Is there a right time for gender-just peace? Feminist anti-war organising revisited

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the question of totalising gender-power relations that have led to and shaped the wars of the 1990s in Yugoslavia and the emerging ethno-national states on the ‘periphery’ of Europe. I argue that the same type of gender-power relations continue to dominate the region, notably Serbia, and to perpetuate gender inequalities and gender-based violence (GBV) in its many everyday and structural forms, causing profound levels of human insecurity. This analysis aims to set in motion a debate around how to tackle these continuing gender inequalities and GBV in post-war societies. In so doing, I propose a shift from focusing on the hierarchy of victimisation that has characterised much of the feminist analyses, activism, and scholarly work in relation to these (and other) conflicts, to a relational understanding of the gendered processes of victimisation in war and peace, that is – of both women and men. Such an approach holds a potential to undermine the power systems that engender these varied types of victimisation by ultimately reshaping the notions of masculinity and femininity, which are central to the gender-power systems that generate gender-unjust peace.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender-just peace
• feminist peace activism
• GBV against women and men
• gender
• human security
• liberal peace

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This protest coincided with the 15th anniversary of NATO bombing of Serbia over the Kosovo conflict, during which many innocent civilians, irrespective of their ethnicity, lost their lives and many more had their livelihoods destroyed. Hence, its sole focus on commemorating the Serbian-led atrocities of Kosovo Albanians did not upset only radical nationalist among the civil servants and hooligans. It also disconcerted many non-nationalistic citizens of Belgrade/Serbia. In this article, I refer to this violent incident against the WIB as one among many signs of GBV causing profound levels of human insecurity in Serbia. Consequently, my discussion does not engage in other aspects of this unsettling incident.

2. For more information, see WIB’s website at www.zeneucrnom.org

3. For more on human insecurity in the Balkans, see Krastev et al. (1999).

4. Feminist resistance has been well documented, see, for example Hughes, Mladjenovic, and Mrsevic (1995), Batinic (2001).

5. For the history of Yugoslav feminism, see Benderly (1997), Papic (1995), Batinic (2001, 4–11).s

6. My discussion in this paper refers to the discourses and processes of militarisation primarily in Serbia and Croatia, and the spread of war violence in Croatia and Bosnia. I consider pan-Yugoslav feminist anti-war activism prompted by these processes, and examine specifically feminist peace activism of WIB in Serbia.

7. For discussion on traditional/patriarchal masculine identity in the Balkans, see Denich (1974)

8. One example of the impact of this change is reflected in the public protests against compulsory military service that took place in Slovenia, in the 1980s.

9. It is estimated that there were hundreds of thousands of young men who fled Serbia and other Yugoslav successor states seeking sanctuary in the EU (Aleksov 1994).

10. The centrality of local feminists in this is best appreciated when contrasted with the situation in Congo, where widespread SGBV against women has become visible only in 2009, after a visit of Hillary Clinton and Margot Wallstrom, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict. It entered the international public domain after Wallstrom’s reference to eastern Congo as ‘the rape capital of the world’ or ‘the most dangerous place on earth to be a woman’ (Autesserre 2012, 204).

11. For more on this, see Belic (1995, 33).

12. On how all feminist scholars were not equally welcome, see Korac (1998a, 50).

13. Zarkov’s research shows that women combatants were very few (2007, 229).

14. Men also suffered other forms of abuse and victimisation. Testimonies of perpetrators reveal that many were forced to rape women. They were ridiculed as not ‘real men’ and ‘true’ representatives of their nation, and threatened to be killed if they refuse to do it (Stiglmayer 1995, 147–162).

15. The United Nations Commission of Experts’ Final Report, Annex IX: C; 1994, December 28. http://www.phdn.org/archives/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/IX.htm#r21

16. As approximately 60% of some 150 detention camps in Bosnia and Croatia were Serb run, in terms of the scale of victimisation, Bosnian Muslim and Croat men were more often victims of rape than Serbian men. All men in these wars were, however, deliberate targets of rape and other brutal forms of sexualised war violence.

17. The only systematic scholarly account of sexual violence against men in Yugoslav wars of succession, to the best of my knowledge, is Zarkov (2001), published post festum.

18. Feminist scholarship demonstrates that a growing number of historically excluded groups, such as women, no longer perceive formal expressions of citizenship as defined by states as a means of fostering active participation in society and its legal and political structures (e.g. Walby 1994; Coll 2010).

19. Zarkov’s analysis of the local media coverage of sexually abused men demonstrates that there was hardly any news coverage locally and none internationally (2001, 71–73).

20. That is why local national papers avoided stating the ethnicity of sexually abused men, if they were ‘their’ men (Zarkov 2001, 74–75).

21. Cockburn (2009, 270) points out how men have to be visible in their physicality if patriarchal gender relations are to be seen clearly ‘working’ both at work and in the domestic sphere.

22. See Dolan (2014) and Sivakumaran (2010).

23. Hence, it is not surprising that people providing support for war victims are often so shocked by the testimonies of sexually abused men that they refuse to believe it. For more, see Dolan (2011) and Watson (2014). This also explains increased insecurity of LGBT populations in conflict and post-conflict zones, in particular, as they are perceived as ‘unwanted others’.

24. For more on this, see Korac (2006, 514–516).

25. Critique of liberal peace as the aim of international peacebuilding interventions is growing. See, for example, Hoffman (2009) and Richmond (2010).

26. Except for Macedonia where the change took place in 1998.

27. Citizen’s Attitudes on Discrimination and Perception of Discrimination in Serbia, Commissioner for Protection of Equality (2012).

28. Citizen’s Attitudes on Discrimination and Perception of Discrimination in Serbia, Commissioner for Protection of Equality (2013).

29. Cockburn (2013) shows how this has happened in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina.

30. This initiative has been led by WIB; it involves over 200 NGOs from the region, linking women from over 100 towns and cities, attracting over 4000 participants involved in some way in its organisation, and over 250 activists involved in a more direct way in its realisation (WIB 2014).

31. For more information on a range of alternative education activities, see WIB website at www.zeneucrnom.org

32. For more information, see websites of WIBs (www.zeneucrnom.org) and Women’s Studies Centre (www.zenskestudie.edu.rs)

33. Cohn and Ruddick (2004) show how war is a gendered institution, how men and masculinities that perpetuate war are socially constructed as dominant, and how meanings that shape our thinking of war come out of these masculinities (Cohn and Ruddick 2004, 410).

34. Data provided by the financial forensics of the Anti-Corruption Council of Serbia show, for example, that approximately one-third of estimated US$10 billion transferred abroad during the years of war, mostly to the bank/s in Cyprus, had been found. However, none of it has yet been returned to the state, but much of it has re-entered the country (i.e. has been laundered) via the process of privatization (Preradovic 2015, 18).