Gendering agency in transitional justice

Björkdahl, Annika; Selimovic, Johanna Mannergren

doi:10.1177/0967010614552547

Cited by 80 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…15 Nevertheless a gendered gaze upon agency reveals that it may shift in form, expressions and strategies. 16 Silence, it has been argued, can be a fully agential act, and that 'silence is part of creating and re-creating social realities as much as voice and language'. 17 Agency is always about power relations, and to exercise agency is to bring about effect of some sort on the world.…”

Section: The Agency Of Voice and Silencementioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered silences in post-conflict societies: a typology

Selimovic

2018

Peacebuilding

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This article offers new theoretical insights into the relationship between silence, gender and agency. Bridging feminist research and critical peace research, the article considers the gendered practices of making and breaking silence in the aftermath of war and armed conflict. A typology is proposed along the axes of (a) disabling and enabling silences, and (b) social remembering and forgetting. Drawing on a number of illustrative cases, the typology is used to identify and categorise modes and functions of gendered silence, and show how oxymoronic fluctuations between silence and speech play out in the everyday. Silence can be employed for subordination and erasure, but can also be a strategy for coping with a precarious everyday, a form of tacit communication of ambiguity as well as a claim-making strategy. Unpacking the gendered dimensions of silence reveals power dynamics with deep implications for societies transitioning from war. ARTICLE HISTORY

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Section: The Agency Of Voice and Silencementioning

confidence: 99%

Gendered silences in post-conflict societies: a typology

Selimovic

2018

Peacebuilding

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“…Gender needs to be a powerful lens through which we view the world. Feminists point out that adding gender in an instrumental way is fraught with risks, from the essentialist picture of women as passive, maternal peace-lovers (Sylvester 2002, 207-223); to the failure to ensure a gender-just peace (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic 2015). This is more than merely a theoretical or conceptual issue: how gender is conceptualized profoundly affects the practice of peacebuilding interventions.…”

Section: A Corrective To a Binarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The inclusion of a gendered lens from a feminist perspective can add noticeable texture and depth to analyses that utilize concepts and approaches from critical peacebuilding. Annika Björkdahl and Johanna Mannergren Selimovic (2015), for example, draw upon ideas from critical peacebuilding about 'the local turn' (cf. Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013) and investigate the implications of theorizing such agency as gendered.…”

Section: A Corrective To a Binarymentioning

confidence: 99%

TheJournal of Intervention and StatebuildingTen Years on: Critical Reflections and Stimulating Ideas on an Evolving Scholarship

Aaronson¹,

Ahram²,

Duffield³

et al. 2016

Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding

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The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISB's editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that time, what they would do differently (with hindsight), or how they see their articles contributing to current debates on intervention and statebuilding. We have selected one article per volume, and we have ordered the contribution starting from volume 1 (2007) to volume 9 (2015). The articles will be made open access for the year, and we highly recommend (re-)reading the original articles along with the comments from the authors. Strong data provided by Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper support the thesis of the limits of the democratization that can be brought about by foreign powers. In their study 'Lessons from the Past: The American Record on Nation Building', they examined 18 US interventions seeking to promote democratization by coercive regime change prior to the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They found that 13 failed to produce long-term democratic rule, including sustained attempts in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. The five successful interventions include a tiny country (Grenada); one that is far from clearly democratic (Panama); Italy (in which the US did not play much of a role), and two that are indeed great successes: post-World War II Germany and Japan (Pei and Kasper 2003).I hence set out to ask what sociological conditions set these cases apart from the others, and whether these might be reproduced in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. I found that these conditions include (a) cessation of all hostility, (b) a high level of domestic security, and (c) local acceptance of the foreign occupation and the democratization drive. In addition, these nations had (d) a strong national unity, (e) competent government personnel, and (f) a low level of corruption. Furthermore, they had (g) strong economic © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.JOURNAL OF INTERVENTION AND STATEBUILDING, 2016 VOL. 10, NO. 1, 3-24 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17502977.2015 fundamentals, including strong industrial bases, established infrastructure, educated populations, and vigorous support for science and technology, corporations, business and commerce. Their (h) cultural values included hard work, high levels of saving, and other forms of self-restraint and capacity to defer gratification, essential for democratic development. (i) Finally...

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“…We ask, does the public recognition of wartime sexual violence and women's suffering challenge the norms and habits of masculine nationhood and pave the way for a new start free of patriarchal hierarchies? Or does it entrench a gendered war “metanarrative” (Björkdahl & Mannergren Selimovic, , p. 172) and with it, unequal gender relations?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%