Literature on gender in transitional justice (TJ) has tended to focus on women as victims of sexualised violence. But this study aims to contribute to more nuanced and inclusive analysis. Gender cannot be seen simply as a descriptive category of victims. The roles of men and women in the context of TJ are multifaceted and interrelated. Incorporating gender into analysis of TJ can act as a powerful critical tool.
TJ refers to the process of dealing with the aftermath of violent conflicts and systematic human rights abuses in order to provide conditions for a peaceful future. It makes use of mechanisms such as national and international tribunals, truth commissions, memory work, reparations and institutional reform. In its early stages, the gendered dimensions of TJ were largely unrecognised and remain under-researched. There has been a tendency to equate gender with issues of sexual violence.
Incorporating a gender perspective into TJ encourages reflection on underlying theoretical, political and ideological premises. The notion of ‘gendering’ TJ has defined a range of approaches:
- At a basic level, gendering TJ has meant identifying and addressing the exclusion of women from national TJ frameworks. This exclusion means that women’s potential to contribute to the reconstructive process remains unused, and their suffering unrecognised.
- Another body of analysis focuses on reparations. It analyses the specific forms of victimisation of women in order to understand their specific needs for redress.
- A further approach has focused on femininity and masculinity, rather than on the socio-political and legal categories of women. Some have advocated more ‘feminine’ ways of achieving justice and seeking healing; others view violence as a social practice embedded in masculinity.
- A critical feminist approach has suggested that TJ is deeply implicated in the patriarchal and neo-liberal structures of governance.
Incorpoating gender into analysis of TJ can act as a powerful critical tool, raising important questions: What constitutes a crime? What constitutes an appropriate way of rendering TJ? Further implications are that:
- The inclusion of sexualised violence in TJ mechanisms is a mixed blessing. It can reduce women to targets of one particular crime and construct them as perpetual victims, fixing their social positions in a newly emerging society.
- TJ tends to focus on abuses perpetrated in public by combatants or security forces. For many women, however, violence during repression or war occurs in the ‘private’ sphere of the home. Feminist perspectives also challenge the dichotomy of ‘before’ and ‘after’ war violence. For many women, violence continues in many forms and a lack of security impinges on the roles they can assume in public life.
- Being granted the status of a victim in TJ depends on the opportunity structures that constrain and enable subjects. If these opportunity structures are not in place, for example due to stigma or taboo, then subjects can remain powerless.
- Through its focus on immediate agency, TJ fails to address complex issues of complicity. These include widespread tolerance of human rights violations by the public, and external actors’ economic, moral and military support for repressive regimes.
