Lessons Learned on Gender, Conflict and Peacebuilding: A USIP State of the Field Report by Kimberly Theidon

There is a growing body of work worldwide that seeks to better understand and strengthen the contribution of women and gender studies to conflict prevention, resolution and reconstruction activities. This State of the Field Report will assess what has been achieved to date in this growing field and identify strategic opportunities for advancing a research and policy agenda on gender, conflict and peacebuilding. 

There are many variables that generate, exacerbate, or deter violence.  Among those variables are gender identities — the masculinities and femininities forged in conflict and post-conflict settings. Constructing certain forms of masculinity and femininity is not incidental to militarism and armed conflict: rather, it is essential.  Militarism and conflict require a sustaining gender ideology as much as they do guns and bullets.  Exploring how violence is gendered and with what consequences allows us to bring into focus a series of compelling issues and to unsettle tidy distinctions between political and criminal violence, between the public and privates spheres, between conflict and post-conflict settings.

The authors note that following armed conflict, there is frequently an increase in violence against girls and women; this “post-violence violence” — what the authors have referred to elsewhere as the “domestication of violence” that frequently follows war — underscores the extent to which security itself is a gendered good.  The peace dividend is not equally divided, in part because the gender regimes forged in conflict settings are not explicitly dismantled when the guns are silenced. 

Additionally, there is a growing literature that seeks to complement macro explanations of war with an exploration of the processes that drive the perpetrators of violence and explain the variations in the forms and levels of violence affecting communities.  This literature is raising the importance of malicious opportunism and the cohesion and organizational capacities of civilians as well as armed groups.  Scholars are also building on these concepts to examine why gender-based violence is so prevalent in certain conflict-affected regions of the world, and why some communities recover relatively quickly from violence while others remain deeply fractured and insecure. 
Adding to the conceptual landscape is research focusing on states in transition, and how transitional justice mechanisms and institutional reforms do and do not incorporate a gendered perspective into their policies and programs.  Increasingly researchers and practitioners are calling for a greater understanding of the ways in which the benefits of DDR programs, Security Sector Reforms, microfinance programs, reparations programs and post-conflict reconstruction efforts differentially affect men and women, at times unintentionally reinforcing women’s subordinate status.  Research on structural reforms points to the contradictory logics and impact of policy and practice: from who is and is not defined as a former combatant to the recycling of violent men into police or armed forces; from reparations programs for victims of sexual violence that place the narrative burden on women and thus effectively exclude them from accessing benefits; from men who lay down their weapons only to join the vast numbers of the unemployed and turn their angry sense of emasculation on the girls and women in their lives — there is much we know and much yet to learn about the gendered dimensions of war and its legacies. 

The State of the Field Report will provide an assessment of research to date on gender, violence and conflict, and outline an agenda for future research, policy and interventions. 

When the Truth is Not Enough: The Politics of Reparations in Post-Truth
Commission Peru

This is a collaborative project, co-directed with human rights lawyer Lisa Laplante. This research is funded by the United States Institute for Peace and Praxis: An Institute for Social Justice.

“When The Truth Is Not Enough: The Politics Of Reparations In Post Truth Commission Peru” is an eighteen month study of the role of reparations in establishing peace, democracy and the rule of law in post-Truth Commission Peru. We explore how the implementation of reparations provides a vehicle for generating the recognition, civic trust and social solidarity that form the foundation of a meaningful democracy. Drawing upon the fields of critical legal studies, anthropology, and public policy, this study explores the political, moral, symbolic and legal complexities of implementing the reparations recommendations made by the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in August 2003. Our multi-sited study allows us to analyze the efforts of the Peruvian government, nongovernmental organizations, civil society sectors and victims’ associations as they struggle over the steps necessary to transform the truth commission recommendations from a document to a reality.

Truth commissions are currently hailed as key mechanisms for meeting the needs of justice in post conflict societies, and as a prerequisite to announcing a new democratic order. However, to date there has been scant ethnographic research regarding what must happen in order to ensure that the transition process initiated by a truth commission successfully continues after the commission concludes its truth-gathering work. Based on our previous research in Guatemala, South Africa and Peru, we believe there is an implicit contract established in the giving and receiving of testimonies. When survivors of political violence speak about their losses, they place a responsibility on their interlocutors to respond: testimony is a demand for acknowledgement and redress. Survivors of political violence come forth in part to reclaim their history as well as to demand a different sort of future. Clearly, the truth is not enough. Indeed, truth without consequences — without “affording a bridge to the future” — runs contrary to the goals of transitional justice. Instead, truth commissions must be followed by concrete measures such as prosecutions, reparations and structural reform not only to satisfy victims’ expectations of justice but also redress the serious harm caused them by structural injustices and political violence.

We will offer one of the few existing studies that examines the implementation of a post-truth commission reparations program. Our theoretical and practical examination of the social, legal and political challenges that arise out of the post-truth commission phase in Peru will produce insights and policy recommendations to inform the work of other transitional justice projects around the world. Our study examines the transitional justice package in Peru to see if this model effectively allows the state and its citizens to reckon with the past and to build a new future. We do not believe that nations “heal”; however, we do believe they can change, and that reparations are a key component in that transformation.

States of Concern: Coca, Conflict and Control in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley, Peru

Funding from the Social Science Research Council: Global Security and Cooperation and The Wenner Gren Foundation. This is a collaborative project with José Coronel Aguirre and interns from Praxis

“States of Concern: Coca, Conflict and Control in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley” is an ethnographically grounded study of alternative development, the administration of conflict, and forms of governmentality in the foremost coca growing region of Peru. We take the Apruímac and Ene Valley and the cocaleros’ movement as an organizing frame for examining how coca eradication efforts and the alternative development programs that accompany them create the conditions for a resurgence of political violence in a region characterized by multiple armed actors and massive discontent.

We understand governmentality as a way of shaping conduct and securing rule through a multiplicity of authorities and agencies inside and outside of the state, and at levels ranging from the transnational to the national to the administration of forms of life. We propose a multilevel analysis that will allow us to trace the shift from neocolonial disciplinary techniques to globalized regulatory regimes that take subjectivity and conduct as their fields of intervention and control.

The organizational innovations characteristic of the post-Cold War merging of aid, development and security call for a place-based study of how this emerging form of global governance is spatialized onto territory and the inhabitants therein. We argue for examining the structures of conflict and historicizing the violence in the VRAE. We emphasize the importance of regional histories when designing policy recommendations, convinced that “theoretically informed particularity” (Hale 2002) can lead to alternatives to alternative development.

We consider this one of the most pressing social issues in the Andean Region. Our proposed research in the VRAE provides an important comparative component to our research in Colombia and Ecuador by allowing us to analyze both the local and regional manifestations of coca, conflict and control. We believe that current counter-narcotics and anti-terrorism policies create the conditions for escalating violence; thus our research has an explicitly preventive aim. By conducting research with both the cocaleros as well as the myriad national and transnational entities with which they interact, we aim to build on people’s struggle for the defense of life and livelihood by generating policy alternatives to current counternarcotics and antiterrorism interventions.

Transistional Subjects: Demobilizing Combatants in Colombia

A key component of peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction is the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) of excombatants. DDR programs imply multiple transitions: from the combatants who lay down their weapons, to the governments that seek an end to armed conflict, to the communities that receive — or reject — these demobilized fighters. At each level, these transitions imply a complex and dynamic equation between the demands of peace and the clamor for justice. And yet, traditional approaches to DDR have focused almost exclusively on military and security objectives, which in turn has resulted in these programs being developed in relative isolation from the growing field of transitional justice and its concerns with historical clarification, justice, reparations and reconciliation. I am currently conducting research in Colombia, a case of great interest because the government is attempting to implement mechanisms of reparations and reconciliation in a "pre post-conflict" context, and to implement DDR on the terrain of transitional justice.