Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520237919
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520237919
- Pub. Date:
- 06/28/2004
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520237919
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520237919
- Pub. Date:
- 06/28/2004
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones / Edition 1
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520237919 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2004 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 373 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Lexile: | 1430L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sites of Violence
Gender and Conflict ZonesThe University of California Press
Copyright © 2004 Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-23791-9
Chapter One
IntroductionGender and Conflict in a Global Context
Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman
The events and aftermath of September 11 ineluctably dissolved the already precarious distinction between domestic sovereign space and more global space where transnational networks, international relations, multilateral institutions, and global corporations operate. Feminists have long argued that private/public distinctions serve to depoliticize the private domestic spaces of "home" compared to more public domains. The attacks have exposed the limits of understanding the United States as a "domestic" space, somehow bounded and separated from the processes and politics of economic, cultural, and political integration. Likewise, boundaries between combatants and civilians, battlefronts and civilian spaces, cease to have much meaning in light of 9/11. Such distinctions, however, have long ceased to exist in conflict zones beyond U.S. borders.
Throughout much of the world, war is increasingly waged on the bodies of unarmed civilians. Where it was once the purview of male soldiers who fought enemy forces on battlefields quite separate from people's homes, contemporary conflict blurs such distinctions, rendering civilian women, men,and children its main casualties. The violence of such conflict cannot be isolated from other expressions of violence. In every militarized society, war zone, and refugee camp, violence against women and men is part of a broader continuum of violence that transcends the simple diplomatic dichotomy of war and peace. This continuum of violence resists any division between public and private domains. Battering and wife beating occur in the homes of Canadian soldiers (Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre and Resolve Violence and Abuse Research Centre 2000), while the so-called "honor killing" of female family members continues in Iraqi homes, despite laws to the contrary (see Mojab, Chapter 5 of this volume). While "home" was once demarcated as a "private" space beyond the purview of public responsibility, violence perpetrated at home is increasingly understood as part of broader social, political, and economic processes that are embedded in state policies, public institutions, and the global economy.
This book forges connections between militarized violence that occurs before, during, after, and even in the absence of war. Sites of war and peace are ultimately linked; both can be sites of violence. Explicitly feminist analyses of gender in conflict situations address the politics of social and economic disparities and explore possibilities for changing power imbalances that include gender relations. This book presents original research illustrating feminist analyses grounded in particular conflict zones. Gender relations and identities are (re)produced by governments, militaries, militias, schools, sports, and media. Documenting the panoply of strategies that generate violence against civilian women and men in the name of the nation, the state, the economy, or the family is the first step toward changing these hegemonic, seemingly transparent notions of what it means to be a man or a woman in a given society. Conflict resolution, reconciliation, and prevention cannot begin until a lucid and comprehensive understanding of the gendered politics that perpetrate and perpetuate violence in the first instance is provided.
This book is motivated by several crucial and related circumstances. First, it is clear from the research presented here that gender relations have been deployed in sites of militarized conflict to incite, exacerbate, and fuel violence. Knowledge of the ways in which violence occurs provides crucial clues to its antecedents and consequences and ultimately may serve to prevent its repetition, particularly in the context of war. A common image in ethnic-nationalist conflicts, as well as in national liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, is the woman refugee gazing out hopelessly or witnessing the death of her child. Along with the woman victim, another prevalent war image is that of a woman with a rifle over her shoulder and a baby on her back, or, in similar fashion, images of nationalist Croatian or Serbian mothers and daughters protesting on the street to prevent relief trucks from reaching zones belonging to the "enemy." These prevailing war images of women have been largely spread by state institutions, media, and military organizations and have come to constitute iconic representations and/or symbols of women at/in war. As such, they tend to serve strategic, nationalist, or state purposes and tell us little about the diversity of women's experience during war, their role on the front lines, or their care in refugee camps.
A second compelling impetus for this book is the widespread incorporation of civilians into war. Very little attention to date has been paid to this highly gendered and racialized phenomenon. No longer are "women and children"-to use Cynthia Enloe's (1993: 165-66) apt expression-immune to or spatially separate from the waging of war. In other words, everyone is at the battlefront: "Total war has a thousand fronts. In such a war, everyone is at the front, even if one has never lain in a trench or fired a single shot" (Kapu^ciJski 2000: 183).
These war "fronts" of militarized conflict are constantly shifting, their boundaries permeated by powerful cultural, economic, and political processes of globalization. The rise of ethnic nationalisms, contests over land and mineral wealth, and struggles for power have emerged as post-Cold War cartographies of conflict on these front lines.
The ways in which war is waged are vastly different now than during the early and mid-twentieth century, when international humanitarian law, which outlines the rules of war, was drafted. Most contemporary wars occur within the borders of sovereign states, not between countries as they once did. Notions of what constitutes a conflict zone are similarly outdated. The idea that (feminized) civilian and (masculinized) military spaces are distinct and separate no longer holds. Civilian homes may be technically out of bounds according to the rules of war, specifically the Geneva Conventions, but in practice they are often targets. Noncombatants are supposed to be safeguarded from war, with fighting duties assigned to armed soldiers, yet civilians compose the vast majority of casualties in current conflicts. Whereas most casualties at the turn of the nineteenth century occurred among soldiers at the battlefront, civilian deaths and injuries constituted 60 to 80 percent of casualties at the end of the twentieth century (Boutwell and Klare 2000: 52). Other estimates are as high as 90 percent (Weiss 1999). One can no longer distinguish between the spaces of battlefield and the home front. "[G]ender links violence at different points on a scale reaching from the personal to the international, from the home and the back street to the maneuvers of the tank column and the sortie of the stealth bomber," writes Cynthia Cockburn in Chapter 2 of this volume.
The incorporation of civilians into contemporary conflicts has been a highly gendered practice. It has occurred on the finest spatial scale: that of the human body, a site always marked by relations of gender, class, nation, race, caste, religion, and geographical location. At a broader scale, wars persist as violent encounters between sovereign states, but increasingly these state-based international relations are complicated by more global concerns. Oil companies and states collaborate to secure lucrative sources of fuel and key access routes for their products at almost any cost. Economic crises precipitated by huge debt loads, currency devaluations, and new modes of governance have contributed to the rise of ethnic nationalisms. Diamonds and other mineral wealth provide the funds to purchase arms and fight for land or access to these natural resources in civil conflict. Movements for independence in a post-Cold War landscape incite military repression. The dynamics and strategies of waging war have changed, affecting people in disparate, yet predictable ways.
A third catalyst for this book, and one that laid the initial groundwork for the Women in Conflict Zones Network (the WICZNET or the Network), has been the massive scale of people's displacement due to conflict and subsequent research on the gendered experience of both conflict and asylum. Forced migration is a barometer of social, economic, and political struggle in a given place. Studies of the ways in which people's lives are uprooted and homes are forfeited in return for safety provide grounded insights into the otherwise abstract concepts of ethnicity, identity, state building, and citizenship. Several authors in this volume write about the lives of women and their families through the various stages of flight, exile, resettlement, and sometimes return (see, in this volume, Mojab, Chapter 5; Hyndman, Chapter 9; de Alwis, Chapter 10; Hans, Chapter 11; Kora,, Chapter 12). These stories highlight inequalities and injustices inherent in the exclusionary practices related to borders and boundaries and address the relation of violence and displacement to broader economic interests, nationalist claims, and militarized maneuvers. Refugees and internally displaced persons are often the fodder of militarized conflict. They are the casualties in struggles over land, minerals, nations, homelands, and justice.
Setting a Research Agenda
The WICZNET was founded in 1996 at York University in Toronto to explore the gendered complexities of militarized violence. During several encounters, this international and interdisciplinary group of feminist scholars, activists, and policy makers deliberated concepts, argued definitions, and shared their insights on conflict zones around the world. Working across the activist-researcher divide was a central goal of the Network. One of the primary and ongoing questions for the Network has been how to define a conflict zone. An early commentary from one Network member proposed that a conflict zone is "a series of relative locations" that are subject to constant redefinition: "Dislocated by acts of violence, unable to return to their previous homes, people's relative locations change. As a result, locations that were once nearby become far away, i.e. a place where help is available can become a location where acts of violence occur" (Preston 1996).
Space constitutes social relations and is produced by such relations. Spaces imbued with meanings become places-places that are more than containers within which social processes occur (Massey 1995; see also Preston and Wong, Chapter 7 of this volume, and de Alwis, Chapter 10 of this volume). As groups struggle to shape the meanings of spaces and create places, they reconstitute and transform social relations. Conflicts are maintained at multiple spatial scales-local, national, and international; to acknowledge "place" is to enable women and men to move past their experiences of conflict and transform these places. Preston cites the example of the Madres de Mayo in Argentina, a group of mothers whose sons had been "disappeared" during the Dirty Wars in that country. By seizing and occupying the space of the Plaza de Mayo, one of the most important public spaces, this group transformed many Argentinians' views about women's "place" in political participation (Preston 1996).
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-Yugoslavia war not only deepened our understanding of comparative research but challenged, in a very poignant way, our attempts to define a conflict zone. In early 1999, as we organized a Network meeting with our colleagues in the region of the post-Yugoslav states, NATO bombings began in Serbia and Kosova/o. The conflict in this region spread to western Europe and North America, where many people who considered themselves to be outside the conflict zone began to sense that they were very much within the boundaries of war (see Edith Klein, Chapter 13 of this volume). As described in Giles et al. (2003: xiii), the impact on the Network was immediate. Attempts to organize a meeting with Network members in the region under attack were abandoned. For those geographically outside the region, it was difficult to fathom that our colleagues were being targeted not only by nationalists in their own regions but by bombs dropped by the armies of NATO countries in which other members of the Network lived. Notwithstanding these difficulties (both practical and political), Network members succeeded in maintaining constant and often terrifying contact. Our solidarity with each other and with other antinationalist feminists around the world at that time was a form of defiance against NATO aggression, as well as the violence perpetrated by the Milolevi regime in Kosova/o. The Network was also a conduit for members in the post-Yugoslav states to reach the rest of the world, circulate information, and make requests.
The Network's early debates and discussions focused on four interrelated analytical domains: (1) ethic nationalism and gender relations; (2) violence in the context of women's rights; (3) gender and citizenship; and (4) women's empowerment in war. Members of the Network also explored the differences and commonalities of research findings across and within various field sites, leading to the development of a comparative and methodological framework for collaborative research. Our work in this book analyzes the gendered, nationalized, racialized, and economic dimensions of violent conflict and the ways these phenomena shape the waging of contemporary war. Since 1996, these four analytical problems formed the basis of our substantive work within the Network. The research questions, however, have changed over the course of collaboration, as the researchers themselves have "rooted and shifted" (Yuval-Davis 1997: 130) to reach new understandings and feminist perspectives on the politics of gender in conflict zones. The feminist process of "rooting and shifting," in which "each participant in the dialogue brings with her the rooting in her own membership and identity, but at the same time tries to shift in order to put herself in a situation of exchange with women who have different membership and identity," is part of what Italian activists have called the "transversal politics of coalition building" (Yuval-Davis 1997: 130, 17). It is a strategic move to navigate between an essentialist (and false) belief in universal sisterhood and an apolitical relativist position that emphasizes people's differences over connections-both of which reduce the ground for feminist political collaboration and change. "The process of shifting should not involve self-decentring, abandoning one's political and other sources of belonging.
Continues...
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