Gender Conflicts

In the early 1970s, when women's history began to claim attention as an emerging discipline in North American universities, it was dominated by a middle-class Anglo-Saxon bias. Today the field is much more diverse, a development reflected in the scope of this volume. Rather than documenting the experiences of women solely in a framework of gender analysis, its authors recognize the interaction of race, class, and gender as central in shaping women's lives, and men's. These essays represent an exciting breakthrough in women's studies, expanding the borders of the discipline while breaking down barriers between mainstream and women's history.

The authors focus on the multidimensionality of gender in conflict, yet they also prioritise the experience of women given both the changing nature of war and the historical de-emphasis on women's experiences.

Gender is increasingly recognized as central to the study and analysis of the traditionally male domains of war and international relations. The book explores the key role of gender in peace research, conflict resolution and international politics. Rather than simply add gender and stir the aim is to transcend different disciplinary boundaries and conceptual approaches to provide a more integrated basis for research and study. To this end Gender, Peace & Conflict uniquely combines theoretical chapters alongside empirical case studies, to demonstrate the importance of a gender perspective to both theory and practice in conflict resolution and peace research.

Peacekeeping has become a major international undertaking throughout the world, from Africa to the Americas, from Europe to Southeast Asia. Yet until now, there has been no systematic analysis of the key role of gender in post-cold war conflicts and of post-conflict peacekeeping efforts. This groundbreaking volume explores how gender has become a central factor in shaping current thinking about the causes and consequences of armed conflict, complex emergencies, and reconstruction. Drawing on expertise ranging from the highest levels of international policymaking down to the daily struggle to implement peacekeeping operations, this work represents the full span of knowledge and experience about international intervention in local crises. Presenting a rich array of examples from Angola, Bosnia Herzegovina, East Timor, El Salvador, the former Yugoslavia, Guatemala, Haiti, Kosovo, Liberia, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, and Serbia, the authors offer important insights for future peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men. Women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, but only recently have they been allowed to join state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist organizations in unprecedented numbers. This begs the question - how useful are traditional gendered categories in understanding the dynamics of war and conflict? And why are our stories of gender roles in war typically so narrow? Who benefits from them? In this illuminating book, Laura Sjoberg explores how gender matters in war-making and war-fighting today. Drawing on a rich range of examples from conflicts around the world, she shows that both women and men play many more diverse roles in wars than either media or scholarly accounts convey. Gender, she argues, can be found at every turn in the practice of war; it is crucial to understanding not only ‘what war is’, but equally how it is caused, fought and experienced. With end of chapter questions for discussion and guides to further reading, this book provides the perfect introduction for students keen to understand the multi-faceted role of gender in warfare. Gender, War and Conflict will challenge and change the way we think about war and conflict in the modern world.

Through an in-depth analysis of the multifaceted manifestations of gender and conflict, this book shows how cognition and behaviour, agency and victimization, are gendered beyond the popular stereotypes. Conflict not only reconfirms social hierarchies and power relations, but also motivates people to transgress cultural boundaries and redefine their self-images and identities. The contributions are a mix of classical ethnography, performance studies and embodiment studies, showing ’emotions and feelings’ often denied in scientific social research. Strong in their constructivist approach and unorthodox in theory, the articles touch upon the dynamic relation between the discourses, embodiments and symbolic practices that constitute the gendered world of conflict. The localities and research sites vary from institutional settings such as a school, rebel movements, public toilets and the military to more artistic domains of gendered conflicts such as prison theatre classes and the capoeira ring. At the same time, these conflicts and domains appropriate wider discourses and practices of a global nature, demonstrating the globalised and institutionalised nature of the nexus gender-conflict. A first set of chapters deals with ’breaking the gender taboos’ and renegotiating the stereotypical gender roles - masculinities or femininities - during conflict. A second set of chapters focuses more explicitly on the bodily experience of conflict either physically of symbolically, while the last set straddle body and narrative. The inductive quality of the work leads to unexpected insights and does give access to worlds that are new, and often surprising and unconventional.

This publication focuses on the gender dimensions of intrastate conflicts (civil wars), organised around eight key themes of gender and warfare, sexual violence, formal and informal peace processes, post-conflict legal frameworks, work issues, rehabilitation of social services and community-driven development. For each theme, the authors examine the impact on gender roles of conflict situations, the development challenges involved, and the policy options available to help build more inclusive and gender balanced post-conflict societies.

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This book makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence—or ignored altogether. Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement: Baljit Kaur, who armed herself with a video camera to record essential evidence of the conflict; Justice Ajit Singh Bains, who became a beloved “people’s judge”; and Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who returned to Punjab to document abuses even as other elites were fleeing. Together, they are credited with saving countless lives. Braiding oral histories, personal snapshots, and primary documents recovered from at-risk archives, Kaur shows that when entire conflicts are marginalized, we miss essential stories: stories of faith, feminist action, and the power of citizen-activists.