Resilience, Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and Transitional Justice: An Interdisciplinary Framing

ABSTRACT

This interdisciplinary article draws on two neurological processes and repurposes them to develop a novel theorization of resilience. It argues that major shocks and stressors within societies can have significant ‘demyelinating’ effects, by weakening or damaging communication channels within social-ecological systems (SES). It illustrates this through a focus on conflict-related sexual violence. It further proposes that resilience can be likened to a ‘remyelinating’ process aimed at enhancing how SES support and communicate with each other. Further extending the analogy, it maintains that transitional justice processes have a part to play in ‘remyelinating’ communication in societies affected by conflict and violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict-related sexual violence
• demyelination
• remyelination
• resilience
• transitional justice
• communication
• social-ecological systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article uses the terminology of ‘victim-/survivor’ to underscore that women and men who have suffered conflict-related sexual violence may identify with one term rather than (or more than) the other – or indeed with both. It is also important to stress, however, that that the men and women who participated in this research were not only victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. All of them had experienced multiple forms of violence, direct and indirect. Some of them had also suffered violence and abuse from family members and spouses/partners, and everyday forms of structural violence were for many an ongoing reality.

2 The author was based in BiH.

3 It should be noted that only 27 of the 449 respondents were men, a fact that highlights the difficulties of locating male victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (see, for example, Schulz 2018, 584).

4 In her work on Peru, Leiby (2018, 141) notes that ‘The norms and laws regulating gender roles and sexual behaviour not only affect whether a survivor reports sexual violence, but also how they talk about it’ (emphasis in the original).

5 While paramilitaries in Colombia officially demobilized in 2005, some of them subsequently joined criminal gangs known as BACRIM. Sanabria-Medina and Restrepo (2019, 7) note that ‘In 2012 the practice of dismemberment increased due to the actions of “organized criminal gangs” or BACRIM who adopted this practice reaching levels of concern, to the point of creating the so-called casas de pique or chop houses, which are physical spaces where victims are taken to be tortured, dismembered, and assassinated’.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the European Research Council under grant number 724518.

Notes on contributors

Janine Natalya Clark

Janine Natalya Clark is Professor of Gender, Transitional Justice and International Criminal Law at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include resilience, conflict-related sexual violence, transitional justice and ethnic conflict. She has three research monographs and a forthcoming co-edited volume (Cambridge University Press). She has published in a wide range of journals, including the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Social & Legal Studies, Theoretical Criminology, Memory Studies, Sociology and International Studies Review. She is currently leading a five-year comparative research project, funded by the European Research Council, about resilience and conflict-related sexual violence.