Tag: gender

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“Don’t Entangle the Peace”: Duque’s Antagonistic Politics towards Colombian Transition to Peace

On By Sonia

Asserting his intention to build a peace that unites the country, Colombian president Duque announced on March 10, 2018, his decision not to sign the statutory law aimed at ruling the functioning of the Especial Jurisdiction to Peace (JEP). This judicial body is a mechanism of transitional justice created through the peace agreement signed between the Colombian Government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas in 2016. Its main purpose is to provide justice for victims of the most serious crimes committed in the context of the internal armed conflict, in particular, crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes. Therefore, the JEP is responsible for delivering criminal justice, while still embedded in a system of transitional justice whose main focus is restorative rather than punitive. This means for the JEP that it must strive to privilege the victims’ right to truth and reparation by inciting the perpetrators to acknowledge their culpability and to repair the victims in exchange for lighter sentences than those they would receive in an ordinary court. From March 15, 2018, when the JEP started its operations until March 2019, it has obtained the commitment of at least 9,699 guerrilla members and 1,973 militaries to appear before it. However, as Duque claimed that six articles of the statutory law were whether violating the rights of the victims or leaving open the door to impunity, it is not surprising that Duque’s refusal to sign the draft law has caused alarm bells to ring.

© juanitaenelcongreso.com

Thousands of voices who support the peace agreement, including groups of retired militaries, have gathered in social media and public spaces around slogans and hashtags such as  #NoEnredenLaPaz (Do not entangle the peace) or #yodefiendolaJEP (I stand with the JEP). According to them, Duque’s position is putting in jeopardy the success of the Peace Accord. Yet, the lack of an own legal framework, resulting from Duque’s decision, does not prevent the JEP from ruling, as it can keep working in the light of relevant case law and the available constitutional rules. Against this background, how can Duque’s politics vis-à-vis the JEP, and especially in regard to the Peace Accord, be interpreted?

There is a shared view among public opinion that a turning back to war with the FARC is unlikely, all the more so given the achievements of the demobilization and disarmament of FARC guerrillas. According to Insight Crime, as of December 2018, more than 13,000 guerrilla members had demobilized. What is certain, though, is that the impact of Duque’s decision resides in its ability to trigger a climate of legal uncertainty in the implementation of the Peace Accord. However, is this effect a random outcome? Or, is it telling of an antagonistic politics aimed at undermining the capabilities of the system of transitional justice to bring about sustainable peace? A closer look at Duque’s politics towards the mechanisms of transitional justice through an intersectional lens of gender, class and location shows that Duque’s antagonistic politics is not so much a move against peace. Rather, he is deploying an antagonistic politics against the transformative dimensions included in the terms of Colombia’s transition to peace set out through the Havana Accord in 2016.

Understanding the Rationale behind Duque’s Flawed Objections

Broadcasted nationally on March 10, Duque’s refusal to sign the draft law did not come out of the blue. Indeed, before Duque’s objections went public, his political godfather and leader of the opposition to the Peace Accord, the hard right-wing ex-president Alvaro Uribe, posted a tweet asserting that the best that Duque could do was to eliminate the JEP. However, the strong signals sent by local actors and the international community allowed some sectors of Colombian public opinion to remain hopeful that the JEP will finally get a legal framework of its own. For instance, the JEP has been incorporated into Colombian law and, insofar as the debate and critiques to the JEP have arisen, the international community and the International Criminal Court (ICC) have immediately reiterated their support to the JEP. The role of the ICC in this debate must be considered through the lens of the principle of positive complementarity through which, briefly speaking, the ICC induces States parties to comply with their obligation to investigate and prosecute crimes domestically (Bjork and Goebertus 2014). This international support added to the role played locally by Colombian Constitutional Court which, after evaluation of the draft law, had already delivered a favorable decision on its constitutionality. Indeed, the Court’s decision took off the table the possibility that Duque could invoke the unconstitutionality of the law as an argument to justify his negative decision. Despite this, Duque did not resist the pressure to meet the expectations of his political godfather, and neither did he lose the opportunity to recapture its hard-line constituency. Finding a way around, Duque opted to refuse approval by challenging six articles of the law. But indeed, these aspects had already been revised by the Constitutional Court. It is therefore, to say the least, clear that Duque has provoked a clash between the executive and the judiciary powers in which, as Rodrigo Uprimny and Juanita Goebertus suggest, the executive power attempts to revive a discussion on issues about which the Constitutional Court has already given its final decision. 

Duque’s objections were rejected by the Chamber of Representatives a week ago. But as the decision of the Congress is still pending, the UN Special Representative for Colombia, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, has urged Duque’s Government to move forward in passing a statutory Law for the JEP:

“The Secretary-General has called for prompt action by all concerned to ensure that a Statutory Law consistent with the Peace Agreement is put in place as soon as possible.  This Statutory Law is the last missing element of the legal framework for the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and a necessary one to ensure that this institution can operate with the necessary independence and autonomy”

UN Special Representative Carlos Ruiz

The chances that Duque’s objections obtain Congress’ approval are few. But it is worth referring to the objection touching on the criterion of prioritization. According to this criterion, the JEP should give priority to the most representative and severe crimes, which is explained by the large number of crimes committed throughout a conflict that has lasted more than half a century. If Duque’s objection is upheld, all the guerrilla fighters should be tried by the JEP, which most likely will result in the overburdening of the transitional justice system and therefore in its collapse. Not surprisingly, it is asserted that Duque’s objections deter guerrilla combatants from demobilizing and seek the failure of the JEP.

The Peace Accord is constitutionally shielded as the Colombian Constitutional Court issued in October 2017 a ruling which states that the next three governments must comply with its implementation. But this does not mean that disagreements over the Peace Accord and its implementation have ceased to exist. During 2017, presidential members of Duque’s political party, the Democratic Center (hereafter DCP), pledged to undercut the Peace Agreement, whereas Duque asserted that once elected he will not destroy but reform it. Once in office, however, Duque has gradually aligned his politics with the practices and discourses of the DCP.  I will provide some examples that show how Duque and his Party have specifically targeted institutions and mechanisms of transitional justice performing what could be termed as antagonistic politics against transition to peace. 

Submitted to the Congress in September 2018, an initiative prompted by the DCP sought to create a separate tribunal for the militaries, so that they and other members of state security forces did not have to appear before the same court as that of the guerrilla members. Underlying this initiative was the idea spread through social media according to which the peace accords were a means to besmirch the honor of the militaries. In terms of the DCP, the JEP would put national heroes on the same footing as the guerrilla members. Although this attempt failed to win Congressional approval, the amplitude of the debate in public forums and in the media allowed the DCP to pay lip services to  their hard-line constituencies, as it made those militaries who support the peace process look as subordinated and kneeled.

Another target of Duque’s administration antagonism against the peace accords has concerned the program of coca substitution and rural development initiatives (PNIs). This program has sought to bridge the social inequality gap between urban and rural territories as well as to tackle the drug trafficking industry, a dangerous mix which has permitted the Colombian armed conflict to persist. The program entails to offer to coca farmers and their families a way out of dependency on coca bush cultivation. Along with granting financial incentives to the families who join the program, the PNIs is linked with development measures such as the building of social and economic infrastructure in the regions that have been most severely affected by the conflict. Viewed as one of the peace agreement’s transformative measures and as a flagship engagement of the Juan Manuel Santos administration, the voluntary substitution of coca crops has provided enhanced opportunities for transitional justice to not only tackle territorial inequalities but to bring about social and gender justice. By 2018, more than 77 thousand families have enrolled in the program and it has allowed the issue of more than 1,065 land titles to small farmers, 44% of whom are women. Such figures speak of the transformative potential of the PNIs to tackle a crucial and historically entrenched marker of gender inequality, specifically women’s access to land. For those populations living in rural drug trafficking areas, the almost only form of governance they have ever known is the alternation in power of armed actors, whether the Colombian army, the paramilitaries or guerrilla groups. Therefore, the PNIs represents as well a chance to bring holistic governance and justice to civilian populations, whose lives have been defined by a patriarchal military rule.

Certainly, however, two main challenges threaten the sustainability of the PNIs. On the one hand, emerging criminal bands (BACRIM) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) are taking over the control of drug trafficking areas formerly controlled by the FARC. But not less concerning is the announcement of the Duque administration to re-integrate forced manual eradication and to resume glyphosate spraying which was banned by the Constitutional Court in 2015. Duque’s securitarian approach against coca farmers has led ex-president Santos to intervene before the Constitutional Court in order to defend the focus on voluntary substitution. Meanwhile, on the ground, thousands of peasants are rallying against the return of glyphosate and the underfunding of the coca crops substitution program by Duque’s government, which as Insight Crime asserts has left “100,000 families in limbo”.

The Democratic Center: Its right-wing Populism and the Danger of its Negationist Discourse

The above examples are illustrative of the ways in which Duque’s politics of peace are undermining social, cultural and economic transformations that the transition to peace was aimed at bringing about. Yet, symbolic mechanisms of transition have not been spared from Duque’s antagonistic politics towards peace. In a move that has been described as an attempt to re-write the history of the conflict, Duque appointed as new director of the Center of Historical Memory (CHM), the researcher and historian Dario Acevedo. Known for his negationist statements about the Colombian armed conflict, Acevedo’s perspective echoes Uribe’s discourse according to which Colombia has faced a terrorist menace and not an armed conflict. Created in 2011 through the Victims’ Law, the CMH has the mission “to investigate and to document the atrocities that took place in the context of the internal armed conflict.” So, as soon as Acevedo was appointed in February 2019, intellectuals’ and victims’ associations quickly manifested their disagreement, raising the question of whether a researcher who negates the armed conflict is the right person to lead the CMH to accomplish its task.

The implications that Acevedo’s negationism might entail in allowing or preventing victims’ right to truth are still uncertain. What is certain, though, is that the construction of memory of the conflict is an aspect in which the political dimension of transitional justice and peacebuilding is more visible. Willing or not, memory is produced through agonistic processes in which there will always be moments of conflict regarding, for instance, the terms of the narration, its time framework, the categories it includes, the voices it allows to speak, as well as the methodologies and means through which memory is produced and represented. The Center of Historical Memory has been recognized for its independence from the government in office but also for its participatory methodologies and for giving room to a plurality of voices. However, according to the members of the Democratic Center, the CMH’s research agenda has until now being oriented by a leftist perspective. In their view, the CMH has given bigger weight to the role of paramilitaries in the conflict while devoting less effort in documenting the violence of the conflict undertook by the guerrillas. Bearing this critique in mind, it is reasonable to be concerned about the politics of memory that Acevedo’s work and the Duque administration are aimed at producing.

In a recent paper published by Peter Verošek on the politics of memory, the author draws attention on a contemporary trend driven by populist regimes which seeks to impose a “glorious national past” by portraying those who contradict this kind of narrative as traitors. Reflecting on Verošek’s work, one cannot help but think about the populist reactions of ex-president Uribe against ex-president Santos. Since 2011, when the Santos government recognized the armed conflict and the victims, thereby paving the way for a dialogue with the FARC, Uribe has slandered Santos labeling him as a traitor. A year later, when Santos engaged in peace talks with the FARC, Uribe expressed his rage by portraying the peace process as a surrender of the country to Castro-Chavism.

Investigating the experience of the victims and survivors is much more than collecting facts about the past. It is about reflecting on the causes and making sense of the violence by locating it in a historical and political frame. Actualizing the right to reparation and guarantees of non-repetition that are due to the victims involves building a perspective of the past in which a plurality of voices are represented and which does not erase local interpretations. It is through this agonistic dialogue that victims and survivors obtain redress and societies might know and address the causes of violence, so as to ensure that it will not happen again. To frame the violence of the conflict, however, in the limited context of a terrorist menace overshadows the violence from its social and political causes, whereas it reduces the experience and suffering of the victims as being the result of madness. The spread of such vision, prompted by Duque’s party, undermines sustainable peace as it ends by delegitimizing the needs and efforts to transform power relations of class, ethnicity, location, gender or political affiliation that the Colombian transitional justice system is called to build up.   

Duque’s antagonistic politics towards peace is telling of the political and therefore inherent conflictual condition of peacebuilding and transitional justice. Underlying this condition is the fact that the building of peace implies making choices and transforming relations of power. Duque’s antagonistic politics represents an articulation of interests that contests these transformations. This contestation could be legitimate and should have a place in an agonistic dialogue. But if societies are seriously engaged in achieving sustainable peace, this dialogue should seek the reform and consolidation of peacebuilding rather than to induce the failure and collapse of its mechanisms and institutions.

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How War and Militarism Are Terrorizing Women in Ukraine

On By Sara

Yesterday, Ukrainian neo-Nazis stormed a European lesbian conference due to be held in the capital city, Kyiv, with the aim of shutting down the gathering before it even starts. Using tear gas and armed with placards, the ultra-right wing ‘protestors’ have spent days hounding the hotel where the conference is to be held, including smashing hotel windows and spray-painting homophobic graffiti. Picket signs read “Go back to hell, sodomites” amongst other unsavoury sentiments.

This targeting of the lesbian conference is just the latest in a string of violence perpetrated by neo-Nazis in Ukraine against women and the LGBQ+ community, which has become increasingly frequent in the last few years. Women and LGBQ+ are not the only targets of this violence – last year, the targeted attacks against Roma in Ukraine by ultra-right wing nationalists made international headlines. Less reported on are the similarly systematic harassment and intimidation of immigrants and other ethnic minorities in the country.

In a country like Australia, we would have a hard time imagining that such harassment, violence, and intimidation against women, sexual and ethnic minorities could become so commonplace. But I think Ukraine is a litmus for the rest of the world in terms of how quickly the polarization of politics can become lethal, and threaten to undo nearly 80 years of human rights advances.

The reason this far-right wing violence has become practically acceptable in Ukraine has to do with the civil war that has affected the country for nearly 5 years and the fusing of militarism, masculinity, and the state that enables the policing of the gender order by these groups to take place.

Tracing the story of war, militarism, and the rise of a particularly violent and aggressive form of neo-Nazi, militarized masculinity in Ukraine requires us to go back a few years.

In 2013, the country was deeply divided between ‘East’ and ‘West’ (or perhaps better said ‘Rest’) on the geopolitical orientation of the country. A very large number of people, particularly in the capital city and Western regions, were deeply upset with the government and with the economy, and held hopes that a new economic arrangement under negotiation with the EU would improve conditions. When the Yanukovich government suddenly reversed its position and refused to sign the EU deal, it sparked mass protests in Kyiv and around the country, which culminated in the 2014 Revolution now known as ‘Euromaidan.’

Euromaidan came under heavy siege from the Ukrainian government. The violence perpetrated against protestors was a strong impetus for many to commit what time, energy, and resources they had to support the movement. But, as with any violence, it also attracted a certain kind of man in droves, seemingly seduced by the opportunity to wield and use weapons and act as masculine protectors. Many of them shared political views that would place them far on the right side of the political spectrum, fostered and developed for many through their love of football (but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

While by no means the majority of participants in the protest, these violent men soon gained prominence and prestige as the ‘heroes’ of Euromaidan. Volodymyr Ishchenko, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, has been tracing the influence of the far-right in Ukraine since Euromaidan. He noted early on that despite their media prominence, the values espoused by the far-right did not reflect the general values of those participating in the protests. Yet, their apparent heroism has allowed for the normalization and even valorization of these extreme views.

Now, the true impetus or cause of the civil war is contested and I’ll reserve my views for now, since the important thing to note for this analysis is how, as heroes of the Revolution, these far-right groups soon became national war heroes for volunteering to take their arms and transfer their violence towards their new enemies – the separatist forces in Donbas. With historical factors and the revolution leaving the armed forces in disarray, when the separatists declared independence in Donetsk and Luhansk regions and seized government buildings by force, the Ukrainian government depended on groups of civilian men who formed ‘volunteer battalions’ to source their own weapons, mobilize to the front line, and fight for the territorial integrity of the state.

Since then, though small in number, these militant far-right groups of men have become an increasingly powerful political force in the state and the government has proven itself unable or unwilling to reign in their violence when it is directed internally at civilians far from the front lines of the civil war. To the neo-Nazis, the enemies are one in the same. According to one with whom I spoke for my own research, the enemy against whom they fight is “homosexuals, paedophiles, and communists.” Those enemies do not just exist in the armed units of the separatist forces, but, by their rationale, in all aspects of Ukrainian society and have the potential to threaten the cohesion and stability of the state anywhere at anytime.

As such, it has become increasingly dangerous to be not only left-wing, but liberal in any sense of the word in Ukraine. In such a situation, the rights of women and of sexual and ethnic minorities are facing quick erosion. Not only are these groups systematically targeted by far-right groups, but so too are the formerly mainstream, acceptable demands now being de-legitimized. For example, far-right groups harassed and attacked organizers of Ukraine’s International Women’s Day march, arguing that IWD is a ‘Soviet holiday’ and that women should be celebrated on Mother’s Day, instead.

Certainly, as we have seen with the recent Christchurch terror attack, the values and sentiments expressed by the far-right are not confined to Ukraine. There is a rising polarization of politics, globally. We have to stop thinking of the violence perpetrated by far-right militant men in the West as “lone wolf” attacks and begin placing their violence within the context of militarism, misogyny, and xenophobia that unites their vision of the world and glorifies violence perpetrated against women and minorities.

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A Gender Analysis of the Christchurch Terrorist Attack

On By Sara

I spent the morning of Saturday, 16th March the way many in Australia and New Zealand did: glued to the morning news, watching hours of analysis regarding the previous day’s terrorist attack in Christchurch, NZ. That morning, it was still believed multiple individuals were involved, but because of his livestream, the focus was on Brenton Tarrant, a 28-year old Australian man deeply embedded in the far-right movement.

After several middle aged, white male analysts were rolled out from Universities across Australia to talk about the how and why of this attack, the absence of a gender analysis was striking. How, in 2019, do so many experts in terrorism studies still not look at masculinity as a factor that drives these attacks?

This question drove me to post to Twitter that a gender analysis was needed.

While I appreciate the effort one individual went to to look up my Academia.edu profile to private message me and mansplain why I was wrong about the need for such an analysis, I must respectfully disagree. So, this post is a preliminary discussion based on my cursory glance at Tarrant’s manifesto, The Great Replacement, to unpack some of what this sort of gender analysis may reveal.

A fixation on reproduction is about control of women’s bodies.

Most of Tarrant’s manifesto is focused on what he calls “The Great Replacement,” which hearkens to a popular right-wing conspiracy theory that holds the white race (specifically, Europeans) is in decline and going to be overtaken by non-Europeans. This replacement is due to declining fertility rates in the West compared to, in the views of the beholders of said theory, robust fertility rates of non-Europeans.

Sure, at first glance, this would seem to have nothing to do with gender. But just as fascists in the 1930s held, such obsessions over fertility rates belie an underlying desire to control women’s bodies and most often go hand-in-hand with beliefs that feminism is ultimately to blame for the decline in fertility rates (NB. I don’t disagree that feminism and/or the advancement of women’s rights correlates and even causes declining fertility rates, but we can debate the merits of this another time).

If one were to probe Tarrant about how he thinks the Great Replacement might be halted, I would hazard a guess that immigration controls is just one step. Most who hold these views also espouse so-called ‘family values’ ideas about sex roles.

The White Male Saviour and Militarized Masculinity

The second key area ripe for a gender analysis is a further exploration of the conditions that have produced a vast and growing number of disaffected, middle-class men in the world who find the opportunity to pick up a gun and perpetrate mass violence an attractive alternative to their everyday lives. As I wrote in a 2014 article published in IFJP:

Changes in global economic and political processes have affected gender relations in domestic contexts, resulting in traditional entitlements being lost by some men (True 2012). Efforts to resist the globalization of these orders by marginalized men have increasingly relied on a resurgence of domestic patriarchy through militarization, problematizing neighboring masculinities or appealing to overt symbolic expressions of a distinct masculinity defined in cultural terms (Kimmel 2005). For many men who lack access to the opportunities of the formal international economy, illegal economic activity represents an alternative means to pursue wealth and attempt to attain the status afforded to the “economic man.” Because economic success is so closely tied to men’s social value, efforts to resist the hegemonic effects of globalization have also become organized chiefly around notions of gender. Violence may not only serve to resist oppressive economic and political conditions, but is also an alternative mode of asserting masculinity and reestablishing patriarchy to benefit men (Kimmel 2005, 416).

Meger (2014) “Toward a Feminist Political Economy of Wartime Sexual Violence,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(3): 416-434.


For Tarrant, his obsession with protecting white children from invading races is an obvious expression of paternalism. But there are many ways to be paternal, and the one he chose was through the end of a large semi automatic, military-style weapon. One need not delve far into feminist psychoanalysis to recall the metaphors of guns as penile extensions, first brought to mainstream IR attention by Carol Cohn (1987).

The Globalization of Right-Wing Extremism

Finally, a far less explored area ripe for gender analysis is how these disenfranchised, white men are finding each other through globalized social media networks and becoming radicalized to commit mass violence. In my own research, I have been fascinated by the number of foreign nationals fighting in the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which both sides of the political spectrum see as the front-line for a potential third world war, based on ideology. Tarrant mentions only briefly in his manifesto having been to Ukraine. If it was to volunteer in the armed conflict, he wouldn’t be the only radicalized right-wing Australian.

There is something to be said for the way that both ideology and affective attachments to those ideologies are being circulated and promulgated online. The appeal of fascism is spreading amongst a particular demographic of men like wildfire. But if we keep thinking of them only as ‘lone wolves’ rather than connected through shared ideology and increasingly shared political agenda, we miss the political component that makes right-wing extremism as dangerous as jihadist terrorists against whom we’ve mobilized trillions of dollars of military, security, and political resources.

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How West African women reclaim international discourses

On By creiling

Initiated in the year 2000, the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda calls for women’s participation in security governance and protection of women from security threats around the world. Despite its grand plans, the agenda’s implementation has been spotty, with greater attention to women’s participation in security solutions than to the structures of violence that have threatened them.

Furthermore, though the WPS agenda was initially driven by women’s organizations around the world and its intent acclaimed by many more, the UN Security Council resolutions and other policy documents that comprise the agenda do not always reflect the needs of the women who are the object of these policies, particularly women in the Global South. Instead, international discourses about women in the Global South stereotype them and reify them simultaneously as passive victims and as inherently peaceful. This characterization positions women solely as targets of the WPS policies rather than as powerful actors in their own right.

In a 2017 article in Global Affairs, “Pragmatic scepticism in implementing the Women, Peace, and Security agenda,” I outline two ways in which women and their work in local women’s security and peacebuilding organizations challenge international discourses at the same time that they reclaim them for their needs. This challenging is the “pragmatic scepticism” of the title – a way for women to be wary about certain essentializing stories told about them while simultaneously realizing that some stories can be useful as forms of organization and fundraising. Drawing on interview and participant observation research conducted among local women’s security and peacebuilding organizations in Côte dʼIvoire in 2014–2015, this article identifies two such stories that frame women’s activism around their own security: vulnerability and motherhood.

Vulnerability as a strength

Discourses around wartime sexualized violence tend to create binaries between victims and saviors, between the vulnerable and the strong. This has been echoed in the WPS agenda, which was not designed to reduce vulnerability by fundamentally remaking the system of gender relations. And though the first resolution of the WPS agenda, 1325, incorporated perspectives of anti-militarism, later resolutions and other aspects of the policy agenda have comprised this intent. Instead, the WPS agenda now highlights women’s vulnerability, and its programs are intended deal with, not question this vulnerability.

Many women in Côte dʼIvoire expressed frustration about how their day-to-day peacebuilding work was overlooked by the WPS agenda, which emphasizes external interventions rather than support of pre-existing grassroots organizations. Côte dʼIvoire, in fact, has a long history of women’s peace activism, during both the colonial period and more recent civil conflicts.

These women did acknowledge that they were vulnerable to particular forms of violence in conflict and in their daily lives – economic, political, and physical. However, they did not want this vulnerability to define them; they did not want a sense of victimhood to permeate women in the country. They reconfigured the vulnerability from being based on fear to being a place of strength from which they can organize.

Photo courtesy of Organization of Active Women in Côte dʼIvoire (OFACI)

As part of my research, I attended trainings run by local women’s peacebuilding organizations that had the goal of teaching women about their rights or empowerment opportunities. I watched the trainings shift from the morning’s formality to a relaxed camaraderie in the afternoon. Women told stories about their experiences of vulnerability and used that vulnerability to develop a solidarity on which, the training leaders hoped, they could build peace in their communities going forward. In the words of one participant, “Women need to help women because it is only us who know what each other is experiencing.”

But vulnerability can be used instrumentally by these women’s organizations, as well. These organizations use the language of vulnerability stemming from sexualized violence in the WPS resolutions to ask for increased funding for their work. Vulnerability is a pathway to access funding for some of these organizations, and women allow themselves to be vulnerable to establish their credentials as at-risk and open to the intervention of the international community.

Motherhood as an identity

Another frame produced by international discourses that women in Côte d’Ivoire adapt and work from is motherhood. This identity is often collapsed with ideas of vulnerability because of women’s specific health needs and mother-only caring responsibilities for very young children. African feminists like Catherine Acholonu and Obioma Nnaemeka note that motherhood in many African societies is not just a biological role but also a social one. Even if a woman does not have children, familial roles such as “sister” or “aunt” are liberally given and come with nurturing duties.

Motherhood, then, is not only taken on by those who have birthed and raised children but is claimed by a majority of women in Côte dʼIvoire and is naturalized for all women. As with vulnerability, women are pragmatic about their mothering roles, noting that there are specific ways they can work with their identity as a mother, but also instrumental ways to sell motherhood as necessary to security.

At the core of the activism by the local women’s organizations was a commitment to security, peace, and anti-violence. In particular, it was the attachment to their children through birth and caretaking that provided women power in their communities and compelled them to act publicly. Especially for poor women, who have little formal power or access to resources, motherhood provides them with the capacity to act. The director of one women’s organization passionately claimed, “A woman, child, there is not a more horrible pain than giving birth. Do you think she can give birth to her child and then let her child die like this? Maybe he’s going to die because you can do nothing. If you can do something, you will snatch your child from death.”

Just as with the frame of vulnerability, women used motherhood instrumentally to attract attention and funding to their cause of peace and security. Women’s organizations often premised their programs on women’s roles in their families and their communities. Conflict management programs, in particular, relied on women’s domestic management and intimate knowledge of their families. Local justice officials sometimes depend on women to report if their adolescent sons or husbands are coming and going from the house at odd hours, if there are weapons or large amounts of cash in the house, and if there are new people in the community.

Implications of reclaiming the discourses

My goal is not to reify women in Africa and specifically in Côte d’Ivoire as motherly or “natural” but to note and understand their experiences in their work, as they operate in their own contexts, both as vulnerable and as actors in conflict and post-conflict. Because the WPS resolutions are based on assumptions of women, allowing Ivorian women to the space to push back against these assumptions can help them redefine security for themselves, through their own advocacy. Only by listening to African women can we open up space for their voices and analyze their words and actions vis-à-vis state structures and international discourses.

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Does the urban question matter in the post-conflict era?

On By Sonia

Given the increasing urbanization of persons experiencing forced displacement, it should be clear that the answer to this question is yes. Indeed, in 2017 alone, the number of new persons displaced because of armed conflicts almost doubled from 6.9 to million to 11.8 million, reaching an estimated 40 million people worldwide living in conditions of forced displacement. But contrary to popular belief, most internally displaced persons (IDPs) reside in urban areas rather than in refugee camps. Cities are now the main destinations where displaced people seek refuge, and at the same time, because of civil conflicts taking place in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, they are also places from which an increasing number of persons are forced to flee. In view of this, it is worth considering: what are the instruments through which urban-related needs of displaced persons and other victims of armed conflicts can be met? Great interest is given in current post-conflict processes to the right to truth, memory of the victims as well as to criminal justice. Important as they are, there is also a need to reflect on transformative means of reparation that post-conflict processes can make available to those victims of war who experience protracted displacement in urban centers.

The main focus of those involved in bringing an end to the plight of forcibly displaced persons is to achieve so-called durable solutions as it was suggested 20 years ago, when the UN adopted the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. Crucial to this approach is the responsibility of national authorities to provide the means to enable displaced persons’ voluntary return, their relocation to the places where they have found refuge or their settlement elsewhere within their own country. Nevertheless, when it comes to protracted conflicts or displacement caused by state actors, the pressures on local authorities to reduce the displacement figures might lead them to privilege other solutions rather than to facilitate their local settlement. This despite the fact that, even in contexts where peace agreements or ceasefires are being implemented, forced displacement still occurs. To this should be added that urban displacement is often invisible as displaced persons usually mingle with poor locals, which might be used by local authorities to avoid granting them the IDP status and to disregard displaced people’s particular needs. However, when the conditions surrounding forcibly displaced persons’ urbanization are those such as lack of political recognition and undifferentiated socio-economic policies, it creates additional pressure on the already scarce resources and social services available to the local population. In cities of the global South where growing urbanization has been shaped by informality and has often occurred with poor urban planning, the steady flow of displaced people into poor areas might exacerbate the demand for social housing and might overload existing public infrastructure.

In fact, until 2011, invisibility and poverty trap used to be terms employed by Colombian human rights defenders to describe the conditions experienced by internally displaced people, especially as during ex-president Uribe’s rule (2002-2010), their urbanization was systematically accompanied by the denial of official IDP recognition. At that time Uribe claimed that what Colombia was facing was a combination of a terrorist menace with a massive economic migration, and by deploying such an argument his government turned a blind eye to displaced people’s condition of victim. In line with Uribe’s denial, governing authorities did not go further than offering displaced persons minimum humanitarian assistance while overlooking their responsibility to provide them with the means to find a place to rebuild their lives and guarantees of non-repetition.

Against this climate of denial and marginalization, in 2008, women’s displaced organizations in coalition with feminists NGOs were able to make a dent in Uribe’s politics, as they resorted to the Constitutional Court and succeeded in getting passed a gender-sensitive ruling, the so-called Auto 092, on the rights of women forcibly displaced by the conflict. The Judicial Decision 092 states that due to historical discrimination of women, forced displacement has a disproportionate impact on their lives and called the Colombian State to adopt measures to specifically prevent conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence before, during and after displacement. Whereas underlining and addressing the risk of re-victimization, Auto 092 compels Colombian authorities to implement positive actions in order to tackle social, cultural and economic inequalities that allow conflict-related violence against displaced women to occur. In so doing, Auto 092 stands as an example of transformative justice as it goes beyond a focus on redressing civil and political rights violations.

Indeed, in their article “Exposing the Gendered Myth of Post-Conflict Transition,” Rees and Chinkin point to the timeliness and appropriateness of jurisprudence that, like Decision 092, binds the victims’ right to reparation to the so-called second-generation human rights:

The problem is that economic and social rights have long been regarded, especially in the global North and thus by those who are lead players in many peace processes, as non-justiciable and supported by only weak enforcement and monitoring mechanisms. Access to appropriate and affordable health services, housing, education, social security and employment are regarded as “benefits” or as services … The myth of their non-justiciability has been broken by the jurisprudence of constitutional courts in South Africa, Colombia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and by the entry into force of the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) in May 2008 (Rees and Chinkin 2015: 1220).

Unfortunately, reality does not always match the law. Despite jurisprudential developments such as Decision 092, Colombian displaced women needed to persist in their struggle to obtain recognition of the victim status of displaced people, to convince the Colombian government to seriously address human rights violations and to provide them with reparations that tackle historical inequalities that make them vulnerable to conflict-related violence.

In 2011, the newly elected president Juan Manuel Santos made a clear departure from Uribe’s negationist rhetoric by recognizing the internal armed conflict and passing the so-called Victims and Land Restitution Law. As a transitional justice framework, the Victims Law is not at odds with a transformative approach, as it seeks to offer a comprehensive redress of structural inequalities and explicitly states its intention to provide guarantees of non-repetition (art. 182). Yet, instead of local integration, the major focus of the Victims’ Law and its implementation is on the stabilization of displaced people, whether through their return or through their resettlement elsewhere within the country (art. 73). Hence, inter-alia, the Victims’ Law establishes procedures to facilitate access to land titles and, by giving priority to displaced women, takes into account the informality of land tenure reflected in the lack of enforceable land titles along with gender-related practices and cultural biases; for they are both tremendous obstacles that hinder rural women’s right to enjoy equal access to land and thereby make them more vulnerable to forced displacement.

However, what has thus become clear through the implementation of this law is that, in order to be a durable solution, the stabilization of displaced persons by means of return-oriented programs should be considered through the lenses of a comprehensive sustainability.

Return-oriented programs and the challenges of defeating impunity

Concerns about the limitations of the Victims’ Law and its program of land restitution to achieve their goals in the midst of the war have proved to be real difficulties. For instance, according to the report “A Land Title Is Not Enough” published by Amnesty International, most economic and political elites who commissioned and benefited from forced displacement have avoided being brought to justice. The interweaving of these structures with neo-paramilitary groups has taken over illegal and legal economies that have fed into the Colombian armed conflict and has not ceased to cause additional displacement. Of equal concern, as the 2015 report of the Working Group on Women and Armed Conflict brought to light, is the growing use of gender and sexual violence against Afro-Colombian women who have acted as social leaders in the process of land restitution. Following the peace agreement signed in 2016, the majority of FARC’s militias demobilized and the number of homicides in Colombia has significantly decreased. However, the number of killings of human right defenders, including land restitution leaders, has simply increased.

Colombian transitional context exemplifies a dramatic example of the difficulties of drawing a line between conflict and post-conflict. Given such a landscape, it is likely that the most pressing endeavors to achieve sustainable solutions would oscillate between providing security to those displaced persons willing to return and recognizing that, for a large portion of this population who live in protracted displacement, it will simply be unfair to condemn them to an indefinite wait until the restitution of their lands is feasible.

 

Stabilization: but not without transformation

A revision of the UN Guiding Principles on Forced Displacement issued in 2010 provides specific criteria to evaluate whether a durable solution for displacement has actually been achieved. Importantly, as this framework highlights, an actual stabilization is not limited to the restoration of the conditions in which a person was living before the displacement. It must take into account that even when an armed conflict has ended, displaced people “commonly continue to have residual needs and human rights concerns linked to their displacement.” Therefore, as with transitional justice measures aimed at providing reparation, the process of stabilization should be seen as an opportunity to address discrimination e inequalities that allowed the occurrence of forced displacement or might enable further victimization.

For instance, when relocated in areas other than their places of origin, forcibly displaced persons can face difficulties to access health services due to the lack of registration or adequate documentation. Also, when trying to find a job, they can face discriminations based on their relatedness to the armed conflict. Because of their political affiliation, they might too be victims of hate crimes, and they can experience discrimination on racial, gender or ethnic basis when trying to rent a dwelling or access social services.

Published in the so-called Framework on Durable Solutions, the revision of the Guiding Principles sets eight criteria of evaluation, with the understanding that they are interlinked and overlapping: long-term safety and security; adequate standards of living; access to livelihoods; restoration of  housing, land and property; access to or replacement of documentation; family reunification; participation in public affairs; and access to effective remedies and justice. But if we aim at embracing these criteria, we should look for how their implementation participates in bringing about social reconciliation and gender-just sustainable peace. Do options of livelihoods available for displaced people reproduce sexual division of labor? Do women’s livelihoods or jobs allow them possibilities in time and space to exercise political participation? Are the means to access housing failing to recognize non-normative families? Do housing solutions for displaced persons provide real chances to overcome gender-based exclusions? Are processes of public apologies and mechanisms of justice such as truth tribunals being gender-sensitive, or are they encouraging or perpetuating patterns of sexism or the patriarchal relation women-protected/male-protector? These are only a few of the questions that we should address if we are committed to mainstreaming gender when seeking to provide displaced persons with transformative durable solutions.

Housing: More Than a Roof over One’s Head

Achieving a suitable solution meeting the above-mentioned standards not only involves ensuring victims’ enjoyment of their human rights but, in doing so, also entails challenges in development and post-conflict reconstruction, including the building of physical, social and cultural infrastructure. This process in Colombia has mostly been referred to as to bring the state into those rural regions where for decades the only government presence has not been other than the military. Building social infrastructure in rural territories has been a claim of Colombian feminist movements since a long time. However, important as it is, it should not mean losing sight of the fact that for a large portion of the displaced population, who have lived far from their lands for almost decades, return might not be a feasible solution.

Despite the urban segregation that displaced persons experience, in Colombia women are less likely to return. This is due, in many cases, to the better access to education and health services for their children available in urban centers or to the fact that they have created new family ties. Thus, difficulties related to urban segregation or discrimination they might endure pale in comparison with the uncertainties of returning to areas where peace and war still overlap.

In spite of this, the main focus of Santos’s Victims’ Law is the return of displaced persons, and therefore it does not include housing restitution but instead access to housing subsidies. In that sense, the Victims’ Law fails to comply with the criteria of return sustainability mentioned above which, like the Pinheiro Principles, put forward that forcibly displaced persons “have the right to have restored to them any housing” of which they were deprived. However, as it has been demonstrated by urban scholars, for a displaced person, the probability that housing subsidies crystallize in an actual purchase of a property is extremely low. Especially, because the conditions of poverty they face and their lack of regular salary income make them ineligible to access a bank loan.

Over time, the Santos government decided to include some IDP families among the beneficiaries of its Free Housing Program. Nonetheless, the experience of Colombia in the implementation of social housing programs, and especially as a means of providing reparation for the victims of human rights violations, reflects similar difficulties to those faced by other global South societies engaged in transitional justice processes. For instance, in their research on post-apartheid South Africa, Parnell and Pieterse hint to some axes of the urban question which, if left unaddressed or ignored, might risk victims’ rights to the city being deferred:

The ongoing focus on electoral and participatory democracy as well as on protecting other individual rights (freedom from discrimination, freedom of expression, etc.) may marginalize new efforts to advance 2nd generation socio-economic rights. These are achieved through the sustained delivery of affordable urban services to households and neighborhoods (not individuals), and through viable service administration and finances, not just through infrastructural investment (Parnell and Pieterse 2010: 148).

Parnell and Pieterse touch on how weak decentralization, inadequate institutional support as well as the imperatives of neoliberal globalizations, such as privatization, play a role in determining the uses of land, limiting the availability of affordable land for developing social housing, and blocking the possibilities of offering subsidized or free services for the poor (electricity, water, sanitation). Other urban challenges such as rigid or outdated zoning plans can restrict development of social housing and social infrastructure, and prevent the evolution of dormitory areas to mixed-use neighborhoods. Those conditions are increasingly seen as requirements for sustainable housing as they prevent risks such as neighborhood deterioration, and further informality.

A combination of these difficulties have been experienced in Bogotá, the Colombian city where the majority of IDP live, as between 2012-2015 the city administration attempted to allocate social housing units for internally displaced persons. But specifically, the case of Bogotá exemplifies the misalignment between the politics prompted at national level and their implementation at local/municipal level. For example, Juan Carlos Flórez, an independent local politician, asserts that the current Bogotá’s administration of Enrique Peñalosa “does not at all comply with meeting victims’ right to housing.” Indeed, from an estimated 500 thousand victims of the armed conflict who live in Bogotá and who have no access to decent housing, only 4 thousand were included in Bogota’s development plan. Like picturing a recipe for disaster, Flórez explains that no free houses will be allocated to displaced people, and furthermore that the institutional support provided to access credit is so weak that it is working to preclude any chance displaced people might have to effectively gain access to the social housing units supposedly allocated to them.

Bogotá as other urban societies of the global South cannot elude the requirements posed by global competitiveness in order to play a role in the global economy. However, for those facing democratic transition, to provide transformative comprehensive reparation to the victims is an essential responsibility if they are aiming at social reconciliation, the building of sustainable peace and at not condemning the victims of forced displacement to become the new urban poor.

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