s rights as human rights, how to recognize and deal with
gender-specific violence).
Women and girls have been harassed and sexually assaulted by
peacekeepers.

Holding of elections Women face specific obstacles in voting, in standing for election and in
having gender equality issues discussed as election issues.

Internal investments in Reconstruction programmes may not recognize or give priority to

employment creation, supporting women’s and girls’ health needs, domestic responsibilities or
health care, etc. needs for skills training and credit.

Demobilization Combatants are often assumed to be all male. If priority is granted to young
of combatants men, women do not benefit from land allocations, credit schemes, etc.

Measures to increase the Women’s participation in community organizations and NGOs is

capacity of and confidence generally uneven. These organizations often lack the capacity and interest
in civil society in granting priority to equality issues.

G E N D E R A N A LYS I S

Through gender analysis we can identify the differ- It is important to have a clear understanding of
ences between women and men regarding their “who does what” within the society. Often women are
specific activities, conditions, needs, access and control relegated to reproductive tasks, but in conflict and
over resources, and access to development benefits emergency situations, they may also play an important
and decision-making. Three key elements have been role in productive activities. Moreover, a better
highlighted in identifying gender analysis: understanding of women’s needs is crucial in deciding
how benefits and resources are distributed and
Division of labour accessed by men and women during a crisis. Finally, it
■ Men: productive tasks is fundamental to support not only women’s practical
■ Women: reproductive tasks concerns, such as the need for fuel, wood, water, food
and sustainable health, including reproductive health
Division of resources needs. It is also critical to support women’s strategic
■ Women often are not allowed to own capital assets needs, including leadership, decision-making and
and have no access and control over resources empowerment. By supporting these qualities and
focusing on women’s strengths rather than their
Needs weaknesses the entire community will be afforded
■ Practical and strategic needs differ greatly between better protection.
men and women

6
G E N D E R P O L I C I E S

Gender analysis seeks to identify and address the terms of their practical gender needs, and that they
impact of a policy, programme, action and initiative work within the existing gender division of resources
by men and women. and responsibilities.

This entitles collecting sexually desegregated data and Gender specific policies
gender-sensitive information about the population Use the knowledge of gender differences in a given
concerned. Gender analysis is the first step in gender context to respond to the practical gender needs of a
sensitive planning and for promoting gender equality. specific gender, working with the existing division of
The following gender policies have been classified by resources and responsibilities.
Naila Kabeer7:
Gender redistribution policies
Gender-blind policies Are interventions that intend to transform existing
Recognize no distinction between the sexes. distributions to create a more balanced relationship of
Assumptions incorporate biases in favour of existing gender. These policies may target both genders, or one
gender relations and so tend to exclude women. gender specifically; touch on strategic gender inter-
ests; and may work with women’s practical gender
Gender-aware policies needs, but do so in ways which have transformatory
Recognize that within a society, actors are women as potential to help build up the supportive conditions
well as men, that they are constrained in different, for women to empower themselves.
and often unequal ways, and they may consequently
have differing and sometimes conflicting needs, inter- These different approaches are not mutually exclusive.
ests and priorities. For instance, in situations where gender-blind planning
has been the norm, moving towards gender-neutral
Gender neutral policy approaches policies would be a significant step forward. In some
Use the knowledge of gender differences in a given situations, it may be counter-productive to start with
context to overcome biases in delivery, to ensure that gender-redistribution policies, and a better approach
they target and benefit both genders effectively in could focus more on needs specific to women.

E V O LU T I O N O F P O L I C Y A P P R O A C H E S
T O WA R D W O M E N A N D D E V E L O P M E N T

There has been a gradual shift in the way women are

perceived within development thinking from that of
victims and passive objects to independent actors.

Welfare approach
During the 1950s and 60s, the emphasis on
women was on their reproductive roles as mothers
and homemakers. This approach was based on
Western stereotypes of the nuclear family in which
women are economically dependent on the male
breadwinners.8

Women in Development (WID) philosophy underlying this approach is that women

In the early 1970s, researchers began to focus on the are lagging behind in society and the gap between
division of labour based on sex, and the impact of men and women can be bridged by remedial measures
development and modernization strategies on women. within the existing structures.10 The WID approach
The WID concept came into use in this period.9 The started to recognize women as direct actors of social,

7 Kabeer N., Reversed realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought, Verso, London/New York 1994.
8 ILO, Briefing Kit Gender Issues in the World of Work, ILO Geneva, 1995.
9 ILO, Gender, a partnership of Equals, ILO Geneva, 2000.

10 ILO, Briefing Kit Gender Issues in the World of Work, ILO Geneva, 1995.

7
 Gender Mainstreaming
The concept of bringing gender issues into the
mainstream of society was clearly established as a
global strategy for promoting gender equality in the
Platform for Action adopted at the United Nations
Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing
in 1995. The conference highlighted the necessity
to ensure that gender equality is a primary goal
in all areas of societal development. In July 1997,
the United Nations Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) defined the concept of gender
mainstreaming as follows:

political, cultural and working life. Criticism to the In any area and at all levels, a gender main-
WID approach emerged later, underlying that streaming perspective is the process of assessing the
women’s issues tended to be increasingly relegated to implications for women and men in any planned
marginalized programmes and isolated projects. The action, including legislation, policies or programmes.
WID approach did not implicitly have a direct impact
It is a strateg y for making the concerns and
on development. The problem of WID was that it
experiences of women as well as of men an integral
provided women with additional resources but no
part of design, implementation, monitoring and
power to manage these resources. The WID concept
evaluation of policies and programmes in all
led to increased workloads and heavy schedules for
political, economic and social spheres, so that women
women and prevented their empowerment.
and men benefit equally and inequality is not
perpetuated.
Gender and Development
In the 1980s, the GAD approach emerged as a result The ultimate goal of mainstreaming is to achieve
of WID and its shortcomings, concentrating on the gender equality.12
unequal relations between men and women due to
“uneven playing fields”. The term gender arose as an
analytical tool from an increasing awareness of inequal-
ities due to institutional structures. It focused not only
on women as an isolated and homogeneous group, but
on the roles and needs of both men and women.
Given that women are usually in disadvantaged
positions as compared to men, promotion of gender
equality implies an explicit attention to women’s
needs, interests and perspectives. The objective then is
the advancement of the status of women in society,
with gender equality as the ultimate goal.11

Mainstreaming is not about adding a “woman’s com-

ponent” or even a “gender equality component” into
an existing activity. It goes beyond increasing women’s
participation; it means bringing the experience,
knowledge, and interest of women and men to bear
on the development agenda. It may require changes in
goals, strategies and actions so that both women and
men can influence, participate in and benefit from
development processes. Thus, the goal of mainstream-
ing gender equality is the transformation of unequal
social and institutional structures into equal and just
structures for both women and men.13

11 ILO, Gender, a Partnership of Equals, ILO Geneva, 2000.

12 UN Economic and Social Council, Agreed Conclusion, E/197/l.30, UN New York, 1997.
13 ILO, Gender, a Partnership of Equals, ILO Geneva, 2000.

8
M Y T H S A B O U T G E N D E R M A I N S T R E A M I N G
I N H U M A N I TA R I A N A S S I S TA N C E

Despite years of discussion, there are still misconceptions about exactly what “gender mainstreaming” entails.
In the following table, some common myths and realities on gender mainstreaming in humanitarian assistance
are presented.14

Myth Reality

Inserting one session on Mainstreaming a gender perspective involves changing how situations are
women fulfills the mandate analyzed. A brief profile of how and why women’s needs are different
to mainstreaming a gender from those of men’s should be the starting point of the analysis. These
perspective basic insights should influence the understanding of the contents and
raise issues to be explored in each project component.

“We have a women’s project A gender mainstreaming strategy involves bringing a gender analysis into
and therefore we have all initiatives, not just developing an isolated subcomponent or project.
mainstreamed gender”

“We have mainstreamed A mainstreaming strategy does not preclude specific initiatives that are
gender therefore we can’t either targeted at women or at narrowing gender inequalities. In fact,
have specific initiatives concrete investments are generally required to protect women’s rights,
targeting women” provide capacity building to women’s NGOs and work with men on
gender issues. Many of these initiatives can be more successful through a
separate initiative rather than as a subcomponent in a larger project.

“We are here to save lives, Using a gender perspective involves incorporating an understanding of
not to ask whether or not how being male or female in a specific situation contributes to vulnerabil-
someone is a woman or a ity and defines capacities. It is not a screening process to exclude those
man before we provide who need assistance from receiving support. There may be times when
assistance or to give priority given their different priorities and needs, women and men will best be
to women over men” served through the provision of different resources. Furthermore, it may
be necessary to make additional investments to ensure that women’s
voices are heard. However, a gender mainstreaming strategy does not
necessarily call for mechanistic “favouring” of women over men.

“All this talk of gender, It is true that a lot of the work on gender in humanitarian assistance
but what they really mean focuses on women. This is primarily because it is women’s needs and
is women” interests that tend to be neglected. However, it is important that the
analysis and discussion look at both sides of the gender equation.
More attention is needed to understand how men’s roles, strategies,
responsibilities and options are shaped by gender expectations during
conflicts and emergencies.

14 CIDA/MHA, Mainstreaming a gender equality perspective in the Consolidate Inter-Agency Appeals, Note prepared for the Donor Retreat on
Consolidated Appeals Process and Co-ordination in Humanitarian Assistance, Montreux Switzerland, March 2001.

9
2 WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

T
he first part of this chapter is based on the part presents the most relevant legal instruments on
presentation made by Dasa Silovic, Senior the protection of women and children in conflict and
Adviser on Gender in Development, UNDP post-conflict situations. The full text of the instru-
New York, during a seminar on Gender and ments presented in this session is available in the
Emergency held in Rome in April 2001. The second annexed CD-ROM under “Legal Instruments”.

P O L I T I C A L PA R T I C I PAT I O N A S A B A S I C H U M A N R I G H T

Today, the participation of women in political and An issue often ignored in addressing women’ s human
public decision-making is generally recognized both rights is the rights of women national minorities and
in political and in legislative terms. Despite these ethnic groups. International documents clearly stipu-
gains, gender discrimination remains a formidable late the recognition of the rights of ethnic groups and
barrier to women’s participation in formal decision- minorities. As compared to other women, women
making processes. Political institutions tend to perpet- belonging to ethnic groups and national minorities
uate an exclusionary attitude and culture of politics experience three times the discrimination within the
towards women. As a result, many women around the overall society and as members of their own ethnic
world have chosen to work outside formal politics group or national minority.
within various civil society organizations and political
parties that advocate for social and political change.

10
E C O N O M I C A N D S O C I A L R I G H T S

Women all over the world perform multiple roles in In situations of armed conflict or impoverishment after
productive labour (paid and unpaid) which is not conflict, women in developing countries tend to main-
reflected in their official measures of economic activi- tain their livelihood and that of their families by work-
ty. Their access to equal pay for comparable work, ing in the informal sector. Thus, their labour is not rec-
family benefits, financial credit and the right to own ognized and socially protected and they are completely
and inherit property are either non-existent or are dislocated from the traditional community in the hold-
limited by law and traditional patriarchal constraints ing of lands and resources. Resettlement is conducted
that continue to undermine female economic life. under patriarchal processes and gives control of rehabil-
itation packages to men. Even if the situation eventual-
The traditional gender division of labour treats ly permits return to the original habitat, women’s lives
domestic work as a voluntary contribution by women have been drastically altered by the conflict.
and perpetuates inequity at every income level.
Issues to be addressed should include the greater Gender-based violence also encompasses life-threat-
vulnerability of women due to loss of employment, ening deprivation of resources like rampant malnutri-
interrupted employment due to conflict and a gender tion and inadequate health care. Freedom from pover-
differentiated assessment of the discrimination faced ty and well-being is the right of every individual.
by women in social welfare systems. Reproductive rights and the right to family planning
are internationally recognized human rights and
should be protected in conflict situations.

G E N D E R P E R S P E C T I V E F R O M WA R T O P E A C E

The Impact of Armed Conflicts on Women activities in the peace process, in line with Resolution
Men, women, boys and girls experience conflicts in 1325 (for example, UNIFEM in Burundi worked on
different ways. Women often take over non-traditional capacity building with local groups of women to
roles brought on by the changes and transformations enable them to participate in the peace talks). The
during the conflicts that render them both victims and idea is to better utilize the time between the end
actors. On the one hand, war is a burden for women of a conflict and the beginning of the reconstruction
and girls including gender-based and sexual violence process in order to promote the participation of
(rape as a weapon of war), the spread of HIV/AIDS, women in peace efforts.
increased vulnerability, lack of mobility and the use of
women as sexual slaves by soldiers. On the other hand, Women in Post-Conflict situations
women also get involved in the conflict as combatants, Once we understand the political, economic and social
by taking take care of extended families in extremely impact of wars on men, women, girls and boys, we are
adverse circumstances and by developing coping in a better position to define the needs of a post-
mechanisms to take over non-traditional occupations conflict society. This is a very important phase that
which enables them to gain exposure outside the gives an opportunity to promote reconstruction efforts
private sphere. with a gender perspective and enable women to partici-
pate actively in this process (as they may not want to
Women in the Peace Process return to the status quo ante bellum). This wide range
Women often organize themselves at the grassroots of activities requires a gender perspective, such as the
level in order to promote activities for peace, but they reconstruction of civil society, reorganization of police
do not get access to the negotiation table in the formal and armed forces, promotion of human rights, organi-
peace process. It is important to stress that the exclu- zation of elections, access to and control over resources
sion of women from the peace process jeopardizes a (land issues for female head of households) and the
sustainable peace. It is therefore, also the responsibility setting-up of truth and reconciliation commissions.
of the international community to support women’s

11
V I O L E N C E A G A I N S T W O M E N

Women live daily with the risk of physical, emotional, While restating the universality of this phenomenon,
economic and social harm in ways that have no direct common characteristics have been recorded – albeit
parallels for their male counterparts. In virtually every with regional typologies – and varied patterns appear
nation, violence or the threat of violence, particularly at prevalent in specific cultural and geographical con-
home, constricts the range of choices open to women texts. Along these geographical contexts, certain forms
and girls in almost every area of life, public and private. of violence against women are intrinsically entrenched
It limits their choices directly by destroying their in cultural and existing patriarchal ideologies. Such
health, disrupting their lives, narrowing the scope of culturally embedded violence includes “female
their activity and indirectly eroding self confidence and genital mutilation (FGM)”15 widespread in Africa,
self-esteem. Universally, violence against women is “Rapto”16 prevalent in Mexico, and “honour-killings”
epitomized by several characteristics which include, practiced in Western Asia, India, Brazil, and Pakistan,
among others.
■ The reluctance to criminalize, the casual treatment
and/or indifference to the issue of violence by Most recently, however, violence against women has
existing laws, law enforcement agents, judicial taken new and despicable dimensions. The resultant
authorities and society at large; effect of such repugnant traditional customs, violent
intra/inter state conflicts, economic hardships, failure
■ The taboo nature of the issue of violence, thus of development policies and globalization is the
creating what has been described as the “private extreme and continued violation of women’s rights
realm” synonymous with domestic violence; and women’s inability to participate and make
informed choices and decisions about their welfare.
■ Existing customs, traditional practices and norms Subsequently, women’s lives in the public sphere is
that further reinforce and perpetuate inherent significantly endangered and marginalized, while
discrimination and inequalities; violence in the hitherto ‘private realm’ is intensified.
The harmful effect of violence against more than half
■ Forced marriages, forced prostitution, trafficking, the population of the world, women, cannot be
commercialization of women’s bodies, which are overemphasized. One of the gruesome effects of such
consequences of failed states, lack of prudent socio- violence against women is the scourging epidemic
economic policies and absence of good governance; ‘acquired immune deficiency syndrome’ (AIDS).
Statistics have indicated that the resultant effect of
■ Sexual violations, including rape, and their use as extreme poverty and gender inequality, especially in
weapons of war, and other human rights violations post-conflict environment and countries in transition,
by soldiers, international aid workers and peacekeep- is women’s increased vulnerability to the epidemic
ers, a direct function of intra/inter conflicts and wars; HIV/AIDS, which leaves households and communi-
ties with unimaginable burdens. Often these women
■ Sexual assault against female civilians during are victims of forced sexual assault and rape by
armed conflict as part of a strategy to suppress or soldiers and aid workers. The overall cost to human
punish the civilian population. society and the anguish experienced by the victim
is inestimable.

Furthermore, there is growing evidence that war and

civil unrest not only endanger women in the public
sphere, they also intensify violence against women in
the home.

It was in apparent recognition of the incalculable cost

of this crosscutting issue of violence to society that
the General Assembly at its forty-eighth session on
20 December 1993 adopted resolution 48/104, which
proclaimed the “Declaration on the Elimination of
Violence Against Women.” Earlier conventions and
resolutions such as the Convention on the Elimina-
tion of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW),
Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Resolu-

12
tion 1990/15 of 24th May, Nairobi Looking Forward ■ Ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention
Strategies (NLFS) 1985 had made sparse mention of on Elimination of Discrimination Against
the issue of violence. However, in 1993, the General Women, a necessary tool in the fight against
Assembly resolution 48/104 became the first interna- gender-based violence;
tional human rights instrument to deal “exclusively”
with violence against women. It reaffirmed that ■ Build indicators and collect data to showcase the
violence is a violation of women’s fundamental human prevalence of violence against women;
rights. In its article 1, it clearly defined violence as:
■ Identify “lessons learned and adopt best practices.”
“any act of gender-based violence that results
in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or In spite of the global campaign to eliminate violence
psychological harm or suffering to women, against women championed by the United Nations
including threats of such acts, coercion, or Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and other partners
arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occur- including civil society organizations, violence against
ring in public or private life.” Such violence women has not been eradicated, though several suc-
whether it occurs on the streets or in homes, cess stories have been recorded. The Rome Statute of
affects women of every nation, belief, class, race the International Criminal Court now recognizes rape
and ethnic group. It is perpetrated by men, and other forms of sexual violence by combatants as a
silenced by custom, institutionalized in laws and war crime and considers
state systems, and passed from one generation to sexual slavery a crime against humanity. Throughout
the next.” the world, the campaign has catalyzed a number of
legislative reviews and passage of new bills such as:
Similarly, international and regional declarations and
campaigns on violence against women have unani- ■ Laws prohibiting FGM in several countries
mously condemned the act of violence, and reiterated including Senegal;
that “human rights of women are inalienable, integral
and indivisible parts of universal human rights.” ■ Laws against domestic violence in Latin America
and the Caribbean, Venezuela, Bolivia, Antigua;
Consequently, women should be treated as subjects of
rights. Societies were therefore urged to: ■ In Brazil, Congress allocated $10 million for the
creation of women’s shelters;
■ Raise awareness on the issue of violence
against women; ■ In India, the government made gender sensitiza-
tion training mandatory for police officers;
■ Criminalize all forms of gender-based violence;
■ In Croatia, Trade Unions adopted sexual harass-
■ Reform pre-existing discriminatory laws, policies, ment policies and the first criminal charges for
including traditional practices and, in some sexual harassment were filed in a law suit;
instances, criminalize such repugnant practices;
■ In Jordan, the government built shelters for
■ Create new synergies geared towards eradicating women victims of honour killings.17
violence against women;
Through the campaigns, partners and stakeholders were
■ Advocate, build capacities and empower women to mobilized in order to reinforce coordination and net-
speak out about experiences of violence; working among women and men involved in eradicat-
ing gender-based violence against women. Despite these
success stories, much work needs to be done.

15 Female Genital Mutilation, is the practice of cutting or slashing the clitoris of a woman, often erroneously linked to sexual libido, chastity, and
fidelity. This practice is prevalent in Africa, Arab States, Western Asia, etc
16 Rapto, has been defined by local laws in Mexico as “the kidnapping of a woman by a man for the ‘sole purpose of satisfying his erotic sexual
desire, or with intent of marrying the woman.
17 UNIFEM, “Picturing a Life Free of Violence: Media and Communications Strategies to End Violence Against Women.”

13
W O M E N ’ S H U M A N R I G H T S I N S T R U M E N T S

Security Council 1325 Resolution (October 2000) person who keeps or manages, or knowingly finances
A very important step to promote gender in peace or takes part in the financing of a brothel; and anyone
building operations was the adoption by the UN who knowingly lets or rents a building or other place
Security Council in October 2000 of a comprehensive for the purpose of the prostitution of others.
Resolution on Women, Peace and Security. Resolution www.unhchr.ch
1325 stresses the need to address gender issues in all
peacebuilding and peacekeeping efforts and to include Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children
women in the key institutions and decision-making in Emergencies and Armed Conflicts (1974)
bodies committed to the building and maintenance of Prohibits attacks and bombing on the civilian popula-
peace. The Security Council reaffirmed the important tion, inflicting suffering especially on women and
role of women in the prevention and resolution of con- children, who are recognized as the most vulnerable
flict and in peacebuilding. It highlights the importance members of the population (Art. 1). Moreover, it
of their equal participation and full involvement in all recognizes all forms of repression as criminal acts,
efforts geared towards the maintenance and promotion including cruel and inhuman treatment of women
of peace and security, as well as the need to increase and children, imprisonment, torture, shootings, mass
their role in decision-making with regard to conflict arrests, collective punishment, destruction of
prevention and resolution. For further information, dwellings and forcible eviction (Art. 5).
consult the full text of the resolution in the annexed www.unhchr.ch
CD-ROM.
www.un.org Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination
Against Women – CEDAW (1979)
This Convention (entry in force 1981) guarantees
The Geneva Conventions (1949) and women equal rights with men in many spheres of life,
Additional Protocols (1977) including education, employment, health care, political
During a war, certain humanitarian rules must be participation, nationality and marriage. The Convention
observed, even with regard to the enemy. These rules also affords women protection from abuses from which
are set out mainly in the four Geneva Conventions of men are largely already protected. However, it does not
12 August, 1949, and their Additional Protocols of 8 specifically protect women against rape, spousal abuse or
June 1977. The Geneva Conventions are founded on other abuses suffered mainly by women.
the idea of respect for individuals and their dignity. www.unhchr.ch www.unifem.org
Persons not directly taking part in hostilities and
those put out of action through sickness, injury, cap- Optional Protocol to CEDAW (1999)
tivity or any other causes must be respected and pro- Enables individuals to raise complaints with the UN
tected against the effects of war; those who suffer Committee for CEDAW and the Committee to
must be aided without discrimination. The Additional probe into violation of human rights in member
Protocols extend this protection to any person affect- states. By ratifying the Optional Protocol, a State
ed by an armed conflict. Furthermore, they stipulate would recognize the competence of the Committee
that the parties to the conflict and the combatants on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
shall not attack the civilian population and civilian – the body that monitors States parties’ compliance
objects and shall conduct their military operations in with the Convention – to receive and consider com-
conformity with the recognized rules of humanity. plaints from individuals or groups within its jurisdic-
www.unhchr.ch tion. The Committee would then be authorized to
request the State Party where the alleged violation
Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in occurred to take “interim measures … to avoid possi-
Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution ble irreparable damage to the victim or victims…”.
of Others (1951) www.unhchr.ch www.unifem.org
Parties that sign this Convention “agree to punish
any person who, to gratify the passions of another: Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989)
(1) Procures, entices or leads away, for purposes of The Convention (entry in force 1990) on the rights of
prostitution, another person, even with the consent of the Child explicitly extends to children the protection
that person; (2) Exploits the prostitution of another afforded to adults through the various legal instru-
person, even with the consent of that person”. In ments. For example, States Parties agree to safeguard
addition, the states parties promise to punish any due judicial process for children and protect children

14
affected by armed conflict. Four general principles are During post-conflict and reconstruction an additional
enshrined in the convention: 1. Non-Discrimination set of legal instrument must be taken into account.
(Article 2): states party must ensure that all These instruments include:
children within their Jurisdiction enjoy their rights.
The essential message is equality of opportunities: ILO Convention 100: Equal Remuneration (1951)
girls should be given the same opportunities as boys. States which have ratified C.100 agree to promote the
2. Best interests of the child (Article 3): the best principle of equal pay for work of equal value. They
interests of children must be a primary consideration in must ensure its application to all workers in a manner
all State decisions which affect children. 3. The right to consistent with the national methods used to deter-
life, survival and development (Article 6): the right-to- mine rates of pay. The Convention defines equal pay
life article includes formulations about the right to for work of equal value as a rate of pay fixed without
survival and to development. 4. The views of the child discrimination based on sex.18
(Article 12): states that children should be free to have www.ilo.org
options in all matters affecting them, and those views
should be given due weight “in accordance to the age Convention on Political Rights of Women (1952)
and maturity of the child”. The main objective of the Convention is to implement
www.unicef.rg www.unhchr.ch the principle of equality of rights for men and women
in the enjoyment and exercise of political rights. The
The Vienna Declaration (1993) Convention formulates important principles providing
The declaration recognizes that the human rights of that women, without any discrimination, shall be (a)
women and of girl-children are an inalienable part entitled to vote in all elections; (b) eligible for elections
of universal human rights, and calls for the elimination to all publicly elected bodies established by national
of gender-based violence. It recognizes the importance law; (c) entitled to hold public office and exercise all
of joint efforts to eliminate violence against women in public functions established by national law.
public and private life, and confirms that the violation www.unhchr.ch
of women’s human rights in armed conflict situations is
a violation of the fundamental principles of interna- ILO Convention 111: Discrimination (1958)
tional human rights and humanitarian law. Each ratifying state must adhere to the basic goal of
www.unhchr.ch promoting equality of opportunity and treatment by
means of a national policy that aims to end all forms
Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against of discrimination in employment and occupation.
Women (1993) Discrimination is defined as any distinction, exclusion
Asserts that violence against women is pervasive in all or preference based on race, colour, sex, religion,
societies, across lines of income, class and culture, and political opinion, national extraction or social origin
recognizes that violence against women by private actors that nullifies or impairs equality of opportunity or
is a human rights violation. The Declaration reaffirmed treatment in employment or occupation.
that violence against women is the manifestation of www.ilo.org
historically unequal power relations between men and
women and that it is one of the critical mechanisms by Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960)
which women are forced into a subordinate status. Adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO,
www.un.org www.unhchr.ch this convention paves the way for equal educational
opportunities for girls and women. The convention is
Beijing Platform for Action (1995) not only directed at the elimination of discrimination
The Platform identifies violence against women as in education but also concerns the adoption of meas-
an obstacle to the achievement of the objectives of ures aimed at promoting equality of opportunity and
equality, development and peace. It includes a focus treatment in this field.
on combating violence against women as one of its www.unesco.org
strategic objectives and on promoting the status of
women in war affected countries.
www.un.org www.unifem.org

18 ILO Women Workers’ Rights Training Package, ILO Geneva, 1994.

15
3 TO O LS F O R GEN DER MAINSTREA MIN G

T
he first part of this chapter presents essential tions. In the second part, a series of key suggestions
tools that can help to conduct gender analysis for engendering project formulation are presented.
in emergency, conflict and post-conflict situa-

G E N D E R A N A LYS I S

During humanitarian crises, it is essential that the Elements emphasizing the need for gender analysis in
different needs of the entire community are taken into transition situations:
account. This includes the delivery of services, and ■ Disruption and destruction of social networks;
according the rights of men and women equal priority in
order to guarantee a more successful intervention. ■ Population balance between women and men can
change in war time;
Objectives of the humanitarian and recovery
interventions are: ■ The gender division of labour is often in flux
■ To protect civilians from harm; (including new skills for women);

■ To save lives; ■ Gender relations are often contested;

■ To enhance response to and management of crisis; ■ Women are often excluded from political and diplo-
matic efforts and negotiations to end the conflict;
■ To support early initiatives that facilitate the
transition to recovery. ■ Demobilization of military forces often focuses
donor attention to men;
Gender analysis contributes to meeting objectives of
humanitarian and recovery interventions. It tells us: ■ Abundance of weapons may create urban and
■ Who (women, men, boys, girls, elderly women and rural violence;
men) suffers and how;
■ Gender equality may be considered a secondary issue;
■ Who (women, men, boys, girls, elderly women and
men) needs protection and why; ■ Demographic pressures on women (to increase
nationality)19;
■ How they (women, men, boys, girls, elderly
women and men) cope; ■ Reintegration of former combatants and their
dependents into local communities (female
■ How they (women, men, boys, girls, elderly combatants, war widows, handicapped men and
women and men) are or are not able to recover. women, girls sexual slaves, child soldiers etc.);

Gender analysis helps us to: ■ Impact of mine accidents on men and women and
■ Identify areas for action; rehabilitation problems;

■ Design interventions; ■ Post-conflict violence (domestic violence);

■ Understand implications of interventions; ■ Return of refugees and internally displaced persons

(with special concern for female heads of household);
■ Identify processes and structures that perpetuate
disadvantages (e.g. legislative, political, socio- ■ Post-traumatic stress disorders (how to assist
cultural, economic); victims and survivors of gender-based violence);

■ Identify potential processes. ■ Reconciliation issues.

19 IASC Gender Analysis in consolidate Appeal P rocesses (CAP).

16
T H E C A PA C I T I E S A N D
V U L N E R A B I L I T I E S F R A M E W O R K

The Capacities and Vulnerabilities Framework was are related to people’s material, social and physical
designed specifically for use in the humanitarian and resources, and their beliefs and attitudes which are
recovery context. It can be utilized within the scope of built over time and determine people’s ability to cope
planning and predicting the outcome of interventions, with a crisis.
as well as assessing needs by mapping out the strengths
and weaknesses of peoples in emergency and transi- Vulnerabilities are long-term factors that weaken
tion situations. the ability of people to cope with a sudden crisis or a
drawn-out emergency and often make people more
In this particular context, Capacities refer to the susceptible to disaster.20
existing strengths in individuals and social groups that

Capacities and Vulnerabilities analysis matrix

Crisis Vulnerabilities Capacities

Physical/material
What productive resources,
skills and hazards exist?

Social/organizational
What are the relationships
and organization among people?

Motivational/attitudinal
How does the community
view its ability to create change?

20 Oxfam Gender Team, Frameworks for Gender Analysis, Oxfam, Oxford (UK), 1996. Also refer to the Harvard Analytical Framework, November 1995.

17
C H E C K L I S T

During the seminar, a checklist for assessing needs in this list should render the intervention more
conflict situations was developed by participants to comprehensive and complete, and assist in avoidance
outline their different experiences of conflict, post- of pitfalls such as gender blindness. Nonetheless, the
conflict and emergency situations. This checklist can elements described in the checklist are not always
be utilized as a powerful instrument in the service of readily available in every circumstance. However, a
those persons directly seeking a practical day-by-day complete gender approach cannot be implemented
evaluation of gender awareness in their intervention without a set of minimum level practices.
and humanitarian assistance strategies. Going through

Set of essential practices

Completed/Date

■ ___________ 1. Development of a gender analysis from the beginning of any response to an

emergency situation (at least some data to understand the composition of
the population)

■ ___________ 2. Registration of refugee women

■ ___________ 3. More attention to security needs and vulnerabilities of women

■ ___________ 4. Gender should be a prime consideration in methods chosen to

distribute resources

■ ___________ 5. Guarantee the access of women and men, girls and boys to basic services

■ ___________ 6. Identify a number of key informants (both men and women) that can help
monitor the intervention

■ ___________ 7. Use ways of communication accessible to the entire population

■ ___________ 8. Create a mechanism for continuous assessment involving all stakeholders

■ ___________ 9. Document your experience and share and discuss it with others addressing
similar situations

18
 Checklist

1. Make a brief analysis of the social and cultural context in which you are going to operate,
taking into account:

■ Existing gender roles (who does what) ___________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Who has the power to decide within the family, the community, the institutions __________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Who receives the supplies in the distribution lines _________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Structure of local households ___________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ How resources are allocated within the household __________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Roles of men and women in spiritual/religious life __________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Traditional/cultural practices that that hinder women’s rights _________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

19
 Checklist (cont.)

2. Make a brief analysis of the political context in which you are going to operate, taking into account:

■ Level of women’s participation in political movements, local authorities, decision-making at the com-
munity level ___________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ How women register for voting and how they participate in the vote (if relevant) __________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Whether or not boys and girls have the same access to education_______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Whether girls drop out and if so, at what level _____________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

3. Make a brief analysis of the economic context in which you are going to operate, taking into account:

■ Kind of activities/tasks/work that are forbidden to women by local customs ______________________

______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Who the breadwinner is in the family ____________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Whether or not both women and men are engaged in the informal sector, and what do they do ______
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

20
 Checklist (cont.)

4. Identify local resources that can contribute to the intervention:

■ Local human resources on which you can rely _____________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Existing economic resources (who is managing them? what is the amount?) ______________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Existing local infrastructure (location, condition, who is responsible for them) ____________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Existing networks of support (family, religious groups, committees…) __________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Men and women who can collaborate in the protection of the most vulnerable groups _____________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Local human resources that would be available after training/capacity building/skills development
(identification of potential) _______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Are women already overwhelmed with work (domestic tasks)? ________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Time factor/allocation of time for the use of local human resources (especially for women who may be
engaged in several activities) _______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

21
 Checklist (cont.)

5. Remember that people’s needs are different:

■ Identify and prioritize the primary needs of both men and women. (Conflict may keep women inside
their homes more than at normal times. Special efforts need to be made in order to contact them and
ascertain their needs.) ____________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Organize sanitation according to the population ____________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Organize income-generating activities targeting the more vulnerable groups _____________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Adapt first aid kits to the context and needs of the target population ___________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Organize psychological support activities accessible to the entire population _____________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Use (in these activities) different approaches according to sex and age of the end-users _____________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Create medical infrastructures accessible to the entire population ______________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

22
 Checklist (cont.)

■ Involve both men and women in the organization and management of the camp __________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Organize some activities to satisfy social, psychological and cultural needs _______________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Protect both women and men from violence (e.g. women: sexual violence; men: forced recruitment in
the armed forces) _______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Help the local population to return, as far as possible, to “normal” everyday life ___________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
■ Camp settings – organize the camps according to security priorities for women and girls (separate loca-
tion of latrines and showers for men and women, improve security within the perimeter of the camp etc.)
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________

23
E N G E N D E R I N G T H E P R O J E C T C YC L E

Projects may have different impacts on men, women

and children according to the way in which they
are designed and implemented. Developing gender-
sensitive projects means integrating a gender dimension
into all phases of project formulation. The following
table analyzes the project cycle and makes suggestions
for engendering particular programmes.

The Project Cycle

Phase 1. Problem identification and analysis

General Components Elements for engendering project formulation

■ Identify the problem ■ Making a socio-economic analysis through interviews with leaders
■ Analyze the problem (both men and women)
■ Generate solutions
■ Select solutions ■ Engendering the project cycle:
■ Apprise solutions Integrating a gender dimension into all phases of project formulation;
involving local women in all phases of the project, including design,
planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation

■ Meetings with representatives of the community (young, adults, elders

■ Agreed problem and both men and women) in order to find out:
preferred solution
– Existing gender roles
– Gender division of labour (who does what within the home and the
community)
– Access to and control over resources
– Decision making mechanisms
– Opportunities to access services
– Education level

■ Health situation within the community

■ Identify immediate needs of both men and women

■ Analyze existing projects to find out differences and similarities in

gender analysis

■ Identify and select the most relevant strategic needs to be addressed

24
 Phase 2. Project formulation

General Components Elements for engendering project formulation

■ State the problem ■ Formulate objectives that are concrete and measurable
■ Prepare proposal
– Objectives ■ Identify clearly the beneficiary of the project (only women, only men,
– Outputs both, local association and institutions, specific groups)
– Activities
– Inputs ■ Choose the best approach to reach the identified objectives (WID,
– Plan monitoring gender, both)
– Plan evaluation
– Plan implementation ■ Design a strategy that takes care of both contributions that men and
– Plan budget women can give as well as the specific need they have to satisfy
– Challenge assumptions
■ Adjust proposal ■ Design the activities on the basis of the selected beneficiaries and of
their needs (material help, social activities, psychological support,
training activities, information activities)

■ Remember to use gender sensitive language in writing the project

■ Agreed proposal to
secure funding ■ Prepare a budget explaining clearly which resource will be devoted to
women and men

■ Select adequate staff that can respond to different gender needs:

choosing the right human resources will facilitate a correct gender
perception (e.g. foresee women doctors where cultural norms
are required)

Phase 3. Project appraisal

General Components

■ Review document
■ Challenge major project components
■ Make recommendation for adjustment
■ Adjust proposal

■ Revised document

Phase 4. Secure Funding

General Components Elements for engendering project formulation

■ Identify donor ■ Try, when possible, to select gender sensitized donors

■ Apply required format
■ Negotiate ■ Verify that the donors are interested in financing the whole project
(including the gender activities)

■ Promote the importance of gender sensitized projects when contacting

■ Funding secured the donor

25
 Phase 5. Project implementation

General Components Elements for engendering project formulation

■ Prepare workplan ■ Readjust the parts of the project that are not reflecting the target
■ Implement population needs
■ Monitor implementation
■ Assess progress made ■ Select gender sensitized collaborator within the local population
■ Identify needs
■ Update workplan ■ Train the staff of the importance of the gender approach stressing the
accent of those parts of the project which have a gender component

■ Include both men and women of the staff according to the selected
beneficiaries of the project and to the cultural and social norms

■ Directly and pro-actively involve the beneficiaries

■ Use means of promotion of the project that are accessible to the

entire population

Phase 6. Evaluation

General Components Elements for engendering project formulation

■ Effectiveness ■ See how the objectives have been met
(Are we having an impact
on the problem?) ■ Measure the improvement and/or decline of both male and female
condition
■ Efficiency
(Are we using resources ■ Verify the effectiveness through interviews to both women and men
efficiently?)
■ Verify the efficiency (both economic and in terms of human resources)
■ Relevancy
(Is the project still a ■ Analyze the unexpected results (positive and negative)
relevant solution to the
problem? Have better ■ Verify the sustainability of the project: measure at the end of the
alternatives emerged?) project, which and how many activities will have continuity

■ Unforeseen
(What unexpected events
have affected project
performance, and how?)

■ Sustainability
(Will the benefits of the
project continue once
the project has ended?)

26
 B I B L I O G R A P H Y

BACKGROUND PAPER Mooney, Erin. “Internal Displacement and Gender.”

Humanitarian P rinciples Workshop: Focus on Child
MAINSTREAMING GENDER IN THE Rights Approach to Complex Emergencies and Internal
HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE TO EMERGENCIES Displacement. Brussels: UNICEF, Office of
Emergence Programmes and Brussels Office, 1/10/98.
One of the purposes of the UN is “promoting and
encouraging respect for human rights and for the Naraghi-Anderlini, Sanam. Women, peace and security:
fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to A preliminary audit from the Bejing Platform for Action
race, sex, language or religion.” UN Charter to Security Council Resolution 1325 and beyond.
London: International Alert, 2001
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Bryne B. Gender and Humanitarian Assistance. Vol. 1, UNHCR. Sexual Violence against Refugees: Guidelines
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of the Government of Netherlands. 1996.
Voutira E. Improving Social and Gender Planning in
Charlotte Lindsey. Women Facing War. ICRC. 2001 Emergency Operations. WFP. Oxford University
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Kabeer, N.: Reversed Realities (Verso, London, 1994). Baden, S.: Post-conflict Mozambique: Women’ special
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Training Manual (Oxfam, Oxford, 1994).
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28
A B O U T U N D P

UNDP is the UN’s global development network, advocating

for change and connecting countries to knowledge, experi-
ence and resources to help people build a better life. We are
on the ground in 166 countries, working with them on their
own solutions to global and national development challenges.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

The Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery (BCPR) Felicity Hill, Consultant-Programme Specialist, Governance,
would like to give special thanks to members of the peer Peace and Security Unit, United Nations Development Fund
review group who so graciously dedicated their time in for Women (UNIFEM)
contributing their inputs to this manual:
Mariko Saito, Socio-economic Development Group, UNDP
Angela E. V. King, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary Bureau for Development Policy
General on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women
Elena Gastaldo, consultant ILO-International Training
Aster Zaoude, Senior Gender Advisor, Socio-economic Center, Turin
Development Group, UNDP Bureau for Development Policy
Rajeswary Iruthayanthan, Chief of Publications, UNDP
Dasa Silovic, Gender Advisor, Socio-economic Development Communications Office of the Administrator
Group, UNDP Bureau for Development Policy
Elsie Onubogu, consultant, Socio-economic Development
Nadine Puechguirbal, Department of Peace Keeping Group, UNDP Bureau for Development Policy
Operations (DPKO)
Turin Staff College
B U R E A U F O R C R I S I S P R E V E N T I O N
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International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 15, No. 1, September 2001 (!
C 2001)

Risky Business: What Happens to Gender Equality

and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies?
Insights from NGO’s in El Salvador
Rae Lesser Blumberg1

Using the case of El Salvador, this paper explores how women’s orga-
nizational skills developed in civil war translate into work in NGOs in
the post-conflict struggle for rights. The paper briefly describes the gender
stratification methodology used in the analysis and then presents the situa-
tion in El Salvador before, during, and after the war. After discussing how
Salvadoran women, despite quite limited economic power, became a well-
organized force that was strategically indispensable to the rebels during the
war, the paper examines factors that contributed to the success of Las Madres
Demandantes (LMD), an NGO focused on the single issue of getting child
support payments to women. The experience of other NGOs in El Salvador
is reviewed with respect to the factors that contributed to the success of
LMD. In conclusion, a few lessons from the issues faced by the post-conflict
women’s NGOs in El Salvador are presented.
KEY WORDS: gender stratification; El Salvador; post-conflict societies; women’s NGOs.

INTRODUCTION

Stories1 of women rising to the occasion in war and emergency go back

to ancient history and forward to today’s headlines. Social science studies
frequently find that traditional gender constraints are loosened for the dura-
tion of the crisis; women are accepted even in combat roles if the situation is
sufficiently desperate. In many recent conflicts, the outcome often depended
to a significant extent on women’s efforts and this might even be recognized
1 William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia, 539 Cabell Hall,
Charlottesville, VA 22903; e-mail: [email protected] and Professor Emerita, Sociology,
University of California, San Diego; e-mail: [email protected].

161
!
C 2001 Human Sciences Press, Inc.
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162 Blumberg

and applauded in the first throes of victory. But when the dust has settled,
women’s gains, more often than not, have proven ephemeral. In Zimbabwe,
for example, Robert Mugabe credited women, who comprised 30 percent of
combatants at the moment of liberation in 1980 (Lueker 1998), with assuring
his victory. He promised them equality and his government promoted both
female education and gains in legal status. But eighteen years later, under fire
for increasingly authoritarian rule and economic mismanagement, he stood
aside when a Supreme Court decision undermined most of those gains in
women’s legal rights (Lueker 2000). Is this typical?
This article will explore the question: To what extent does women’s as-
sumption of risk lead to lasting gains in rights? The paper focuses on El
Salvador. After presenting the methodology used, the paper describes the
situation in El Salvador before, during and after the war. It discusses how
Salvadoran women, despite quite limited economic power, first became a
well-organized force that was strategically indispensable to the rebels during
the war and then became a well-organized force fighting politically—often
victoriously—on their own behalf once the shooting stopped. The paper
then examines factors that contributed to the success of Las Madres De-
mandantes, an NGO focused on the single issue of getting child support
payments to women; this NGO could never have existed without the or-
ganizational power and expertise women developed during the war. The
experience of other NGOs in El Salvador is reviewed with respect to the
factors that contributed to the success of LMD. In conclusion, a few lessons
from the issues faced by the post-conflict women’s NGOs in El Salvador are
presented.

METHODOLOGY

The paper uses the lens of my gender stratification theory (Blumberg

1978, 1984, 1991, 1998a) to view the “risky business” of Salvadoran women’s
journey—from pre-war subordination through twelve years of war to the
hard-won but far from universal victories of the post-war period. Relative
economic power of women and men and women’s organizational power are
explored as the main factors affecting the extent to which Salvadoran women
have been able to convert risk into lasting rights. Other influences considered
are ideology, social stratification, international women’s and human rights
movements, and international media.
The study draws on my field research in El Salvador in 1996 and 1998,
supplemented by my field experience in over thirty countries around the
world, especially my work in several other post-conflict societies.2 In 1996,
I worked briefly on microfinance and then extensively on USAID-funded
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Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies 163

gender research in ten of the country’s fourteen departments (provinces).

Although my research focused on an environmental project, gender and
post-conflict issues frequently emerged in the interviews and focus groups. I
returned in fall 1998 to carry out a case study for a larger USAID
Women in Politics project. Using rapid appraisal methodology,3 I interviewed
116 people (104 women, twelve men), including fifty-five key informant in-
terviews (forty-five women, ten men) and twelve focus groups (fifty-nine
women, two men). I worked in the city of San Salvador as well as in six de-
partments around the country. These varied in their degree of involvement
in the war: least affected were Sonsonate and Santa Ana in the west and the
department of San Salvador in the center. Chalatenango in the north and
Cuscutlan and San Vicente in the east were much more involved in the war.

WOMEN OF EL SALVADOR: FROM PRE-WAR PATRIARCHY

TO WARTIME PARTNERSHIP TO POST-WAR PARTIAL
EMPOWERMENT

In brief overview, El Salvador underwent a twelve-year war (1980–92)

between a right wing government and left wing insurgents (FMLN). Some
sixty years of authoritarian rule preceded the armed conflict, which began
to escalate into lethal force in the 1970s, replete with Death Squads. When
the peace accords were signed in 1992, women represented over 30 percent
of the FMLN. The Peace Accords were followed by a period of a few years
of fairly substantial aid from the UN, European Union, United States, and
other donors.

Pre-war Patriarchy

Women had limited economic power and were hampered by conser-

vative gender ideologies—both secular and religious—as well as the over-
whelmingly unequal nature of the larger stratification system. Although
women had and have inheritance rights, they had very little property before
the war. Rural women in most parts of El Salvador had little opportunity
to generate cash income and there is no tradition of women selling in local
markets as in the Andean and Caribbean countries. Nor is there a rich tra-
dition of handicrafts, as in the countries with large indigenous populations
that formed part of the Mayan and Incan empires. For most rural women,
especially in the war zones, the only other source of very occasional income
came from selling commodities such as eggs or a chicken or other small an-
imals, or services such as dressmaking, to their neighbors. The statistics on
female labor force participation reflect mainly paid employment by urban
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164 Blumberg

women (where even in the burgeoning manufacturing sector, women made

a good deal less than men). By war’s end, 30 percent of women were counted
as economically active (Sivard, 1995).
Pre-war El Salvador strongly espoused a very conservative gender role
ideology. A woman and her family lost face if she worked outside the home.
As a result, she didn’t get a full measure of economic power from any income
she earned because the ideology devalued it: after all, its tenets decreed that
she shouldn’t have been out earning it in the first place (Blumberg 1984,
1991). This secular ideology was reinforced by a religious ideology of con-
servative Catholicism (except on the left) that further constricted women’s
options at both macro and micro levels. Class differences and mutual distrust
reinforced unequal gender stratification (Blumberg 1984).

War

Women, working almost exclusively with the FMLN, gained organi-

zational experience during the war. Numerous women’s NGOs arose to
support the FMLN fighters, and women became increasingly involved in the
war effort. Many became leaders, some became noted—and tough—military
commanders. Their support was indispensable to the FMLN and publicly ac-
knowledged by the insurgent leadership. Grass-roots women organized also,
out of necessity. In the war zones, about a million people fled, most leaving
the country for refugee camps in neighboring countries or for the United
States. The women who stayed behind and those in the refugee camps lived
in a world with little day-to-day contact with the fighting age men; they had
to organize to survive. In many of my focus groups in 1998, women in the
Oriente told me stories of having been catapulted from simple farm wives
to leaders who made sure people got fed and cared for.4

Peace and Its Gendered Aftermath

The women activists of the FMLN expected that their sacrifices and
contributions would be recognized in the Peace Accords and that they would
gain new rights for all the risks they had undertaken. To their dismay, their
agenda was almost completely ignored by both left and right in the forging of
the Accords. In response, many national-level women’s NGOs loosened or
cut their ties to the FMLN and began emphasizing women’s rights and gender
awareness. Donors endorsed their new program by providing considerable
support for projects lasting as long as seven years.
Part of what the activist women were unable to obtain from the Peace
Accords they have managed to extract from the national political system
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Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies 165

through an unexpected coalition of left- and right-wing women members

of Congress (Salguero 1998). Together, boosted by lobbying and advocacy
efforts from the war-born women’s movement and women’s NGOs, they
succeeded in pushing through significant legislation aiding women. Violence
against women (VAW) became the issue that broke through all the years of
hostility and war and united women members of the Legislative Assembly
from both ARENA, the right-wing governing party, and FMLN, converted
into a political party as part of the peace process. To everyone’s surprise,
they formed a caucus, and with the help of the activist, organizationally
sophisticated NGO women, they got the following measures passed by a
Legislative Assembly in which they were only around one-tenth of deputies:
a law against intra-familial violence, a reformed Family Code, and a series
of regulations toughening and broadening the application of the country’s
child support (cuota alimenticia) laws.
The legislative successes contrast with the early disarray of the women’s
NGOs. Going into the first Peace Accords election in 1994, the level of dis-
unity and infighting that emerged in a highly participatory attempt at plat-
form writing meant that they were unable to agree on a common agenda until
six days before the election. As a result, there was no time to get the main par-
ties on board vis-à-vis their belated platform. But the caucus of the women
politicians focused on the issues that united the women’s groups and per-
mitted them to turn the risks they had taken into a significant gain in rights.
Women’s NGOs in El Salvador have had mixed results in pursuing their
goals. The following two cases examine how economic, organizational, and
other factors influenced their results.

LAS MADRES DEMANDANTES: CASE STUDY OF A

SUCCESSFUL NGO

Organizational and Economic Factors

One of the NGOs that separated from the FMLN in order to pursue
strategic and practical gender interests is the well-known and highly regarded
Las Dignas. In 1994, they undertook a diagnostic study of the problem of
women not being able to get child support (cuota alimenticia) because of
the Byzantine inefficiencies of the bureaucracy in the Attorney General’s
Office (Procuraduria General de la Republica) that administered the exist-
ing law (Murcia 1998). While most women with that problem were poor,
the child support problem encompasses all levels of society. Las Dignas not
only began to promote direct action on its own, it also helped create a spin-
off NGO, Las Madres Demandantes (LMD; Polanco 1998). This association
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166 Blumberg

of “Demanding Mother’s” actually plays on the Spanish word for a person

making a demand in a legal case (demandante), as well as the fact that all
these women are demanding child support through both legal and organi-
zational means (Vasquez 1998). LMD evolved very rapidly to become the
premier single-issue women’s NGO in the country (Lopez 1998). It elected
its own board from within the ranks of child support supplicants. It began
to run weekly meetings and support groups for women members involved
in seeking child support awards or modifications. It also began to offer help
to women who were not active members but needed help in negotiating the
bureaucracy.
In the focus groups discussions with rank-and-file members and board
members, I was impressed by the level of expertise developed by these
women concerning their issue. They were highly competent in a narrow
sphere of the law despite lacking much formal education. Moreover, these
women attempted to share their knowledge with others in the same situa-
tion (Villalobos 1998). In addition to helping poor women with child support
problems, LMD has run an effective campaign to focus national attention on
the issue. First, they successfully demanded that candidates for political office
not be in arrears on support payments or guilty of domestic battering. Their
campaign “outed” the head of the youth wing of ARENA, who turned out to
be over 30,000 colones (over $3,500) in arrears in child support—over three
years of missed payments. Outraged women and youth activists from his own
party insisted that he pay up. He apologized, saying it was an “oversight” and
that he loved his child. This became a cautionary tale to other politicians.
Second, they successfully demanded that the state telephone monopoly,
ANTEL, which was in the process of structural adjustment-dictated down-
sizing and privatizing, give 30 percent of laid off employees’ severance
payments (indemnificaciones) to their children if a legal demand for child
support had been made—regardless if the employee was in arrears of not.
This was extended to other public and private sector enterprises that sub-
sequently followed the same downsizing regimen. Third, they successfully
lobbied for three years running to obtain 30 percent of the annual Christmas
bonus (aguinaldo) for the children of those with a legal obligation to pay
child support, and now the Legislative Assembly has made this permanent.
Fourth, when a scandal broke in the Attorney General’s Office—employees
were discovered to be pocketing money paid in by fathers and destined for
child support—they took the lead in publicizing the issue to the media. They
took out full-page ads in the main newspapers demanding restitution of the
funds and punishment for the perpetrators.
Organizational experience has played a strong role in the success of
LMD. It is the only NGO I found that had organizational links from the top
to the bottom of the society: members lobby at the national level, appeal
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Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies 167

to middle-class and even wealthy women with child support problems, and
provide essential help to enable many poor uneducated women to success-
fully obtain their child support despite the remaining post-reform bureau-
cratic procedures they must negotiate (Gonzalez 1998). Although LMD has
organized around an economic issue, child support payments, it has not
stressed economic power for women.

Other Factors

NGOs do not operate in a vacuum, and other factors influence the suc-
cess or failure of a group even though they may not directly focus on the
group’s activities. Thus, despite the organizational effectiveness of LMD,
its gains—as well as those of other ex-FMLM women’s organizations in
post-war El Salvador—have been constrained by elements of the conserva-
tive ideological and political systems. Ideologically, Catholicism still plays a
big role in resisting changes in areas such as family planning policy.
Political rifts continue between ARENA and FMLN; ARENA controls the
national government and FMLN controls the mayor’s office and city gov-
ernment in a number of places including the capital. FMLN has gone far-
ther than ARENA in increasing women’s participation. The Legislative
Assembly has eighty-four members. In the 1994 elections, the FMLN elected
five women and sixteen men (women comprise 23.8 percent). In the 1997
elections, women won nine of the twenty-seven seats gained by the party
(33.3 percent). Interestingly, the right wing ARENA party also increased its
proportion of women in Congress from three out of thirty-nine party seats
(7.7 percent) in 1994 to four out of twenty-eight party seats (14.3 percent)
in 1997. This was due to the fact that the party lost twelve male seats from
1994–1997 while electing an additional woman. FMLN’s 1997 gains in female
representation were due more to deliberate policy (Valladares 1998).5
The growing presence of the international women’s movements and,
to a lesser extent, human rights movements is starting to make a difference
vis-à-vis the position of women in many countries, including El Salvador,
and this contributes to the success of groups like LMD. The Peace Accords
in 1992 coincided with the explosion of activity among Latin American
feminists preparing for the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in
Beijing. Regional preparatory conferences and interaction during and after
the Beijing conference put the El Salvadoran feminist NGOs in touch with
NGOs in other countries; the process was an exciting cross-fertilization, with
a battle-tested (literally), well-organized plethora of Salvadoran women’s
NGOs learning from and contributing to their same-language counterparts
from all around Latin America.
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168 Blumberg

The attention of the world human rights movement was focused on El

Salvador through the period of worsening atrocities leading up to the civil
war and during the twelve years of conflict. This strengthened the Salvadoran
human rights movement and also exposed it to the evolution of that move-
ment, which in recent years has begun to include gender as a human rights
issue (Blumberg 1998a; Velado 1998). The Salvadoran movement is begin-
ning to follow suit (Zamora 1998).
In El Salvador, globalization arrived long ago with respect to media,
concerning both media coverage of the war and the proliferation of U.S.
media programming. American-origin TV ranges from dubbed prime time
series on local channels to CNN and MTV on cable. The U.S.-based media
stress sex and violence but also portray more women in non-traditional and
autonomous roles—and are increasingly pervasive (Friedman 1998). Also,
a million Salvadorans left the country during the war; most went to the
U.S., mainly Los Angeles. There, women were more likely to work for pay
and thereby enhance their household power. At the same time, almost all
of them were exposed to the U.S. media’s daily depiction of a relatively
more egalitarian gender system. After the war, those that returned took
these norms home again—as did their daughters. The media mobs left with
the peace, returning only for earthquakes, elections and hurricanes but U.S.
programs and world-view are there for the duration.

EXPERIENCES OF OTHER NGOs WORKING FOR SALVADORAN

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

Two broad groupings of NGOs are now examined in light of the suc-
cess of LMD. The ex-FMLN training and advocacy groups ignore women’s
economic empowerment, while the Entrepreneurial Women’s Organization
deals with it before going on to more gender- and women’s rights-focused
concerns. Both models have the same goal of empowering Salvadoran women
and spurring them to activism and leadership.
Ex-FMLN training and advocacy women’s NGOs have been promoting
women’s local level empowerment by offering them training in advocacy,
women’s legal rights (including the new rights vis-à-vis domestic violence
and child support), gender awareness and self-esteem. A few NGOs also
try to promote savings and credit schemes for the recently trained women
but with little impact, since they are not using the new and viable microfi-
nance/“best practices” model (Otero and Rhyne 1994; Blumberg 2001). In
focus groups with newly trained women in six departments (provinces), two
themes emerged: (1) gratitude for the training (women particularly lauded
learning that they had equal rights and worth and that wife beating was now
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Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies 169

against the law), and (2) frustration that the training had not addressed their
number one problem: lack of income/difficulty making a living.
The Entrepreneurial Women’s Organization (Organizacion Empresar-
ial Feminina/OEF ) has evolved from a welfare-oriented organization offer-
ing a wide range of services to one that focuses increasingly on microcredit.
In complete contrast to the ex-FMLN women’s NGOs, the apolitical OEF
(Tesak 1998) begins with microfinance assistance. Although they are not yet
hewing to all the “best practices” standards of the microfinance movement,
they have a fairly successful program offering escalating loans to savings and
credit clients. Some women have developed thriving businesses with their
OEF loans. All the OEF women clients who participated in the focus groups
advocated this “economics first” strategy. OEF also provides training in le-
gal rights and gender awareness that is quite similar to that offered by the
ex-FMLN women’s NGOs. Again, in the focus groups with OEF clients I
found that this type of training was well-received—but all of them stated
that they preferred the credit and its benefits to the training, if they had to
make a choice (Blumberg 1998b, 1998c). In any event, they want the credit
first.

Organizational and Economic Factors

The ex-FMLN NGO leaders I interviewed hoped that their training

would lead more and more women to activism and political involvement, thus
further strengthening the base of the women’s movement in El Salvador and
assuring that the hard-won gains of the war would not evaporate. Politically
neutral OEF’s leadership did not talk about political activism as one of their
goals although they, too, wanted to develop women leaders and see the
women’s movement and female status raised in a sustainable manner.
As part of my 1998 Women in Politics research (see endnote 1), I asked
some staff and clients of both the ex-FMLN NGOs and OEF about post-
training political activism. After all, both had similar training in advocacy,
gender, and legal rights. Although I did not have time to thoroughly to cross-
validate their claims, the interviews provide some insights into the changes
over time. The director of OEF estimated that roughly half of the veterans,
women who had received several successive loans as well as the gender
and rights training, had become activists at the local level (Mendez 1998).
This included getting elected to the community councils (juntas directivas)
and/or water boards. About half of the OEF clients who participated in the
focus groups indeed were currently holding—or had held—such posts. One
woman, who had developed a series of successful businesses despite years
of opposition from her husband (who finally had become supportive), was
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170 Blumberg

serving on her community council but stated that she had her heart set on
one day becoming mayor of her city.
In contrast, focus groups with women who had received the ex-FMLN
NGOs’ training in gender awareness and rights and interviews with several
NGO field staff who worked with these women indicated a much lower level
of political activism following training. The field staff (promotoras) estimated
that no more than one-fifth of the trainees had gone on to run for a local
political post—unless they were one of the war-created grass roots leaders.
In fact, regardless of which training they had received, women’s grass roots
political activism proved more common in the zones most affected by the
war. Even in the absence of economic power, the exigencies of the long
struggle transformed previously timid rural wives into heads of households
in large numbers (an estimated 57 percent of household heads in the most
fought-over areas are women) and into organizers and leaders in a surprising
number of cases, given the high level of gender inequality in the rural milieu
(Blumberg 1998b, 1998c).

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

Drawing on variables from my general theory of gender stratification,

this paper examines NGOs working on women’s issues in post-conflict El
Salvador following a war effort in which women made significant contribu-
tions. The influence of economic and organizational factors were discussed
for several different NGOs. In addition, I examined several variables that
had indirect influence on the groups: ideology, political conflict, international
women’s and human rights movements, and media.6
Salvadoran women didn’t have enough of an economic power base to
support a substantial level of gender equality, but this didn’t deter many
of them from actively supporting the FMLN in the long years of conflict.
As time went on in the protracted struggle, both poor Salvadoran women
living in the combat zones and the middle class women who formed pro-
FMLN organizations developed organizational and leadership skills out of
urgent necessity. I was told many stories about ordinary women turning into
“Mother’s Courage.”
To a certain extent they gained some of the fruits that normally flow
from economic power as the result of their organizational accomplishments,
including increased self-confidence. Although I didn’t explore the other de-
pendent variables in my theory thoroughly, what the grass roots women
told me in focus groups did not indicate that they had achieved much more
“voice and vote” in household decision-making.7 Lacking economic means
of support, they couldn’t easily leave a battering spouse, and their economic
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Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies 171

situation also limited their ability to control other aspects of their destiny or
life options.8
Although the data require further cross-checking, preliminary evidence
suggests greater economic power contributes to some degree to women’s
influence and activism in community and political spheres. Programs fo-
cused on getting child support payments and microcredit led to more post-
training political activism than other women’s NGO programs that offered
legal and gender awareness training without attempting to improve women’s
economic situation. In conclusion, the strongest combination for greater
women’s rights and political activism is proposed to be increased economic
power plus greater organization and relevant training.

ENDNOTES

1. Thanks are due to Gale Summerfield for her reading of an earlier draft of this essay.
2. This article also draws on my other relevant experience. I did studies in Nepal and Ecuador
for the USAID and two missions in Kosovo in spring 2000 as part of a World Bank–FAO
project on emergency farm relief. I worked in the capital city, Pristina, and in urban and rural
areas of three of the municipalities worst hit by the conflict, Gllogovc, Skenderaj and Decan.
I’ve also worked in post-conflict situations in Guatemala in 1985 (in Cakchiquel-speaking
areas of the western highlands) and 1998 (in Alta Verapaz and Baja Verapaz provinces), as
well as in a variety of other countries whose conflicts were either long-ended or in various
stages of intensity.
3. Rapid appraisal methodologies (RAMs) include Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA), Participa-
tory Rural Appraisal (PRA), Rapid Assessment Procedures (RAP) and similar variations.
All share a single technique of cross-validation that makes them superior to most forms
of fast qualitative research: “triangulation.” Triangulation involves obtaining at least two
sources of data—preferably by two different methodological techniques— about each of a
tightly honed list of variables and issues. Both qualitative and quantitative techniques may
be used, including key informant interviews, focus groups, observation, analysis of existing
documents, reanalysis of extant data sets, and even small surveys. Rapid appraisal techniques
are particularly well suited where random samples are not feasible. They are even more ap-
propriate for exploratory research where not enough is known about the phenomenon to
construct valid closed-end items for a sample survey, and may well have higher validity than
(even random sample) survey research under those circumstances.
4. And, although I never interviewed them, women who spent the war years in Los Angeles
not only were exposed to a more gender-egalitarian society, but also were thrust into a fair
number of organizational and leadership roles in a community with a female majority.
5. Specifically, the party set up a system of quotas for women candidates in the party’s electoral
lists. However, only the top few members of a list are likely to be elected; so naming lots of
women and putting them on the bottom of the list is a patently empty gesture; FMLN didn’t
put all its women in high slots but it didn’t stick them in a group at the bottom either. In
theory, women are to be representatives in proportion to their strength in the party, about
one-third. So the 1997 elections conform to this guideline. The trend at the national level
indicates that the ranks of female parliamentarians will continue to swell.
The picture is less rosy at the middle levels (municipal and department) of the pyra-
mid, even where the war was most bitterly fought. Although the proportion of women in
municipal and departmental (provincial) government is greater for FMLN than ARENA,
it is still well below the 17 percent achieved by women at the national level In fact, the
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172 Blumberg

proportion of female mayors declined from 12.2 percent in 1994 to 8.8 percent in 1997.
Male resistance to changes in traditional gender roles remains strong at this level. Addi-
tionally, when I did my field research in 1998, I found no organized donor programs aimed
at improving women’s representation at the sub-national level—other than the efforts by
women’s NGOs discussed in this paper.
6. Relative economic power (defined as control of income and/or other economic resources by
men vs. women) is the main independent variable of my theory. Prevailing ideology—secular
and religious—at macro and micro levels is one of the “discount factors” (see, especially
Blumberg 1991) that can dampen or magnify a person’s economic power—i.e., whether
a person gets “a dollar’s worth of economic power,” or more, or less, from every dollar
contributed to the household. Women’s level and strength of organization, which proved
the single most important factor, is one of the “strategic indispensability” factors that help
women achieve power even in the absence of prior economic power. I also looked at the
overarching stratification system, since this, along with the strategic indispensability factors
and the nature of the kinship system, can facilitate or constrain women achieving economic
and other types of power.
7. My theory posits that with increased economic power, both self-confidence and say in house-
hold decision-making tend to rise. Specifically, I argue that greater economic power is as-
sociated with a woman’s stronger “voice and vote” with respect to the following: fertility
decisions, domestic well-being decisions (such as the duration of schooling and the nature
of medical/health care given sons vs. daughters), and economic acquisition or allocation
decisions.
8. “Life options” are my main dependent variables. They involve one’s relative control of
matters affecting one’s personal autonomy such as rights vis-à-vis marriage, divorce, sex-
uality, fertility, freedom of movement, access to education and household authority; these
life options occur in all human societies. While macro level legal, political and ideological
systems affect the life options of women as a group and in comparison to men, for a partic-
ular woman, enhanced economic power tends to give her more say and leverage over her
own life options. And if the economic power of a large enough proportion of women rises,
it can be translated into an improvement in macro level rules about women’s rights in these
areas.

REFERENCES

Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1978. Stratification: Socioeconomic and Sexual Inequality. Dubuque, IA:
Wm. C. Brown.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1984. “A General Theory of Gender Stratification.” Pp. 23–101 in Soci-
ological Theory 1984, edited by Randall Collins. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1991, ed. Gender, Family and Economy: The Triple Overlap. Newbury
Park, CA and London: Sage.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1998a. “Gender Equality as a Human Right: Empowerment, Women
and Human Rights—Past, Present and Future.” INSTRAW News. No. 29, Second Semester.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1998b. “Lessons from the 1998 USAID Women in Politics Research in
Ecuador, El Salvador, Nepal and Thailand.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for Interna-
tional Development/Management Systems International, interim report.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 1998c. “Climbing the Pyramid of Power: Gender and Politics in El
Salvador.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Agency for International Development/Management
Systems International, draft.
Blumberg, Rae Lesser. 2001. “We Are Family: Gender, Microenterprise, Family Work and Well-
being in Ecuador and the Dominican Republic—with Comparative Data from Guatemala,
Swaziland and Guinea-Bissau.” The History of the Family: An International Quarterly.
Friedman, Thomas. 1998. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York:
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Gender Equality and Women’s Rights in Post-Conflict Societies 173

Gonzalez, Maria Lidia. 1998. Key informant interview with Member of the Board, Asociacion
de Madres Demandantes, San Salvador, October.
Lopez, Aracely. 1998. Key informant interview with President of Las Dignas, San Salvador,
October.
Lueker, Lorna. 1998. “Women, War and Liberation in Zimbabwe.” Dissertation, University of
California, San Diego.
Lueker, Lorna. 2000. Presentation at Risks and Rights Symposium, University of Illinois,
Urbana.
Mendez, Dinora. 1998. Numerous key informant interviews with Executive Director, Organi-
zacion Empresarial Femenina (OEF), during fieldwork in San Salvador, San Vicente and
Chalatenango Departments, October.
Murcia, Ana. 1998. Key informant interview with Coordinator of Las Dignas, San Salvador,
October.
Otero, Maria and Elisabeth Rhyne, eds. 1994. The New World of Microenterprise Finance: Build-
ing Healthy Financial Institutions for the Poor. West Hartford, CN and London: Kumarian
Press and Intermediate Technology Publications, Ltd.
Polanco, Ruth. 1998. Key informant interview with Co-coordinator of Las Dignas, San Salvador,
October.
Sivard, Ruth Leger. 1995. Women . . . A World Survey. 2d. edition. Washington, D.C.: World
Priorities.
Tesak, Ildiko. 1998. Key informant interviews with President of the Board, Organizacion Em-
presarial Femenina (OEF), San Salvador, October.
Valladares, Marta (“La Nidia”—her nom de guerre). 1998. Key informant interview with famed
former FMLN military commander, currently a Deputy and FMLN 1999 Vice Presidential
candidate, San Salvador, October.
Vasquez, Vilma. 1998. Key informant interviews with Consultant, Asociacion de Madres De-
mandantes, San Salvador, October.
Velado, Margarita. 1998. Key informant interview with Consultant, Human Rights Commission,
San Salvador, October.
Villalobos, Ana Daisi. 1998. Key informant interview with Member of the Board, Las Dignas,
San Salvador, October.
Zamora, Aracely. 1998. Key informant interview with Associate Commissioner for Women’s
Rights, Human Rights Commission, Women’s Rights Secretariat, San Salvador, October.
Women:
The Secret Weapon of Modern Warfare?
KELLY OLIVER

The images from wars in the Middle East that haunt us are those of young women
killing and torturing. Their media circulated stories share a sense of shock. They have
both galvanized and confounded debates over feminism and women’s equality. And, as
Oliver argues in this essay, they share, perhaps subliminally, the problematic notion of
women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is symptomatic
of fears of women’s “mysterious” powers.

The figures and faces from wars in the Middle East that continue to haunt
us at the beginning of the twenty-first century, are those of women: think of
Palestinian women suicide bombers, starting with Wafa Idris in January 2002,
or the capture and rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch early in the U.S. invasion of
Iraq just over a year later, or the shocking images of Pfc. Lynndie England and
Army Spc. Sabrina Harman at the Abu Ghraib prison in spring 2003. These
images and stories horrify yet fascinate us because they are of young women
killing and torturing. As they have circulated through the U.S. media, their
stories share a sense of shock and confusion evidenced by various conflicting
accounts of what it means for women to wage war. They have both galvanized
and confounded debates over feminism and women’s equality. And, as I will
argue, their stories share, perhaps more subliminally, the problematic notion
of women as both offensive and defensive weapons of war, a notion that is
symptomatic of age-old fears of the “mysterious” powers of women, maternity,
and female sexuality.
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker suggests that the prison abuses at Abu
Ghraib are the result of what she calls the “myth of gender equality” (2004, 2).
Indeed, the photographs of women’s involvement in torture and sexual abuse at

Hypatia vol. 23, no. 2 (April–June 2008) © by Kelly Oliver

2 Hypatia

Abu Ghraib rekindled debates over both whether women should be in the mili-
tary and gender equality. They also prompted a debate over the role of feminism,
not only in response to the photos but also in the abuses themselves. Writers
on both sides of the feminist divide implicate feminism in women’s criminal
behavior at Abu Ghraib. For example, on the antifeminist side, MensNewsDaily.
com suggests that women’s sadism is not only responsible for Abu Ghraib but also
the norm: “all of the females implicated at Abu Ghraib will have little trouble
finding jobs in the multibillion-dollar VAWA (Violence Against Women Act)
domestic violence industry, just as soon as ‘American, gender feminist justice’
rationalizes away all their misbehavior” (Ray Blumhorst quoted in Parker 2004,
2). And a columnist for the American Spectator argues that the abuse at Abu
Ghraib “is a cultural outgrowth of a feminist culture which encourages female
barbarians” (George Neumeyr quoted in Marshall 2004, 10). Some conserva-
tive journalists have blamed the torture on the women’s feminist sensibilities,
arguing that the abusers resented the Islamic attitude of men toward women
and therefore they enjoyed what they took to be their feminist revenge on the
prisoners (Warner 2004, 75).
While conservatives blame feminism for the brutality at Abu Ghraib, even
feminists associate advances made by the women’s movement with the abuse.
For example, columnist Joanne Black concludes, “Throughout history, when
they have had the chance, women have shown themselves as capable as men
of misusing power and inflicting brutality. They have, till now, merely lacked
the opportunity. Feminism has remedied that. Sadly for those of us who thought
we were better, women have proved themselves men’s equal” (2004, 4). Brooke
Warner blames a postfeminist world in which “young American women” have
“a certain-I-deserve-it attitude.” She claims that “brashness, confidence, and
selfishness are norms” and that “American military culture promotes these
values as much as the university system, though it manifests itself as physical
rather than intellectual prowess” (2004, 75). Both sides thus implicate feminism
in the torture for giving women opportunities equal to men, and for increasing
their confidence to the point of creating violent women.
On the one hand, some feminist scholars and journalists explain the abuse by
pointing to women’s marginal place in the male-dominated military, which not
only makes it more likely that they will follow orders and try to fit in but also
that they will be scapegoated and held up as representatives of all of their sex,
which certainly is true of how the press portrayed the three women indicted.
Conservatives, on the other hand, argue that coed basic training is responsible
for what one commentator calls the “whorehouse behavior” at Abu Ghraib.1
The same commentator asks if police soldiers at Abu Ghraib were weak in basic
operational skills, “because 10 years ago, for political reasons, politicians and
feminist activists within the ranks established coed basic training to promote
the fiction that men and women are the same and putting young women in
 Kelly Oliver 3

close quarters with young men would somehow not trigger natural biological
urges?” (Thomas 2004, 10, emphasis added).
Much of the conservative commentary surrounding the Abu Ghraib torture
has explicitly or implicitly associated women and sex: we see explicit comments
on women triggering men’s sexual urges and the presence of women leading
to “whorehouse behavior.” But, as Susan Sontag points out, these images of
women smiling while engaging in sexual abuse and sadistic torture that cap-
tivate public imagination are subliminally familiar to us from the S&M porn
industry, which is booming on the internet and popular with soldiers and
which traditionally puts women in the dominatrix role (2004, 27). Feminists
have argued for decades that the prevalence of pornography promotes violent
images of sex and desensitizes us to sexual violence. Perhaps desensitization to
sexual violence is part of why human-rights groups at first were unsure how to
categorize the abuse.
Gender stereotypes also play a role in the confusion regarding these images:
not only because women are the torturers but also because men are the ones
being sexually abused. Of course, we know that men sexually abuse and rape
female Iraqi prisoners, but that is so much business as usual that it does not
capture our imaginations in the way that images of women sexually abusing
men does. It makes us wonder, How a man can be raped by a woman? How can
a man be forced to perform, and thereby seemingly be an agent of, sex acts?
These types of questions point to our assumptions about desire, sex, and gender.
And gender stereotypes make the smiling faces of Lynndie England and Sabrina
Harman abject, in Julia Kristeva’s sense, as terrifying or repulsive and at the
same time fascinating or captivating.
But gender also reportedly plays a role in the abuse itself. Some journalists
claim that women were used as “lethal weapons” against Iraqi male prisoners.
In the words of a Baltimore Sun reporter, “Forcing men in a fundamentalist
Muslim culture to parade naked (let alone feign sex acts) in the presence of
women was conceived as an especially lethal brand of humiliation” (Ollove
2004, 18, emphasis added). This report suggests that the presence of women
in the Abu Ghraib prison allowed for even more humiliating forms of torture
supposedly used to “soften up” prisoners before interrogation. Because of their
“sex” and its seemingly “natural” effect on men, women become the means to
compound not only sexual and physical abuse but also abuse of religious and
cultural beliefs.
Playing on traditional associations between women and poison, but now
in the context of war, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd calls this a
“toxic combination of sex and religion” (2005, 17). This “toxic combination”
actually seems to be part of the military’s interrogation strategy in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, where hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan have been held for
over four years now. In January 2005, nine pages of a manuscript held by the
4 Hypatia

Pentagon and written by Army Sergeant Eric Saar, who worked as a transla-
tor at Guantánamo Bay prison, were leaked to the press. The pages describe
female interrogators using “sexual touching,” “provocative clothing” (including
miniskirts, bras, and thong underwear), and “fake menstrual blood” to “break”
Muslim prisoners by making them unclean and therefore unworthy to pray.
Accompanying the pages was a letter from Guantánamo officials in which
they marked for deletion a section describing a Saudi prisoner whose face was
smeared with red ink pulled from the pants of his female interrogator who told
him it was menstrual blood. The officials marked the section “secret,” advis-
ing the Pentagon that it revealed “interrogation methods and techniques that
were classified” (Novak 2005, 33). Menstrual blood has become a top-secret
interrogation technique. As bizarre as this seems, it should be no surprise, since
within patriarchal cultures of all varieties menstrual blood represents the abject
and unclean. Perhaps, menstrual blood is imagined as threatening because it
provokes fears of women’s procreative powers, or as Kristeva suggests, because
it conjures the maternal body as an uncanny border and ultimate threat to indi-
vidual autonomy.2 And, although in the popular imaginary it is not alone in the
category of “gross” bodily fluids, you still don’t see menstrual blood showing up
in Hollywood films that recently are filled with vomit, semen jokes, and toilet
scenes (if it did, imagine the transformation in Something about Mary’s special
“hair gel”). Obviously, the military’s use of menstrual blood as an interrogation
method calls for more analysis; for now, though, let’s return to the discourse
of “sexual tactics.”
A draft of Sergeant Saar’s manuscript obtained by the Associated Press (AP)
describes the U.S. military “us[ing] women as part of tougher physical and
psychological interrogation tactics to get terrorist suspects to talk.” One of the
officers in charge of the prison, Lt. Col. James Marshall, refused to say whether
the U.S. military intentionally used women as part of their tactical strategy.
But according to a document classified as secret and obtained by the AP, the
military uses “an all-female team as one of the Immediate Reaction Force units
that subdue troublesome male prisoners in their cells.” And the Federal Bureau
of Intelligence has complained about the “sexual tactics” female interrogators
use. Reportedly, “some Guantanamo prisoners who have been released say they
were tormented by ‘prostitutes’ ” (Dodds 2005a, 11).
Aside from the AP release by Paisley Dodds, little media attention has been
paid to the sexual and religious abuse in Guantánamo. What there has been,
however, is instructive in its characterization of the abuse as “women us[ing]
sex to get detainees to talk” (Dodds 2005b, 15), “women us[ing] lechery as an
interrogating tactic” (News Journal 2005, 4), “sexually loaded torment by female
interrogators” (Novak 2005, 33), and “the use of female sexuality as a tactic”
(Jacoby 2005, 11). The headnote of an article in Time magazine reads, “New
reports of detainee abuse at Gitmo suggest interrogators used female sexuality
 Kelly Oliver 5

as a weapon” (Novak 2005, 33). The rhetoric of women as weapons is even

more explicit in reports of Guantánamo than in the reports of Abu Ghraib. It
is telling that the media continues to associate women and sex, going so far as
to say that female sexuality is a weapon. Here, sexualized interrogation tactics
become metonymical substitutes for all of female sexuality. And female sexuality
itself is reduced to a tactic or strategy to “break” men, a threatening weapon
that can be used against even the most resistant men.
This condensation between interrogation tactic, weapon of war, using sex,
and female sexuality itself reveals a long-standing fear of women and female
sexuality evidenced for centuries in literary, scientific, and popular discourses
of Western culture. Indeed, it is the familiarity of the association of women and
their sex with torment and deadly threats that makes these reports so uncanny.
The association of female sexuality and danger recalls Sigmund Freud’s account
of the fear of castration women evoke in men. In Freud’s writings, female sexu-
ality not only makes visible and concrete the threat of castration but also the
threat of death (Freud 1919, 244–45). Maternal sex, in particular, is imagined
as both life-giving and devouring, and therefore uncanny; that is to say both
shocking and familiar.
Certainly, photographs from Abu Ghraib and reports from Guantánamo of
women torturing men with sex have this effect. They remind us of Hollywood
images of the femme fatale seducing men and driving them to their deaths,
or of pornographic images of the sadistic dominatrix wielding a whip or leash
and their Hollywood counterparts, Catwoman, Electra, or Charlie’s Angels,
pseudofeminist avengers who use sex and violence to entrap and kill men.
Although the image of the feminist superheroine getting revenge against the
men who dominated her may be relatively recent, the image of female sexuality
as potent and deadly as the black widow spider’s has been part of our cultural
imaginary for centuries.
In the rhetoric surrounding Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, it seems that
what the media describes as a toxic cocktail is two parts female sexuality and
one part the feminism that unleashed it, with a religious twist that makes it
particularly disturbing. Female sexuality can be used to contaminate and make
impure because it is seen as impure, not just within conservative Islam (as repre-
sented in Western media) but also within the U.S. military and the American
cultural imaginary more generally. Within popular cultural representations
from Hollywood to commercial advertising, female sexuality is represented as
abject, as both terrifying and fascinating; like the Abu Ghraib photographs,
it shocks and repulses us yet we can’t take our eyes off of it. As Sontag points
out, at the same time that they make us ashamed, there is a shameless quality
to the photographs: “Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they
commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that,
formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor
6 Hypatia

to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these pho-

tographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for
unapologetic brutality” (2004, 29). Presumably, male guards have performed all
kinds of torture on both male and female prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other
U.S. prisons; but with the exception of the photograph of the hooded Abu
Ghraib prisoner standing on a box, arms out, attached to electrical wires, the
photos that have captured our imagination are photographs of women engag-
ing in sexualized torture.3 As Sontag says, “The photographs are us,” but not
primarily because we are shameless and admire brutality, but rather because
within our culture, women, and particularly female sexuality, are represented
as abject and threatening. The association between women, sex, and violence
makes these images an striking reflection of our culture.
In reports of women’s involvement in torture, there is a telling slippage
between the rhetoric of tactic, technique, and weaponry—what we might
call the rhetoric of téchnê—and the rhetoric of natural biological urges and
female sexuality—what we might call the rhetoric of physis.4 Implicit in this
discourse is the notion that women’s sex is an especially lethal weapon because
it is natural. Within popular discourse, women’s bodies, menstrual blood, and
female sexuality can be used as tactics of war because of the potency of their
association with the danger of nature, of Mother Nature, if you will. Akin to
a natural toxin or intoxicant, women’s sex makes a powerful weapon because,
within our cultural imaginary, it is by nature dangerous. Yet it becomes more
threatening because we imagine that it can be wielded by women to manipu-
late men; it can become the art of seduction through which women beguile
and intoxicate to control and even destroy men; think again of Hollywood’s
femme fatale.
The condensation between the rhetoric of technology and nature in the
construction of woman as weapon is even more dramatic in British and Ameri-
can media reports of Palestinian women suicide bombers. A news story in the
London Sunday Times describing the frequency of suicide bombings by Pales-
tinian women begins: “They are anonymous in veils, but when they go out to
kill they may be disguised with a ponytail and a pretty smile. . . . Israel’s new
nightmare: female suicide-bombers more deadly than the male”; the reporter
goes on to call them Palestine’s “secret weapon”; and says that their trainers
describe them as the new “Palestinian human precision bombs.” One Islamic
Jihad commander reportedly explains, “We discovered that our women could be
an advantage and one that could be utilized. . . . [Women’s bodies have] become
our most potent weapon” (Jaber 2003, 1). In this report, women’s bodies are
“secret weapons,” “human precision bombs,” and “potent weapons,” and the
means to fight a war machine. The image of the human precision bomb again
combines the rhetoric of technology and nature to produce “female suicide-
bombers more deadly than the male.”
 Kelly Oliver 7

Like the women involved in Abu Ghraib, shahidas (female martyrs) not
only unsettle assumptions about gender but also manifest age-old associations
between women and death. Images of pretty, young nineteen- and twenty-year-
old women torturing or killing, even killing themselves, transfix us with their
juxtaposition of life and death, beauty and the grotesque. Compare what the
Times calls their “ponytails” and “pretty smiles” to what has been described as
Sabrina Harman’s “cheerleader’s smile” (Black 2004, 4) or as Lynndie England’s
“perky grin” and “pixie” haircut (Cocco 2004, 51). If images of these American
women conjure fun-loving girls—“America’s sweetheart” or “cheerleaders”—
then images of Palestinian shahidas are portrayed as tragic rather than comic,
more masochistic than sadistic, sadly beautiful rather than perky. Within
Palestinian communities, shahidas are reportedly described as beautiful, pure,
and self-sacrificing; their images are printed on posters and pocket-sized icons
to be idolized (Victor 2003). While female interrogators transform from chaste
cheerleaders into whores, Palestinian shahidas become even more virginal in
their violent deaths.
Like the women torturers, these women killers leave us with the stinging
question of how our ideals of youth and femininity, or girls and women, can be
reconciled with such brutality? Yet our bewilderment, confusion, and indigna-
tion, as evidenced in the rhetoric of popular media, are symptoms of the return
of the repressed. For centuries, women have been associated with both beauty
and the grotesque; within the history of our literature, philosophy, and medi-
cine, they have occupied both the position of virgin and of whore. They have
been portrayed as using sex as a weapon of seduction that is figured as all the
more deadly because of its connection to nature. In a sense, we have always
imaged girls’ ponytails, haircuts, and smiles as dangerous lures.
Speaking perhaps to a deep-seated stereotype or a biological fact that has
repercussions for our psychic lives, in her book Army of Roses: Inside the World
of Palestinian Women Suicide bombers, Barbara Victor laments that “the most
mysterious aspect of the cult of death that has permeated Palestinian society,
especially when it comes to shahida, is the transition that each woman makes
from bearer of life to killing machine” (2003, 33). Victor’s rhetoric of a “tran-
sition from bearer of life to killing machine” repeats the slip from nature to
technology that makes images of these women so unsettling. She is mystified
at how bearers of life become killing machines; yet the association between
the mother and death seems central to a patriarchal imaginary within which
women’s life-bearing power is precisely what makes them so dangerous, not to
mention so mysterious and alluring. What Freud saw as the mystery of woman’s
life-bearing–death-giving sex that led him to call female sexuality a “dark
continent” (Freud 1993).
Reportedly, the actions of women suicide bombers have led several Islamic
clerics to proclaim that women, like men, can reach paradise as martyrs, despite
8 Hypatia

earlier beliefs that women could not be holy martyrs. Training women from
conservative religious groups, however, requires loosening restrictions on their
freedom of movement and contact with men outside their families. It also means
changing regulations on what they wear and on showing their bodies, which
men typically are not permitted to see, even in death (Daraghmeh 2003, 22).
When nineteen-year-old Hiba Daraghmeh blew herself up on behalf of Islamic
Jihad in May 2003, one influential cleric said that she didn’t need a chaperone
on her way to the attack and could take off her veil because “she is going to die
in the cause of Allah, and not to show off her beauty” (Sheik Yusef al-Qaradawi
quoted in Bennet 2003, 1). The conservative patriarchal religious restrictions
on women’s movements and bodies become fluid as leaders begin to imagine
the strategic value of women as weapons of war. On the morning of January 27,
2002, just hours before Wafa Idris, the first Palestinian woman suicide bomber
blew herself up, Yasser Arafat spoke to women in his compound at Ramallah
and told them, “Women and men are equal. . . . You are my army of roses that
will crush Israeli tanks” (Victor 2003, 19).
Like metaphors used to describe the American women prison guards, the
metaphor of women as an “army of roses” is a condensation of technology
and nature that figures women on the dangerous frontier between téchnê and
physis. They become beautiful but thorny flowers, armed with bombs that can
crush modern technologies of war; they represent nature’s threatening power
against modern technology.
Arafat also invoked the rhetoric of women’s equality to encourage women
to participate in violence. Like the “equal-opportunity abusers” at Abu Ghraib,
female suicide bombers have sparked a feminist debate among Palestinians over
the question of whether women should, as one reporter put it, “hop over con-
servative societal barriers to join the almost exclusively male ranks of suicide
bombers” (Daraghmeh 2003, 22). Like the feminist debates (or debates over
feminism) ignited by photos taken at Abu Ghraib, the appropriation of the
rhetoric of equality in order to justify women’s participation in violence and
warfare, especially suicidal forms, not only points to the fluidity of discourse but
also to problems inherent in the rhetoric of equality as it has been employed
by both feminists and conservative patriarchs waging war.
Just as metaphors of women and female sexuality as dangerous, or the lethal
condensation of artifice and nature is nothing new, the appropriation of the
rhetoric of equality has been used for centuries to justify military action and
imperialist occupation. Western governments still use it when it is conve-
nient to justify sending in “freedom fighters” to “liberate” societies branded
“backward” because of their treatment of women. In U.S. justifications for the
invasions in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan, we have seen what Gayatri
Spivak calls Western imperialist discourse of “saving brown women from brown
men” (Spivak 1988; Cooke 2002; Cloud 2003; Abu-Lughod 2002). Selective
 Kelly Oliver 9

appropriation of feminism and concern for women has become essential to

imperialist discourses. For example, at the turn of the nineteenth century,
English Lord Cromer, British consul general in Egypt, founded the Men’s
League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage in England at the same time he used
arguments about women’s oppression to justify the occupation of Egypt (Abu-
Lughod 2002, 784; Viner 2002; Ahmed 1992). And, in the 1950s, much of the
rhetoric used to justify French colonial rule in Algeria focused on the plight of
Algerian women, whose oppression was seen as epitomized by the veil (Abu-
Lughod 2002, 784; Larzeg 1994). We have seen a similar concern with the
veil in recent media used to justify military action in Afghanistan, where the
burka and veil became the most emblematic signs of women’s oppression. The
media was full of articles referring to the U.S. invasion as liberating Afghan
women by “unveiling” them and President George W. Bush talked about freeing
“women of cover” (Abu-Lughod 2002, 783). There is more to say about the
obsession with “unveiling” Muslim women, but that discussion will have to wait
for another time. For now, consider how conservative politicians employ, and
thereby trouble, feminist rhetoric even as they cut programs that help women,
including welfare, Planned Parenthood, and affirmative action.5
Recall that in her radio address just after the military campaign, Laura Bush
used Afghan women to justify the invasion: “Because of our recent military gains
in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. . . .
The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”
(quoted in Abu-Lughod 2002, 748). President Bush echoed this sentiment in
his 2002 State of the Union address: “last time we met in this chamber, the
mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbid-
den from working or going to school. Today women are free” (quoted in Cloud
2003).6 And an article in the San Francisco Chronicle associates Afghanistan
itself with woman, noting that “as women emerge from the shadows, so will
Afghanistan” (Ryan 2002, D3). In sum, the assimilation of the rhetoric of
women’s rights and equality in the name of violence by conservative Christians
as exemplified by the Bushes and conservative Muslims as exemplified by Islamic
Jihadist clerics embracing shahidas demonstrates that the struggle for women’s
rights and equality is as much a discursive struggle as a material one. As many
feminists have argued, conservative convolution of feminist rhetoric suggests
that the discursive constellation of rights and equality alone cannot account
for sociohistorical or material differences that govern if not determine our lives
and, perhaps more important, the meaning of those lives.
In her speech before UNESCO in December 2002, French intellectual Julia
Kristeva commented on shahidas: “Women are sent off to sacrifice and martyr-
dom in imitation of the warlike man and possessor of power, which contempo-
rary inquiry shows is a violation of Islam’s own principles. . . . Some currents
of classic Islam do not hesitate to pander to this alleged ‘equality’ between
10 Hypatia

the sexes, without ever envisaging the sexual and subjective difference of the
woman, revelator of new life values and creativity” (Kristeva 2002). Kristeva
was suggesting that shahidas represent the triumph of a culture of death that
values biology over biography, survival over meaningful life. Traditionally, in
both Islamic and Christian cultures, women have been associated with bio-
logical life and denied access to the biographical; they have been associated
with procreation as the survival of the species and not as the creation of new
values and new meaning for life. In different ways, then, fundamentalisms in
both traditions continue to victimize or ostracize women, who do not serve the
procreative function as circumscribed by patriarchal religious law.7
Fundamentalisms may use the rhetoric of women’s equality to valorize
women’s suicidal violence, but they do not give women true freedom to recre-
ate what it means to be a woman.8 What we need is not just the rhetoric of
equality, which has been used to justify violence, but rather a new discourse of
the meaning and joy of life, not life as mere biology but as biography. If women
have been freed from age-old restrictions on their freedom, restrictions that
justified their lives only in terms of procreative biology, then we need discourses
that provide new justifications for women’s lives that move beyond procreation.
Otherwise, at the extreme, women are free only to kill themselves.
We can read the shahida as a symptom of patriarchal restrictions within which
the only meaningful place left to women who do not conform to the ideals of
motherhood and femininity is martyrdom. She represents the return of the
repressed ambiguities of human procreation, of human life and death, which strad-
dling physis and téchnê on the frontier between biology and biography, between
being and meaning, cannot be assimilated into, or circumscribed by, social codes.
This ambiguous aspect of our existence has been relegated to women, maternity,
and female sexuality. And, as women begin to occupy the position that we have
built for them discursively, that is to say the position of deadly weapon, it should
be no surprise that the return of the repressed explodes in our face.
While fascinated by images of teenage women suicide bombers and women
torturers at Abu Ghraib, the teenage woman warrior who has most captured
American hearts is Jessica Lynch. Hers is not a story of attack but of self-defense
and ultimately of suffering and survival. Originally, media reports heralded
Lynch as a “female teenage Rambo” who fought off the enemy firing her rifle
until she ran out of ammo and in spite of bullet wounds engaged in a knife
fight before she was captured by Iraqi forces. Her story is now so altered that
it seems that her life was saved by Iraqi doctors who treated her with kindness
and not as a prisoner of war after she sustained injuries in a Humvee crash; she
neither fired her gun, stabbed any Iraqis, nor received any gunshot wounds or
abuse at the hands of Iraqis.
In spite of the changing story, Lynch is celebrated as a heroine seemingly
because she represents the best of American womanhood, whatever you take
 Kelly Oliver 11

that to be; she has become a Rorschach test for our ideals of both femininity and
girl power: she is a “princess,” “damsel in distress,” a teenage “female Rambo”
gunning down any man that gets in her way, the naïve “country girl” who grew
up in a hollow in West Virginia whose pen pals are a group of kindergarten kids,
“Miss Congeniality,” the “scrappy tomboy” who learned the ways of the woods
and survival from her “sexist” brother and father—“a strong girl bred from good
American stock” (Parker 2003, 21), and a “pretty blonde warrior” who suffered
for us and just wants us to acknowledge that she is a “soldier, too.”
“There’s a funny shift,” says military historian John A. Lynn. “We want
to fight wars but we don’t want any of our people to die and we don’t really
want to hurt anybody else. So Pvt. Lynch, who suffers, is a heroine even if she
doesn’t do much. She suffered for us” (quoted in Eig 2003, A1). In other words,
she is the perfect heroine because she represents feminine self-sacrifice, akin
to that of the Virgin Mary, who suffers for us. She symbolizes our pain, and it
is no accident that the power of this martyr image has everything to do with
her being a woman. More particularly, she is venerated for her eight days in an
Iraqi hospital because she is a seemingly innocent young pretty white girl, the
girl next door; while Shoshana Johnson, an African American woman captured
in the same skirmish and held for twenty-one days in various prisons and the
victim of abuse, remains in the shadows. Lynch’s response to her rescuers from
under her bedsheets—“I’m an American soldier, too”—when they tell her that
they are American soldiers who have come to protect her and take her home,
operates as a type of displacement for the confusion during Johnson’s rescue,
when American soldiers at first did not believe she was one of them and ordered
her down on the floor with her Iraqi captors.
Lynch, and to a lesser extent Johnson, became part of the military’s media
campaign. The press and the Pentagon alike wielded Lynch’s story not only to
shore up public support for the war but also to rally the troops on the ground.
According to Rick Bragg, Lynch’s biographer, rumors of Jessica’s capture and
torture made American soldiers “want to kill” and “proud” to do so (2003, 122).
In the words of one New York Times reporter, “When American forces were
bogged down in the war’s early days, she was the happy harbinger of an immi-
nent military turnaround: a 19 year old female Rambo who tried to blast her
way out of the enemy’s clutches, taking out any man who got in her way” (Rich
2003, 1). When these reports turned out to be false, metaphors of weapons,
human shields, and propaganda wars again turned up in the press. Journalists
began to figure Lynch and her dramatic rescue as “weapons” in the Pentagon’s
“propaganda war” to bolster American confidence in the military.
In addition, Bragg speculates that the Iraqis kept Lynch alive because she had
“propaganda” value for Saddam Hussein: “She was a pretty, blond American
soldier and would look good on television, if Saddam held on to power long
enough to use her as propaganda” (2003, 103). Bragg claims that Hussein’s
12 Hypatia

federal militia used Lynch as a “human shield” and the hospital where she was
being held as a safe haven, knowing that “the Americans would certainly not
bomb a hospital with a female U.S. soldier lying helpless in her bed. . . . She
was more than a prisoner of war” (119).
Journalist Nicholas Kristof also describes women as defensive weapons,
human shields that were used strategically in Iraqi. He says, “In the Muslim
world, notions of chivalry make even the most bloodthirsty fighters squeamish
about shooting female soldiers or blowing them up at checkpoints. For just that
reason, I asked a woman to sit beside me in the front seat while I drove on a
dicey highway in Iraq on the theory that befuddled snipers would hesitate to
fire” (2003, A 31).9 In addition to figuring women as offensive weapons of war
in the cases of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the shahidas, women also figure
as defensive weapons of war that can protect men. Even “bloodthirsty fighters”
will be “befuddled” by women’s presence.
The Lynch story evolved from the story of a teenage Rambo to the story of a
wounded helpless girl saved by Iraqis because she was blonde and pretty. Kristof
explained, “An Iraqi doctor felt so sorry for Jessica Lynch that he risked his life
to help rescue her, and that probably wouldn’t have happened if she’d been
a big, hairy, smelly Marine” (2003, A31). Or, in the words of Lynch’s brother
(quoted in Bragg 2003, 154), “Look at that face. Who isn’t going to fall in love
with that face?” We could say that the Jessica Lynch story became part of what,
in another context, Rey Chow has called the “King Kong Syndrome,” in which
beauty tames the beast and even the most bloodthirsty fall for a sweet-faced
white woman. As Chow says, “Herself a victim of patriarchal oppression[,] . . .
the white woman becomes the hinge of the narrative of progress, between enlight-
ened instrumental reason and barbarism” associated with the third world; “The
white woman is what the white man ‘produces’ and what the monster falls for”
(Chow 1989, 84, emphasis added). Given her status as a heroine, with TV docu-
mentaries and books about her, it seems that the monstrous enemy insurgents
and their doctors are not the only ones to fall for the helpless white woman;
the American public has greedily swallowed her bittersweet story, perhaps as a
tonic for war wounds and imperialist guilt.
In conclusion, women have been a central element in discursive constella-
tions revolving around recent military action in the Middle East, whether as
individuals supposedly representing all American women or all Muslim women,
as heroines or as scapegoats, as victims or torturers, as oppressed or as feminist
avengers. In all of the cases that I have touched on, women have figure as either
offensive or defensive weapons of war—and not just as weapons of war, but as
the most dangerous and threatening weapons. Within this rhetoric, a woman
can break even the most devout with just the threat of her sex; her ponytail and
pretty smile become deadly weapons; and with the charms of her vulnerability
and sweet face, she can subdue even the most bloodthirsty and win over the
hearts of friend and enemy alike.
 Kelly Oliver 13

The words of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof crystallize the
rhetoric of woman as weapon. He writes, “The only time I saw Iraqi men entirely
intimidated by the American-British forces was in Basra, when a cluster of men
gaped, awestruck, around an example of the most astoundingly modern weapon
in the Western arsenal. Her name was Claire, and she had a machine gun in
her arms and a flower in her helmet” (Kristof 2003, A31). Traditionally, bombs
and bombers have received female names. The B-29 bomber that dropped the
atom bomb on Hiroshima at the end of World War II was named after the pilot’s
mother, Enola Gay; atom bombs tested at the Bikini Atoll in summer 1946 during
the immediate postwar nuclear testing explosion were also named after women,
one after Hollywood “bombshell” Rita Hayworth’s most famous femme fatale
character, Gilda, and another named “Helen of Bikini.” Now, the most astound-
ing modern weapon in the Western arsenal is named Claire. The secret weapon of
modern warfare turns out to be a woman wielding a gun and a flower. She occupies
a place in our imaginary not so different from Hollywood’s femme fatale who,
with a flower in her hair and a gun in her purse, lures men to their deaths. She
herself is a deadly blossom . . . perhaps part of an army of roses. It should come
as no surprise that women continue to occupy the position that we have built
for them discursively, only in more explicit forms. Women become weapons, at
the extreme, literally blowing up, the bombshell become the bomb.

Notes

1. See Scripps 2004; Cuniberti 2004; D’Amico 2004; and Thomas 2004.
2. “Ok, I was getting into it before we got to the menstrual blood. Up until that
point it was sounding like a damn lap dance. . . . I can’t help it. I am a guy. . . . I guess
I have to admit to myself that I am sorta into that whole ‘women with power thing’
because this thing sounds like fun to me” (Steward 2005).
3. This photograph conjures the image of Christ’s crucifixion. Cloud (2004,
306n85) suggests that “the image of a hooded Iraqi standing on a crate, holding wires
he was told would electrocute him if he fell, seem to mimic images of veiled women in
Afghanistan.”
4. In ancient philosophy, téchnê refers to the art, craft, or skill involved in delib-
erately producing something, while physis refers to the natural world (www.philosophy-
pages.com).
5. “On his very first day in the Oval office, [George W. Bush] cut off funding to any
international family-planning organizations which offer abortion services or counsel-
ing (likely to cost the lives of thousands of women and children); this year he renamed
January 22—the anniversary of Roe v. Wade that permitted abortion on demand—as
National Sanctity of Human Life Day and compared abortion to terrorism: ‘On Sep-
tember 11, we saw clearly that evil exists in this world, and that it does not value life.
. . . Now we are engaged in a fight against evil and tyranny to preserve and protect life”
(Viner 2002, 21).
14 Hypatia

6. Note that Bush refers to the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan, not only
appealing to family but also to an association between Afghanistan itself and women
or girls.
7. As Kristeva speculates, and Victor’s Army of Roses corroborates, “these are amo-
rous disasters—pregnancy outside of marriage, sterility, desire for phallic equality with
the man (like the woman-nihilists who committed suicide in the cause of the Russian
Revolution)—which influence the vocation of shahidas” (Kristeva 2002). And while
the enlisted women whose photographs have been associated with war in Iraq may not
be amorous disasters, they are poor women who typically join the military to avoid the
poverty that can lead to various sorts of “amorous disasters.” For an analysis of these
“amorous disasters,” see Oliver 2007.
8. Kristeva says, “Fundamentalism dedicates those women it wants rid of to idealiza-
tion and the sacred cult, for the amorous life of these women, with their intolerable and
inassimilable novelties, marks the incapacity of the religious word (parole) to pacify the
ambivalent bonds of free individuals, emancipated of archaic prohibitions but deprived
of new justifications for their lives” (2002, 125).
9. In addition to their use as human shields, Kristof also details in this article sev-
eral ways in which women are useful in Muslim countries like Iraq as part of military
strategy.

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