Violence: no bright lines between conflict and peace

The inequalities embedded in the international distribution of COVID-19 vaccines are glaring. Home to 81 percent of the world’s adult population, low- and middle-income countries have been able to purchase only a third of global vaccine production; meanwhile, high-income countries control half of the global supply (Rouw et al. 2021). Pandemic responses continue to reveal and intersect with deep-seated hierarchies within and across countries. Authoritarian regimes are using COVID-19 as a justification for further clamp-down on information and freedom of expression. In the very fluid context of the pandemic, societies such as India have seen that the disregard for democratic norms and transparent working has created a sudden and acute shortage of medical oxygen, leaving some countries gasping for breath. Political differences and conflict are being stamped out ruthlessly in the name of public health (International IDEA 2020). As ever, seemingly dramatic shifts – which we long to see in terms of declining levels of contagion, illness, death, and disruption – leave pre-existing power structures largely untouched. Too often, such dynamics erupt in a range of violences, from rising rates of domestic violence to ethnic and race-based attacks. There is no vaccine against intersectional oppression. The struggle for health equity, as for so many other promises of human development, is far from over.

Conflict resolution, and particularly peace processes, appear to promise an end to the devastation and disruption of everyday life. However, as revealed in variety and depth in IFJP’s pages, such transitions frequently render invisible persistent violences roiling under the surface. The contributors to this issue offer a range of cases where conflict resolution has distinct gendered impacts – and, rather than producing a cessation of violence, these impacts reveal a continuum of harms against feminized/marginalized bodies and the exclusion of women’s agency. However, they also point to the need to continue epistemological and methodological explorations of the places and spaces where agency exists, in both formal and informal arenas of influence at local, national, and international levels.

Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius critically analyze the impact of international norms on conflict-related violence, arguing that such norms can be used as “tools to liberate and to dominate.” Kachin women’s rights activists deploy them to garner international attention and advocacy, as well as to effect changes in local gendered power relations. However, ethnonationalists have relied on the very same norms to reinforce gendered inequalities in the service of their own ends. Such use has made it difficult to make visible, and confront, both a wider continuum of gendered violence and broader demands for gender justice. Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz and Maria Catalina Monroy’s work on the Colombian peace process also speaks to the entanglements of domestic and international forces, to show the complexities of negotiations involving audiences and advocates at both levels.

As Sanne Weber explains, a focus on the complex processes of “social reintegration” in Guatemala – rebuilding the social fabric and individual identities as part of broader disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration processes – demonstrates a lack of attention to gendered relations of power resulting in a range of difficulties for female ex-combatants. They experienced more “fluid gender roles during conflict,” and a return to civilian life presented “difficulties in their emotional and family relationships, leading to mental health struggles and even violence, as well as persistent stigma which produced anxiety and challenges in the labor market.” Weber argues for community reconstruction that addresses gender inequalities transversally across private as well as public arenas.

Julia Zulver also moves beyond binaries that suggest a bright line between conflict and peace, focusing on the targeting of activists in the “reconfigured” armed conflict in Colombia emerging after peace accords. In part because they supported peace, organized women in Putumayo continue to experience attacks. However, they also continue to resist intersectional patriarchal oppressions by building on their hard-won strategies from the previous period of strife. Celeste Koens and Samanthi Gunawardana’s careful observation of Tamil women’s political participation in the wake of conflict also reveals a continuum of women’s agency beyond the formal arenas of political action. They find that “Tamil women in Mannar exercise agency to challenge … constraints and promote a broader transformative political arena.” Variously responding to the violent and insecure conditions of everyday life, their collective actions in particular can “disrupt[] masculinist assumptions about who is considered a political actor and what counts as political agency.”

In their Conversations piece about how COVID-19 affected their collaborative study, Augusta Hagen-Dillon, Rosana Heringer, and Shamillah Wilson illustrate that the very phenomena that their research revealed – both the continuing challenges of supporting the agency of those on the front lines of gender struggles as well as the challenges of global feminist collaborative research across sites with difficult political environments – were exacerbated by the pandemic itself. Philipp Schulz and Anne-Kathrin Kreft offer their deeply reflective conversation on the toll of researching conflict-related sexual violence, arguing that these challenges should form part of a larger conversation on difficult and sensitive research.

Consistently, in the pages of IFJP we present scholarship that renders visible gendered politics, feminist analyses of these politics, and the epistemic politics of their invisibility, and through our Conversations and Book Reviews sections offer avenues for stepping further back and further in to understand the depth of challenges in doing international feminist politics research.