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This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace
... In Tuzla, local actors were able to rally the population around a multiethnic, antiwar identity, securing relative peace for the city's residents. In Sarajevo, dark humor, art, and satire served as civilians' own way of rejecting ethnic politics and shouted loudly, "This was not our war" (see Hunt 2004). Finally, the case of Prijedor reveals the difficulties of engaging in civil action against an armed, aggressive, and organized opponent. ...
The war Bosnia and Herzegovina, between 1992 and 1995, was characterized by vastly different levels of violence across the country. The chapter examines the way in which civil action shaped the course, severity, and effects of the violence in three Bosnian cities: Tuzla, Sarajevo, and Prijedor. These cities roughly experienced low, moderate, and high levels of violence respectively, proportionate to their population size. It argues that civilians, local political elites, and religious institutions played critical roles in carving out civil spaces in the midst of violence, dampening local levels of violence and, in some cases, contributing to the resolution of the broader conflict. The varied levels of violence across the three cases help to illustrate the conditions under which such civil action is possible, underscoring both the potential and the limitations of civil action to counter armed conflict.
... Most likely, some forms of women's advocacy for peace as well as their active inluence have existed for longer in a number of multiethnic areas (cf. Hunt, 2004;Cheng, 2006;Nwoye, 2008). However, this assumption could only be tested indirectly in this particular study, through examining attitudes toward gender (in)equality among members of the present-day communities, as will be shown in the next section. ...
... Equally importantly, building on the pioneering work of Meintjes, Pillay and Turshen (2001), Moser and Clark (2001), Manchanda (2001), Hunt (2004) and others, there has been a proliferation of scholarly works analysing the role of women in war and peace. In Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini describes her goal as being to bridge the divide between the world of women's peacebuilding and that of the international peace and security community, to show how and why women's presence, activities, opinions, approaches, and resilience matter in precisely the areas that they are often ignored. ...
This article highlights the gap between institutional approaches to peacebuilding – which narrowly focus on post-conflict reconstruction of formal state institutions – and the lived experiences of grassroots peacebuilders. It analyses the documented stories of participants in the Women PeaceMakers1 1The term ‘Women PeaceMakers’ is intended to encompass women's multiple roles in pursuit of sustainable peace and social justice. Thus, in this article ‘peacemaking’ and ‘peacebuilding’ are used interchangeably. View all notes Program at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice at the University of San Diego, demonstrating that peacebuilding does not occur simply after conflict, but at all phases of peace processes. The article and its three case studies – developed with three women peacemakers from the Philippines, Guatemala and South Africa – contend that this expands and deepens the practical and academic definitions of peacebuilding. Without this evolved understanding of the concept, women's actions to build peace will continue to be overlooked and underfunded.
The siege of Sarajevo has altered the experience of ethnicity, reconfiguring ethnic categories into moral boundaries. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by the Army of Republika Srpska, and many Sarajevan Serbs still grapple today with the feeling that others view them as aggressors. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Serb women of the pre-war generations, I describe how they intentionally make small alterations in gesture and body language in order to perform ethnic ambiguity, and avoid being read by others as Serb. While anthropological accounts have tended to use performativity to emphasize the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity, here I focus on the anxiety that drives Serb women’s performances in order to capture the inherent and inescapable feeling of ethnicity in a post-war space. I also discuss the difficulty of capturing this anxiety through empirical methods, navigating the discrepancy between Serb women’s narrative accounts of ethnic stigmatization compared to the apparently unproblematic flow of everyday social life. Through this discrepancy, I demonstrate how the embodied and ever-accumulating feeling of ethnic anxiety can conjure threats where there may be none, and how it can charge even the most (seemingly) mundane encounters.
This paper is an autoethnographic account of the Ferguson Unrest of 2014. The first section is a context-based analysis to understand why Ferguson, Missouri, became a catalyst to ignite national outrage against police brutality. The second central question is to understand what does protest in America look like in the 21st century, particularly through the eyes of the young people who are experiencing these modes of civil resistance for the first time. To get at this question, the researcher draws from many narrative and reflexive accounts of encounters with various interlocutors and locals during two weekends of direct action. As a lens, the author utilizes renowned community organizer Saul Alinsky and neo-Ainsky traditions of issue-generating to analyze the effectiveness of organizers in Missouri. I critique that in an era unlike those in which Alinsky was appropriated [overt/blatant racism and classism] injustices are increasingly more covert, and not the most effective community organizing strategy.
While women are often voiceless victims of war, they comprise the very backbone of peace and reconciliation initiatives worldwide. Peace following religious, geo-political, and social upheaval cannot be secured without the active involvement of women who contribute to society's stability. Predicated on an overview of women's peace and reconciliation efforts in Northern Ireland, Liberia, and the Balkans, this paper offers four principles based upon peacebuilding theoretical foundations: (1) reconciliation is a process not a single event, (2) women's networking contributes to lasting peacebuilding initiatives, (3) changing the narrative of the conflict assists to fortify reconciliation efforts, and (4) women should be an integral part of peace and reconciliation initiatives following national conflict. An exploratory analysis on how women in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have bridged ethnic and religious divide offers an initial affirmation of these four peacemaking principles.
Savaşlar genellikle erkekler tarafından, kadın ve çocukları korumak amacıyla yürütülen bir mücadele
olarak resmedilir. Bununla birlikte yaşanan işgücü kaybının telafisi, cephe gerisindeki faaliyetlerin idamesi,
savaşan erkeklerin motivasyonu gibi nedenlerle kadınların bu mücadeleye destek olması başarı için hayati
öneme sahiptir. Ancak verilen destek karşılığında kadınların toplumsal rollerinde herhangi bir değişiklik vaat
edilmez. Kadından istenen, erkeğe bağımlılığını ve onun karşısındaki ikincil konumunu pekiştiren iyi bir eş,
kendini çocuklarına adayan anne, mutlu bir ev hanımı gibi ataerkil rolleri yerine getirmesi yanında artan
işgücü ihtiyacını karşılamak üzere iş hayatına katılmasıdır. Bu kapsamda bu çalışmada Birinci Dünya Savaşı
yıllarında yayımlanan propaganda afişleri arasından rastgele örneklem metoduyla seçilen beş afiş,
göstergebilimin sağladığı analiz araçlarından yararlanılarak çözümlenmiştir. Yapılan çözümlemeler
sonucunda afişlerin, geleneksel toplumsal cinsiyet rollerini koruyacak ve yeniden üretecek şekilde dolayısıyla
da erkek egemen cinsiyetçi düzeni destekler biçimde tasarlandığı görülmüştür.
Abstract
Wars usually portrayed as a struggle with the intention of protecting the woman and children by
man. At the same time, in order to be successful, the support of women for this struggle is become vital for
the reasons such as the loss of workforce, maintenance of activities behind the façade and motivation of the
men who fight in the struggle. However, in return for the support of the woman to man, not any changes
promised for the social roles of women. The social roles which are requested by man for women are
reinforcing dependence of women to man and fosters women‟s secondary position in the social structure. The
things expected from woman besides accomplishing their patriarchic roles as such as being a good wife,
devoted mother to her children, happy housewife, are also to join work life in order to meet the growing
needs of the workforce. In this study, five propaganda posters which were published during the years of the
First World War selected by random sampling method, and analyzed with the tools of semiotics. As a result
of the analysis, it is observed that posters were designed in a manner that preserves and reproduces the
traditional gender roles and therefore supports the male-dominated, sexist order
Mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices tend to re-entrench gendered hierarchies by ignoring women or circumscribing their presence to passive victims in need of protection. As a consequence we have limited knowledge about the multifaceted ways women do justice and build peace. To address this lacuna we conceptualize and unpack the meaning of gendered agency, by identifying its critical elements and by locating it in space and in time. The conceptual work that we undertake is underpinned by empirical mapping of the transitional justice spaces in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, where we point out instances of critical, creative, and transformative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination. We collect women’s oral narratives and explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research enables us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice processes directly and in their own spaces. This article thus renders women’s agency visible and attempts to grasp its contributions and consequences for transformations from war to peace.
A gendered reading of the liberal peacebuilding and transitional justice project in Bosnia–Herzegovina raises critical questions concerning the quality of the peace one hopes to achieve in transitional societies. By focusing on three-gendered justice gaps—the accountability, acknowledgement, and reparations gaps—this article examines structural constraints for women to engage in shaping and implementing transitional justice, and unmasks transitional justice as a site for the long-term construction of the gendered post-conflict order. Thus, the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding and transitional justice have produced a post-conflict order characterized by gendered peace and justice gaps. Yet, we conclude that women are doing justice within the Bosnian–Herzegovina transitional justice project, and that their presence and participation is complex, multilayered, and constrained yet critical.
Nel mese di aprile del 1992 le truppe serbe attaccarono la Bosnia Erzegovina, un mese dopo che questa, a seguito di un referendum popolare, aveva dichiarato la sua indipendenza dalla Federazione yugoslava. L'esercito yugoslavo era forte e ben addestrato, ma oltre ai soldati regolari, esso era composto anche da volontari e da truppe paramilitari, come le ultranazionaliste "aquile bianche" di Seselj e le "tigri" di Arkan. L'esercito bosniaco non poté fronteggiare questo impatto e il territorio della Bosnia venne presto occupato. La Bosnia, da molti secoli, era abitata da una popolazione mista composta da musulmani, cattolici e ortodossi; da bosniaci, serbi e croati. Essa divenne teatro di uno scontro feroce, difficile da fermare. I paesi europei furono a lungo incapaci di trovare una posizione militare comune che consentisse di intervenire. Inoltre lo scontro non aveva un fronte definito ed esso veniva sostenuto attivamente, non solo da molti serbi bosniaci, ma soprattutto dal regime di Milosevic. Si trattò di una guerra "irregolare", condotta dai serbi all'insegna della cosiddetta "pulizia etnica" nei confronti di questo amalgama di popoli, religioni e culture. Si calcola che la popolazione (soprattutto musulmana) uccisa in scontri militari o trucidata dalle azioni di pulizia etnica sia di 150.000-200.000 persone. Una delle caratteristiche dello scontro in Bosnia è che esso non corrisponde in modo univoco a ciò che viene solitamente chiamato "guerra" (cioè un esercito armato contro un esercito nemico). Si trattò piuttosto di genocidio, o, come è stato proposto, di crimine contro la vita. Ma su questo punto tornerò più avanti.
It is argued that the stories of the survivors of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 have been neglected by the memorial culture
of Bosnia and by the various national reports that investigated how the massacre could have taken place. The author argues
that a satisfactory history of the genocide has to include the voices of the survivors, in this case, the women. These are
stories of trauma that are hard to listen to. She compares listening to them to the difficulty historians experience in listening
to the stories of other genocides like the Shoah/Holocaust, they are stories based on silence about what cannot be told. The
argument relies on the oral history literature on listening to trauma as personal and subjective accounts of survival. They
are not straightforward referential narratives. One narrative, the narrative of Sabaheta who lost her child and husband, is
central to the piece. She is one of the women interviewed by the author. The interview expresses sorrow about loss and rage
about the international community; these stories are interwoven. The narrative also describes through the eyes of the victim
what she felt happened. The author is Dutch, so is part of the one nation – more than any other – that is accused of “doing
nothing.” It was the Dutch army that was supposed to protect the civilian population of Srebrenica. The government of The
Netherlands has halted any negotiation on financial support for the research as “the project does not help to overcome trauma.”
She argues that giving a voice to the victim is a necessary step toward closure.