Defying Victimhood: Women and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding ed. by Albrecht Schnabel and Amara Tabyshalieva (review)

Defying Victimhood: Women and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding joins a cohort of monographs and edited volumes in raising the alarm that armistice now leads to escalations of violence against women and children.¹ As Albrecht Schnabel and Anara Tabyshalieva phrase it:

This window of opportunity to address some of the inequalities, inequities and injustices that have caused much of the violence endured by women before and during the war, often continuing unabatedly in the post-war period. . . .Rape and sexual harassment, forced pregnancy, marriage, divorce, prostitution and trafficking do not end with the conclusion of peace dialogues or the signing of a formal peace agreement.

(pp. 12-13)

Where WWI produced nihilism, the post- Cold War era has produced gendered wars that have not ended for too many people in conflict areas. Even though the majority of chapters in this volume are not about African cases, the dynamics of waging war and waging peace have universal applications. This much we know from our African and Africanist educators and activists who have been engaged in global peace- building, at least since the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. However, one must bring this book to students if for no other reason than to assign a single chapter: “Gender and Transitional Justice: Experiences from South Africa, Rwanda and Sierra Leone” by Lyn Graybill.

In terms of structure, this volume has four major sections. “From Victim-hood to Empowerment: Patterns and Changes” defines the volume’s geography from Guatemala, Bosnia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Rwanda (Krishna Kumar), to Cambodia and Timor-Leste (Sumie Nakaya) and Burundi (Rose M. Kadende-Kaiser). These authors present some consequences of the structural exclusion of women as decision makers from the peacebuilding process.

Section two, “Women and Children: Essential Partnership of Survival and Peace,” includes studies from former Soviet bloc nations in the Balkans (Constantine P. Danopoulos, Konstantinos S. Skandalis, and Zlatko Isako-vic), Tajikstan (Svetlana Sharipova and Hermine De Soto) and Macedonia (Deborah Davis). One uneasy discussion is female nostalgia for Soviet maternalist policies as some jealous men wage micro- warfare to reclaim these women from a polyandrous relationship with a defunct, polygamous quasi-husband of a state that may have been more compassionate than capitalist replacement states.

Section three, “Putting Good Intentions into Practice: National and Global Efforts to Right Past Wrongs,” is pivotal and even more disconcerting. Lyn S. Graybill’s “Gender and Transitional Justice: Experiences from South Africa, Rwanda and Sierra Leone” informs us that the number of official reports of rape has tripled since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She states that “no member of the security forces or liberation movement applied for amnesty for rape or other sexual violation” and suggests that they may feel that it does not meet the threshold of being a political act “performed ‘without malice.’ Can one rape without malice?” (p. 209) Graybill notes that in Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was “prosecuting those who gave orders to rape but not the actual rapists. Many women presumably live in neighbourhoods with former rapists whom they must see daily, reliving the trauma over and over again” (p. 217). Sierra Leone also pursued those who ordered rape and not the soldiers who followed orders (p. 221) for the cases from South Africa, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone (Lyn S. Gray-bill). Clearly, there are gaps in the law. Ancil Adrian- Paul’s chapter shows the power of global collaboration in pressuring the UN Security Council to pass UNSCR 1325 in which women’s security in theaters of war and conflict must be addressed, including “preventing and ending impunity for gender- based violence.” Yet, even this success “does not address issues of justice” (p. 245). This section begs a question: How can the present legal system correct gender-based violence (GBV) if justice for women is still denied?

The final section, “Deconstructing Victimhood...