Gendering Agency in Transitional Justice

Security Dialogue2015, Vol. 46(2) 165 –182

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Gendering agency in transitional justice

Annika BjörkdahlLund University, Sweden

Johanna Mannergren SelimovicThe Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI), Sweden

AbstractMainstream 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.

Keywordsagency, Bosnia-Herzegovina, gender, peacebuilding, transitional justice

Introduction

This article contributes to an ongoing conversation concerning agency in peace research by high-lighting the central, yet often neglected, role of women’s agency in transitional justice and peace-building processes. Our point of departure is that gendered hierarchies, and the circumscribed agency of women in such processes, result in gendered peace and justice gaps and a peace that does not resemble a gender-just peace. In this article, we concentrate on transitional justice. This enjoys a particular appeal because of the opportunities it offers to address human rights abuses

Corresponding author:Annika Björkdahl, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden. Email: [email protected]

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166 Security Dialogue 46(2)

committed against women and its potentially transformative effect on gender relations in post-conflict societies.

The aim is to further theorize agency from a gender perspective. To do so, we conceptualize gendered agency through a reading of women’s agency in relation to time and space. We locate this agency in the gendered transitional justice gaps in the context of post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina, and we point out instances of transformative, critical, and creative agency performed by women that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination.

We build on recent developments in peacebuilding and transitional justice research, as well as feminist scholarship on agency, we apply a gender perspective to the local turn in peacebuilding and transitional justice theorizing, and we attempt a reconfiguration of local agency from a gender perspective. We argue that a gender approach delivers more credibility and substance to the notion of just-peace and enables a theoretical conceptualization more reflective of justice concerns that emanate from the ‘bottom up’. No doubt a gender approach goes beyond a focus on women. Nonetheless, in peacebuilding and transitional justice analysis the understanding of the particular challenges for women is limited. In this article we have therefore chosen to expose the conflictual relationship between gender and agency by zooming in on women as their agency has to a large degree been left under-theorized.

A deepened understanding of women’s agency may then reveal the overall gender disciplinary logic of transitional justice processes that also affect men. Such logic defines and marks the bound-aries of female agency, scripts agency, and disconnects women from peace and justice. These boundaries exclude the multiple roles that women play in post-conflict processes (Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos, 2012; Meintjes et al., 2001; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008). The partial narrative that emerges from such processes where women’s voices are absent becomes the meta-narrative of the conflict and the basis for broader retributive, distributive, and restorative justice processes from which women then may be excluded a priori (Ní Aoláin et al., 2011: 69).

This article will make visible such agency that may not be captured by mainstream peacebuild-ing and transitional justice lenses. Yet, to recover women’s knowledge/voices/agency is not a sim-ple matter. By gendering agency and identifying its spatial and temporal dimensions we access agents, spaces, and processes of agency that may be hidden, ignored, or misrepresented in conven-tional approaches to transitional justice and peacebuilding. We find that women’s participation in post-conflict processes of justice and peace is complex and important. The agency that women are able to exercise in the space of transitional justice is more than reflections of existing discursive frameworks or circulating scripts. Through their transformative, critical, and creative agency they negotiate ideas about ‘whose justice’ and ‘justice for whom’.

The context of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) particularly well informs such conceptual discussion on gendered agency and transitional justice performed ‘from below’. The analysis is confined to the Bosnian war and its aftermath, a defining moment for the development of transitional justice into a pivotal ingredient of liberal peacebuilding. The ad hoc tribunal of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) internationalized post-war justice and led to the installment of the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC). Furthermore, gender crimes committed in the con-text of war received unprecedented attention and were recognized as a crime against humanity. Yet, the peace that has been constructed in BiH through nearly two decades of extensive peacebuilding including transitional justice processes is fragile, externally driven, and riven with contradictions and gendered inequalities. The Dayton Peace Accord (DPA) did in fact ‘not diminish but reaffirmed the patriarchal nationalism as a dominant ideology and social system in post-war Bosnia’ and estab-lished a peace that is far from gender-just (Cockburn, 2013: 127; Björkdahl, 2012). In the post-Dayton setting, gender identities are being reconstructed, reconfigured, and redefined through an interaction between the liberal peacebuilding discourse, with its transitional justice ambitions, and



Björkdahl and Selimovic 167

nationalism, culture, and religion, which has produced a form of victimized and ethnicized feminin-ity. These tensions have affected all aspects of transitional justice efforts, including the construction of reparations for victims, the domestic legal system, and the ongoing struggle around acknowledge-ment and commemoration (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2013). Thus, the post-conflict phase has come with a backlash for women and peace, as women’s rights activists strongly testify (Focus Group, Sarajevo, November 2011). Women in BiH have seen their agency circumscribed, their space to maneouver shrunken, and their calls for peace and justice unheard.

This article will map spaces and times in which Bosnian women perform transformative, criti-cal, and creative agency that challenge conventional notions of victimhood, such as testifying in court cases, by constructing popular culture narratives of the war that problematize women’s expe-riences and by performing reparations in the absence of a welfare state.

Advancing the agenda

Our endeavour is part of a critical peace research agenda that raises critical questions concerning the poor quality of peace in many post-conflict societies. The frictional encounters between interna-tional peacebuilding and transitional justice discourses and local practices, the emergence of hybrid peace(s), and the need to foreground local contexts and agents have prompted a local turn in peace-building (Richmond, 2009; Mac Ginty, 2010; Björkdahl and Höglund, 2013; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013).This turn poses a fundamental challenge to the dominant ways of thinking and acting about peace and justice. It has unmasked conservative peacebuilding and transitional justice practices and offered a critical assessment of the peace and justice established through the orthodoxy of these processes (e.g. Richmond and Mitchell, 2012; Jabri, 2013). Also in research on transitional justice, locally owned processes outside formal, often elite-driven, structures are afforded increasing attention. Shaw and Waldorf’s (2010) exploration of ways of ‘localizing transitional justice’ traces how ordinary people respond to, and at times transform, transitional justice mechanisms and thereby recast understandings of culture and locality inherent in international perspectives on transitional justice. At the same time, a critical, gender-informed approach reveals that bottom-up community-based transitional justice processes may privilege exclusionary and conservative politics and values and thereby bring important and unexplored gender implications (O’Rourke, 2008).

‘The local turn’ brings important implications for how we understand the nature and location of power in peacebuilding (Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013) and it has opened up for rethinking agency in the context of peacebuilding and transitional justice. Scholars advancing the critical peacebuilding agenda have been able to map various local agents that operate at different scales and make competing claims about peace and justice (Kappler and Richmond, 2011: 269; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013: 772–773; Kappler, 2014). However, although recognizing the impor-tance of power, ‘the local turn’ is not explicitly making visible the gendered dimension of power relations. While the local space is now being acknowledged as something more than an ‘empty’ space, it is not understood as a gendered space, and whereas local agency is brought to the fore, such agency has not been theorized as gendered.

Important work done by feminist peace and conflict researchers has provided pioneering contri-butions on the gendered nature of war and peace (Tickner, 1992; Enloe, 1990, 2004, 2010; Sjoberg, 2013). From this rich body of literature, we in particular build upon research that explores how peace and justice processes often interact with (ethno)nationalist and patriarchal structures to uphold and discipline gendered power relations that strip women of influence (e.g. Cockburn, 2013; Meintjes et al., 2001; Yuval-Davis, 2008; Handrahan, 2004). This research also demonstrates how female agentive subjects engaged in activities outside their expected roles are denied agency (Alison, 2004; Shepherd, 2012), and investigations into prevalent stereotypes of women-as-victims show




how they link up with the overall production of masculinities and femininities in war (Engle, 2005; Campbell, 2007; Beltz, 2008; Manjoo and McRaith, 2011; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2008).

Recent efforts to develop a more complex understanding of gendered agency is mainly located in a lively area of research that investigates how gendered frames marginalize female perpetrators of violence, thus denying violent women agency, rationality, and womanhood (Alison, 2004; MacKenzie, 2009; Åhäll and Shepherd, 2012; Auchter, 2012). This points to an entrenched andro-centric view that the realm of political violence is a man’s world, and violent women betray social norms that assert that women are passive, non-violent, and peaceful (Elshtain, 1995: 166–168; Narozhna, 2012: 82; Park-Kang, 2012: 122).For example, Sjoberg and Gentry (2007) argue that three dominant narratives of women’s agency, ‘the mother’, ‘the monster’, and ‘the whore’, pro-vide gendered reference frames for understanding women involved in political violence.This in turn shapes what type of agency individuals can exercise, as agentive subjects’ narratives of inten-tions and desires are read and interpreted according to sometimes outspoken, sometimes silent, rules (Shepherd, 2012: 6).

From this reading, we surmise that the kinship is very strong between those who theorize local agency, context, and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to peacebuilding and transitional justice on the one hand and those that write about peace and conflict from a gender perspective on the other hand. Part of our task in this article, then, is to bridge the two. Critical peacebuilding and transitional justice, we find, lend themselves well to integrate a gender perspective (see Väyrynen, 2010; Christie, 2010). A gender analysis seeks to expose one of the most basic and pervasive inequalities that exist both across and within other inequalities (see Hoogensen and Stuvøy, 2006). The concept of gender thus speaks to relationships of power and informs transitional justice and peacebuilding theory about structural relations of dominance and subordination that go largely unrecognized (Ní Aoláin, 2012). Enriched by such gender approaches, the research on peacebuilding and transitional justice can now begin to investigate the gendered dynamics of peace and justice, explore the role of women in processes of doing justice, and map the set of dispositions that inclines female agents to act/react and locate hidden spaces.

Yet, the conceptual basis for this process is hampered by the fact that gender is a complex, mul-tilayered, and contested concept. There is little agreement about the basic definition of gender as the socially and culturally constructed identities of men and women or that the women’s prevalent subordination to men is key to gendered hierarchies (see Zalewski, 2010). There is a difference between ‘women’ and ‘gender’ that we want to acknowledge. Thus, gender means not solely women (Kronsell, 2012). Although this is often how gender is understood, this loses out on the dynamic relations of power between the identities of men and women that the concept of gender entails. The approach of this article is to employ gender as a concept that more broadly informs an understanding of power, exclusion, and marginalization. Gender analysis, then, is a way of explor-ing the various forms subordination takes in any particular space, a tool that we use to zoom in on transitional justice spaces and make visible women’s agency.

The research overviewed above has doubtless proved important insights into the gendered nature of war and peace, and new knowledge has been gained into the forces silencing women in transi-tional justice. Yet, this research has less to say about the potential for women’s agency in spaces of justice (see Bell and O’Rourke, 2007; O’Rourke, 2008, 2012; Shaw and Waldorf, 2010).There has been no sustained effort to unpack the blurry concept of agency and look closer at what women actually do as agentive subjects. Agency in transitional justice is more often than not merely used as a convenient theoretical catchword and its interlinkages to micropolitics of power and to social transformations towards durable and just peace remains under-theorized.

Our analysis aims to contribute to investigations that examine the conservative backlash for women’s agency in post-conflict societies and expose the post-conflict as a gendered time and




space. By mapping and investigating how micropractices of power take place in post-conflict spaces, we expose the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding and transitional justice. In our concep-tualization of gendered agency, we identify transformative, critical, and creative elements of agency that women exercise, and zoom in on how their agency is enabled and/or disabled in rela-tion to space and time. In this way we hope to theorize gendered agency more deeply, which in turn may advance theories of peacebuilding and transitional justice.

Methodology and positionality

A note on methodology will provide some insights into how the research findings below were attained. Although this article is mainly conceptual, its analysis of women’s agency and gendered justice gaps is grounded in interview and field-based research undertaken in BiH over a period of more than five years (Björkdahl, 2012, 2013; Mannergren Selimovic et al., 2012; Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2013). We have explored various ways of conducting fieldwork in a self-reflexive manner drawing on feminist methodologies (e.g. Ackerly et al., 2006; Thapar-Björkert and Henry, 2004). We use interviews and focus groups to collect women’s oral narratives and to explore new sets of questions to capture women’s unique experiences in doing justice. Such research has enabled us to engage with the subjects of post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional justice pro-cesses directly, and often in their own spaces. The women whose knowledge and experiences form the basis of this long-term research process have taken active part in (re)formulating the perceived boundaries for transitional justice and the agentive subject with which this article is concerned.1

We also find that participant observation – ‘being-in-the-place’ – enables us to enter into the realm of the everyday, which is the privileged location for this study (see Nordstrom and Robbens, 1995: 139).To stay attuned to lived realities helps us to resist and counter abstract notions of peace and justice. Such an approach also requires us, as researchers, to consider issues of power, position-ality, and locality in research relationships and to consider ourselves in relation to the various roles of the research subjects so that we do not disregard, ignore, or downplay their agency (Kappler, 2013; Thapar-Björkert and Henry, 2004). Bearing in mind Jacoby’s (2006: 171) insightful reflec-tion that ‘both the researcher and the researched are subjects with agency’, albeit with differing power statuses, we critically reassess methodologies that construct power as uni-directional in the research process. Through our multiple fieldwork techniques we demonstrate that a research space can be constructed where the binary constructions of researched/powerless and researcher/power-ful are challenged. In fact, we recognize and are indebted to the women we interviewed as they play a transformative role in our research.

The article now proceeds with a gendered reading of agency that conceptualizes the critical, creative, and transformative elements of agency. The concept of agency is then further unpacked by bringing in spatial and temporal aspects. We posit that these need to be more closely addressed, and our analysis is underpinned with empirical illustrations of agency performed by women in post-Dayton BiH that challenge or negotiate patterns of gendered relations of domination.

Gendering agency

Building on important feminist scholarship we disentangle the ‘conflictual relationship’ between gender and agency (Gardiner, 1995: 2). We want to open up the notion of agency to avoid the risk of reproducing the idea of a single, uniform human subject unmarked by gender difference. By studying agency from this point of departure, we can unveil relations between gender, power, and inequality (Ortner, 2006: 139; Gardiner, 1995) within the political and cultural work that makes gender also construct and distribute agency. Identities are performed and narrated through certain




norms and practices that uphold gendered hierarchies, creating a ‘matrix of intelligibility’ that circumscribes and prescribes what is a ‘liveable life’ (Butler, 1999: 24). Such unpacking of agency also opens up for investigation of both individual and collective performances of agency that take place in confusing times of social progress as well as backlash. Within the complex reconfigura-tions of gender in post-conflict societies, it is not surprising that agency also takes on new and contradictory manifestations. Thus, women’s agency is constantly reinvented in the context of political and social change. In these processes we here identify three central components of wom-en’s agency: transformative, critical, and creative. They will be conceptualized below in order to assist us in reading women’s efforts to do justice and build peace in post-conflict spaces and times.

Transformative agency

In its most basic meaning, agency has to do with the human capacity to act; a capacity that is not exercised in a vacuum but rather in a social world in which structure shapes the opportunities and resources available in a constant interplay of practices and discourses (Giddens, 1984; see also Cleaver, 2007). In order to understand what entices structures to change, we need to understand how differently positioned agents can take part in change. At the centre is the mutually constitutive relationship between structure and agency, the observation driving the work of much theoretical thought. An initial step in our effort to conceptualize agency is to clarify the blurred border between actor and agency, ‘whereas actors are engaged in a consultative mode of participation, agents are better conceived of as transformative of both direct (immediate) and structural (removed) con-cerns’ (Cornwall, 2003: 1327). Transformation thus calls for a deeper understanding of agency and of the role that agentive subjects play for change. The defining component of agency ‘is the achievement of change, whereas action presumes no such transformation’ (Shepherd, 2011 : 506). Shepherd further points out the central aspect of agency as ‘the idea of autonomy (literally “self law”), the capacity to act independent of external constraints or coercion’. But the autonomous ability to act and to drive transformation is, to a high degree, different for men and women accord-ing to preconceived notions of ‘appropriate gendered behaviours’ and where men are usually con-sidered as ‘active and autonomous agents, but women are not’ (Gardiner, 1995: 2). This is at the core of the conflicted relationship between gender and agency.

Critical agency

The exercise of agency involves mutuality and interdependence as well as relations of domination and subordination, and women are ‘both active subjects and subjects of domination’ (MacLeod, 1992: 533–534). Within these relations multiple degrees of more or less agency is exercised and can ‘include everything from outright rebellions at one end, to … a kind of complex and ambiva-lent acceptance of dominant categories and practices’ (Ortner, 2006: 144). On one end of the spec-trum, self-disciplining agents accept and even endorse relations of inequality as they enroll in projects of others and internalize hegemonic norms. Such agency that upholds prevailing power hierarchies, often by undercutting other women’s agency, can be rewarded by patriarchal struc-tures. At the other end of the spectrum, agents exercise forms of critical agency to challenge power relations, question existing norms and practices, confront inequitable distribution of resources, and claim and extend their rights.

The political, gendered dimension of critical agency refers to a critical disposition against the status quo and a commitment to social change based on a fundamental rethinking of gendered relationships (McNay, 2000).Critical agency is the process through which this activity constitutes its sociopolitical environment, alters the behaviour of others, changes policies and politics, as well




as modifies ideational structures. Recent explorations of agency in critical peacebuilding research has taken a specific interest in identifying critical agents and, in so doing, has been able to explore the interplay between discourses of power and social practices of resistance (e.g. Richmond, 2010, 2011; Kappler and Richmond, 2011). While these contributions have made visible those agents ‘in the margins’, the search for the critical agent has mostly taken an interest in reactive acts. Agents here run a risk of being seen (only) as able to respond to overarching structures (McNay, 2000; Emirbayer and Mische, 1998).We recognize the fact that agents are to a lesser or greater degree socially embedded in relations of power and interdependence (MacLeod, 1992: 533–534), yet we find that it is important to recognize not only reactive but also proactive agency, with power of initiative. Critical agency should not only be understood as overt political (re)action, but may also be enacted through ‘life projects’ that may not necessarily be formulated as intentional (political) acts of resistance but that still have transformative effects in the gendered everyday (Ortner, 2006).

Creative agency

Agency also holds a creative element in the sense that agency can be exercised in a manner that unsettles conventional boundaries of women’s agency, takes place in novel spaces, and questions predetermined roles of women while opening up new possibilities for women’s agency. Thus, agency cannot be separated from creativity, yet this creativity and agency itself is gendered (Hekman, 1995: 203). Our emphasis on the creative dimension of agency hints at the shortcomings of the rationalist and determinist notions of agency and alludes to the expressions of agency that do not reify or reproduce but challenge structures (McNay, 2000: 135).Change is then conditioned by cer-tain types of autonomous agency, here understood as the ‘ability to act in an unexpected fashion or to institute new and unanticipated modes of behavior’ (McNay, 2000: 22).We posit that change and creativity of action are closely interlinked. It is also important to recognize that there may not be a visible, identifiable agent of change as agency may be exercised through fleeting action in hidden and obscure spaces and thus struggle in the margins to change existing structures and/or undermine existing power relations. In such times and places, exerting agency in the traditional sense may only have a slim chance of bringing about transformation. Creative agency, however, may be able to re-narrate the partial war-story to reflect women’s experiences also, and re-appropriate the everyday spaces and cross to other levels of society from which such agency traditionally is excluded. Such a deepening of the concept of agency is important for a normative perspective that seeks to understand social transformations towards durable and gender-just peace. Thus, our theoretical venture now progresses to situate women’s transformative, critical, and creative agency in time and space.

Situating women’s agency in space

The agentive subject is always situated. We therefore need to think more closely about the spaces in which women’s agency is exercised, in its transformative, critical, and creative elements. Space can be understood both as a physical site and also as a repository of social and political relations; always under construction and never therefore closed. To situate agency in space is hence to access the relational politics that makes certain actions possible in certain spaces (Massey, 2005). Our interest in transitional justice ‘from below’ means searching for women’s agency beyond organized (political) space, and listening to the ‘whispers in the margin’. Women may not always interact with the world of formal transitional justice, but they do take actions in their own lives in order to redress those injustices to which formal programmes for accountability, acknowledgement, and reparations have failed to respond. Moreover, a small act of exercising agency and doing justice in this informal sense and setting may represent a challenge to what is perceived to be the accepted




boundaries of transitional justice. We note that actions in informal spaces may also travel to formal spaces in sometimes unexpected ways, and restrictions and marginalizations in formal spaces may affect the agentive subject in informal spaces. To a large degree, formal and informal spaces cor-respond to public and private spaces; ostensibly stable categories that are in fact leaky and highly precarious. Critical questions must be asked around how agency is disabled or enabled within and through these spaces as they are imbued with power relations and hierarchies (Gaventa, 2006; see also Mannergren Selimovic et al., 2012).

Disabling spaces

We begin by turning our attention to the formal, public space of the courtroom. We find that its procedures tend to entrench the war meta-narrative, which in turn provides a gendered script in which women’s many different experiences are neglected and muted into a scripted position as ‘women-as-victims’ (e.g. Ross, 2001). From this follows that women are seen to participate in legal proceedings mainly in order to seek personal closure and ‘healing’ (e.g. Mertus, 2000, 2004). We argue that this is an analysis that obscures them as agentive subjects with much larger and critical agendas, and provides a too narrow reading of many individuals’ decisions to go through the grue-some legal process. While this is not outspoken, it seems that these choices are in fact informed by a will not only to confront the perpetrators but also to challenge patriarchal norms that define their lived experiences of the post-conflict everyday. According to a rare interview study with Bosnian women witnesses, the strongest reasons for giving testimony were ‘to make the perpetrator account-able for what he did and to see him punished, to prevent other women and girls from being raped, and to tell “what really happened”’ (Medica Mondiale, 2009: 52). They also wanted to act against impunity and increase security: ‘I decided to testify to protect our children … We had to testify in order to remove war criminals from the streets’ (Medica Mondiale, 2009: 54). Finally, they wanted to contribute to far-reaching transformations of underlying societal values: ‘These persons cannot be idols and role models to future generations. The only way to prevent this is to reveal the truth about them’ (Medica Mondiale, 2009: 55). The dominant narrative of rape victims seeking per-sonal ‘closure’ hence renders invisible these women’s attempts to influence critically and contrib-ute to larger societal transformations. In this disabling space women express agency beyond the script of women as victim and rather use the victimhood as a platform for a subject position. Such activities need to be recognized as part of the available repertoire of actions for women in the highly polarized post-conflict society. Hence, while agency may be constrained and marginalized, there is no such thing as ‘absent agency’. It has a bearing on how gendered agentive subjects not only have the capacity to react to structures of domination, but also to act and enroll in projects of their own, and how they both react and act in relation to socio-culturally mediated structures.

We also recognize that the situated agency that female witnesses perform in the delimited space of the courtroom brings consequences that ‘spill over’ into their private spaces. At the courts, wit-nesses have had to share waiting rooms with the accused and in some cases their identities have been leaked despite guarantees of anonymity (TRIAL, 2012). Further, as witnesses are not reim-bursed for their travels to court, and as the court system often fails to provide information about the right to claim for allowances, their participation also comes with an economic cost (Impunity Watch, 2012). Several witnesses in the domestic courts of BiH have been threatened and pro-grammes for witness protection are either non-existent or very marginal (Authors’ interview: Sarajevo, December 2009). It seems that criminal justice provides women not just with relief but also wounds. By coming forward to testify, Bosnian girls and women have suffered from economic restraints and social stigma. Whatever good that may come out of the courtroom ordeal will be offset by the risks of being met with incredulity, being blamed for the rape, or having their




experiences trivialized (Hunt, 2004: 177–179). The formal space of the courtroom brings to light these insecurities and helps us to understand the structural constraints on women’s agency.

Enabling spaces

To grasp and identify further the multifaceted women’s agency in transitional justice processes in BiH, we need to move beyond formal boundaries and access spaces of the everyday – a qualitative realm of human action, which comprises its own forms of agencies and practices allowing women to perform creative, makeshift, and resourceful agency (see Lefebvre, 1961; de Certeau, 1984). The everyday is a space where women are doing justice and building peace, often invisibly to the eyes of state-centric, top-down transitional justice studies. This stands in sharp contrast to the remote, formal, abstract transitional justice mechanisms, often distant from the lived realities of women in post- conflict societies. In a sense the everyday is a space constituted by those inhabiting it. Activities and agencies in the everyday are more likely to be non-instrumental and self-fulfilling than the logics of governing structures of transitional justice and peacebuilding (see de Certeau, 1984: xi). Yet, the everyday is an ambiguous space for women as it is also a site for the disciplinary logic of patriarchy.

A critical reading of the programmes for reparations to female victims in BiH reveals ongoing negotiations between state structures and women agents concerning the definitions of borders between formal and informal, public and private spaces. When it comes to reparations, women in BiH are not simply defined as victims entitled (or not) to reparations. They are agents situated within civil society – stepping in to perform reparations when governments fail to do so (Authors’ interview, Sarajevo, December 2009). Many women non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Vive Zene or Medica Therapy Centre, function in BiH as service providers when repara-tions are lacking, delayed, or insufficient. They provide medical care, psychotherapy, trauma treat-ment, and various other approaches to healing while promoting gender awareness (Cockburn, 2013: 28). Further, addressing women’s experiences of domestic violence, and targeting violence in the public sphere, are necessary in order to ‘fill the rule of law vacuum’ in the post-conflict society. The staff of Medica Therapy Centre, mainly women and former war victims themselves, are simultaneously victims and agents performing reparations much like the individual women testifying in courts, and they negotiate and challenge the scripted passivity inherent in the ‘victim agency’ in their role of doing justice from below (see Newton and Rosenfelt cited in Gardiner, 1995: 4). Demonstrating that agency is not separated from its actions, we agree that ‘agents are coextensive with their actions’ (see Gardiner 1995: 11).

By performing reparation programmes, women situate their agency in the everyday space and are thus able to shape transitional justice practices. Nonetheless, while the work that they perform in the informal and civil society space is vital, it is restrained by structural constraints with little space for transformative action, and often poorly understood since it is ‘off the radar’. As noted by a woman involved with providing safe houses for women who have suffered domestic violence:

We are just in a vicious circle. We are forcing the state to prosecute perpetrators. But we do not force the state to provide the victims with housing and so on. And (the state) did not in the first place provide the foundations for them to no longer be victims at all. (Focus Group, Sarajevo, November 2011)

She continued: ‘If you ask victims and survivors of violence, what they need is housing … and a job so that they can put bread on the table. But we do not fight for their social and economic problems, we can simply fight for their temporary sanctuary.’ The everyday here emerges as a space where female agents engage in transformation both at the level of the individual victim that




they support and also at a societal level where they try to affect patriarchal norms, while taking into consideration the constraints of power structures.

Beyond conventional spaces of transitional justice, popular culture in the form of films and other types of fiction has emerged as a creative space for women to renegotiate narrow readings of women’s experiences of war, adding complexity to processes of acknowledgement and the war narrative (see Weldes, 2003). In the Bosnian context, film-making in particular has provided a chance for critical, creative agents to alter the narrative of the war and influence the post-war per-ceptions of the victims and perpetrators of the war. The film Grbavica (English title Esma’s Secret - Grbavica), released in 2006 and directed by Jasmila Zbanic, turns the nameless victim into a subject dealing with the ongoing consequences of a war rape. As the film also criticized and com-plicated the post-conflict state’s celebration of its heroes, it led to some public debate (Dogwoof Pictures, 2006). Zbanic’s documentary film, Red Rubber Boots, is about a mother’s ceaseless mourning as she searches excavation sites for remains of her lost child. The film captures the drive of the subject to fill the void and raises questions such as meanings and practices of motherhood after a traumatic past, as well as linking it to explorations of memory, remembrance, witnessing, and women’s subjectivities and identification models in the Bosnian present (Husanovic, 2009). The recent international film production, In the Land of Blood and Honey (directed by Angelina Jolie), which frames the topic of the rape camps with a love story across ethnic borders, sparked a lot of controversy, which in itself opened up a debate on the voice of rape victims, raising conten-tious questions around who could speak for them and who had the right to control their story (The Guardian, 2011). These developments support the claim that ‘all cultural sites are powerful arenas in which political struggles take place; Culture is not opposed to politics. Culture is political, and politics is cultural’ (Cynthia Weber cited in Åhäll, 2012: 3). This cultural space enables women to perform ‘authorial agency’ where the narrative constructed – the story-telling in itself – creates subjects capable of action (see Gardiner, 1995: 5) and helps women to perform creative agency in unconventional transitional justice spaces.

Situating women’s agency in time

To this vital discussion of spaces needs to be added a deepened understanding of the temporal dimensions of agency in order to grasp transformation. Thus, the debate about gender and agency is taking place within a context of both backlash and progress, which we are able to capture by introducing temporality to the conceptualization of agency.

Theories of the mutually constitutive relationship between structure and agency have been criti-cized for not being fully able to explain what makes structures change. As noted by Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 963), the concept of agency ‘tends to remain so tightly bound to structure that one loses sight of the different ways that agency actually shapes social action’. Their reading of agency as a ‘temporally embedded process of social engagement’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 963), which is informed not only by the past and present but also by the future, includes time as an essential aspect of understanding the relationship between agency and change. Change presupposes an understanding of continuity because the most radical and profound phases of social transformation show not only discontinuities (Giddens, 1979: 216).

It is valuable to observe how women’s agency is played out over a longer period of time, how gains may go backwards, how progress may be reversed, and how windows of opportunity may open for women’s agency at unexpected moments. To bring in temporality gives us access to the longue durée of these changes and continuities and, importantly, makes it possible to investigate analytically the ways that agents may entice change and to link these agentive engagements to transformations over time (Eastmond, 2010; McLeod, 2013). In this way one avoids the danger of




an analysis that places ‘the local’ and ‘the everyday’ as somehow separate from socioeconomic structures, as argued in recent criticism of the ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding research (Chandler, 2013). By bringing in temporality in our conceptualization of agency, we are able to trace how micropractices of agency, on the contrary, are always intersected with the macrotrajectories of greater social and economic transformations. To thus conceptualize agency as embedded in the ‘flow of time’ makes it empirically possible to address and study the transformative potential of creative agents of change, who, in a deeply divided present, imagine inclusive futures while also recognizing the constraints of persistent structures that require compliance. The endorsement of such creative imaginaries of the future calls for an agency that critically challenges dominant dis-courses and practices such as patriarchy and/or ethno-nationalism. To bring in time also makes sense in an analysis of agency in relation to transitional justice processes. These processes are by definition highly ‘temporally embedded’, as backward-looking transitional justice mechanisms seek accountability for past atrocities, and forward-looking mechanisms aim to prevent future violence and build new social relations.

Disabling times

A gendered reading of peace processes over time reveals how the space for women’s agency often expands during times of upheaval when embedded power structures shift and adapt to new demands and decrease as peace is negotiated (Yuval-Davis, 2008: 171; Bell and O’Rourke, 2010). In BiH the peace process has been ongoing for nearly two decades, and to tap into the experiences of women peace activists over this period is extremely valuable in order to understand how spaces for transformative agency have opened up during conflict and then slowly closed in its aftermath. When the war ended, women’s organizations were at the forefront of building interethnic bridges; for example, mobilizing inter-ethnically around issues concerning war rape, care of widows and orphans, and other social issues. As described by one woman, who had been part of the first team organizing women’s groups across frontlines, it took a lot of courage. ‘At that time (the end of war) I felt all those bad feelings for the other side. But in that period, thanks to our sanity, we started to build a really good relationship among ourselves’, she said during an interethnic focus group, ‘… now I feel so free, I can say my name, I really feel that everyone in this room is my friend’ (Focus Group, Sarajevo, November 2011).

These ‘transformative agents’ that managed to cooperate across ‘enemy’ lines laid the basis for the important work that women went on to develop in the post-conflict period; for example, (re)building civil society and successfully lobbying for gender quotas and gender-equal legislation (Lithander, 2000; Helms, 2007). However, the political climate has deteriorated over the years. Patriarchal, ethno-nationalist, and religious values and norms have established a far from gender-just peace with shrinking political space for women (Björkdahl, 2012, 2013; Cockburn, 2013: 127). ‘We have seen a re-traditionalization of gender roles. After the period of socialism and the status that women then had – with all its limitations – a period came of total exclusion of women from the public space, and also the hidden discrimination within families’ (Focus Group, Sarajevo, November 2011). Nationalism and patriarchy were understood to have developed into a ‘partnership that prevents women from doing politics or having power’ (Focus Group, Sarajevo, November 2011).

A central issue for Bosnian women peace activists throughout the post-conflict period has been gender-based violence and its continuity after the end of the conflict. They were, as pointed out above, instrumental in the international legislation around conflict-related sexual violence, but they have also continued their work against post-conflict domestic violence (Authors’ interview, Sarajevo, May 2010). A legacy of the war is that violence experienced during the conflict now seems to mani-fest itself in increased and more severe cases of domestic violence. In an interview, a representative




of one women’s organization stressed the increased need to address domestic violence, ‘everyday rape’, prostitution, and trafficking (Authors’ interview, Sarajevo, December 2009). In their everyday work, many women peace activists were well aware of the continuities between perceived binary pairs such as war/peace, public/private, and accountability/impunity (Ní Aoláin et al., 2011; Elshtain, 1987).‘The extent of domestic violence is precisely a consequence of the fact that victims of war have never gotten recognition’, as a participant in the focus group said.2 Awareness of time helps us to understand how such borders and boundaries are fluid and constantly changing. In transitions from war, rape is a form of violence that easily spills over to peacetime, but with very different sociopolitical connotations and implications. In peacetime, rape may be privatized, sometimes con-ducted in the domestic sphere in connection with other forms of domestic violence produced by and reproducing structures of domination and subordination. An international judge at the Bosnian War Crimes Court pointed to the post-conflict strengthening of patriarchal structures as a space of impu-nity for both war and peacetime rape (Authors’ interview, Sarajevo, December 2009). Probing into the notion of security reveals that security for men is not the same as security for women, and between de facto and de jure security, and between extraordinary and ordinary violence. The violent masculinities that dominate in times of conflict travel into the forms of accountability sought in post-conflict transitional justice processes, reflecting the gender biases that manifest themselves in pre- and mid-conflict. Essentially, our analysis demonstrates how constraints on women’s agency travel through time and how women’s agency may actually shrink as peace proceeds. This opens our understanding of the fragile assumptions such peace and justice projects rest upon, and how a lack of gender awareness may in effect create space for conservative backlashes, stripping women of agency and closing off spaces for informal agency.

Enabling times

Another aspect of transitional justice that has engaged women in BiH concerns commemoration. Increasingly, commemoration is seen as a central element in acknowledgement processes and a potential platform for writing an inclusive history in order to develop a fuller narrative of past abuses, learn from the past, and thus avoid a repetition of atrocities in the future. It is a narrative that has not encompassed women’s experiences. As discussed above, popular culture has fairly recently opened up as a space where the silences around crimes against women and women’s expe-riences have been broken. To add to this, there are several examples of how commemoration events have over time been used by women as an opportunity to actively and loudly demand recognition. The development of this agency is only possible to identify through a temporal reading. It can be illustrated by the actions of a small group of women that, in 2004, took the bus to the small town of Foča in eastern BiH with a clear but difficult mission: to put up a commemorative plaque on a building in the centre of town that had held one of the war’s most infamous rape camps. As the women, some of whom had been camp inmates, approached the building, they were turned away by local police while inhabitants shouted abuse, and some threw stones at them (BBC News, 2004). Their attempt at putting up a plaque was an act of defiance and resistance against dominant, ethno-nationalist narratives of the war that failed to acknowledge them as victims (Authors’ inter-view, Sarajevo, 2008). Through their action, they unsettled stereotypes of the silent and passive female victim, and at the same time they disrupted the image of the heroic soldier (commemorated by a dominating monument only a few metres away).

By situating this exercise of critical agency ‘from below’ in time, we can trace how these women, who had been the objects of rape and abuse during the war, manifested themselves several years later as political agents with creative and resourceful agency. While this particular action did not succeed in changing the local narrative in Foča, which continues to silence the narrative of the atrocities at the




camp, the women’s creative agency, at least momentarily, destabilized the scripted role of women victims. No doubt their cries for recognition should be read as part of a persistent collective voice that resonates from the margins and refuses to allow the silences to remain, probing to bring about a dis-cursive change. Since the time of the manifestation, the small, local organization that coordinates some of the women who went back to Foča, Udruženje Žene-Žrtve Rata, has repeatedly made demands for acknowledgement through public demonstrations in the centre of Sarajevo as well as outside the local ICTY offices. Although a slow process, they have managed over the years to add complexity to the commemoration process and to carve out a space for transformative agency.

Conclusion: Gendering agency and engendering transitional justice

In this article we set out to think critically about the gendered hierarchies inherent in transitional justice processes more broadly and our analysis reveals different ways women are doing justice. Through this gendering project we have accessed agency and spaces for agency ignored by main-stream transitional justice. The gendered interplay between women’s agency and post-conflict and transitional justice structures has been approached through the conceptualization of agency in rela-tion to space and time. Identifying the transformative, critical, and creative elements of agency pinpoints the agentive subject and the active and reactive ways in which women exercise agency. It captures the broad political changes as well as the minute dealings in the ‘micropolitics’ of gen-dered post-conflict life. Thus, female agentive subjects should not be regarded as apolitical. Once non-organized, invisible, or marginalized, women’s agency may over time transform into visible transformative agency. Situating agency in space advances our understanding of the diverse and sometimes hidden spaces in which women’s agency is performed. It points to the need to identify critical agents beyond formal and informal structures, and listen to the silent and silenced voices. Thus we notice that women’s agency is performed in a re-appropriated everyday. It does not mean that such agency cannot cross to other levels of society where women can become identifiable agents for change in formal spaces. Our analysis of women’s agency in peacebuilding and transi-tional justice concludes that agency transcends spatial divides such as domestic/public, informal/formal, expected/unexpected spaces and this approach makes visible the micropolitics that many women engage in for addressing and coping with the deep contestations in ‘the ordinary’ that shat-tering violence has inscribed (Das, 2007). Finally, bringing in the temporality of agency makes visible the opening and closing of political possibilities, the friction over time between different actors when hegemonic relations are transformed. Thinking about agency in relation to time pro-vides tools to understand the potential for transformations and shiftings of gendered hierarchies. Yet, restraints in agency at one point in time may travel through time to create restraints in the future. For example, the lack of women representatives in peace negotiations has negative conse-quences for women’s possibilities to participate in political, juridical, and socioeconomic develop-ment in the post-conflict phase. Thus, the temporal aspect provokes a deeper appreciation of the complexity of performing agency.

We have undertaken a search for, and a reading of, women making peace and doing justice. From this analysis we have been able to distil a number of preliminary concluding thoughts. First, we need to look beyond ‘acceptable or “appropriate” victimhood for women’ (Ní Aoláin et al., 2011: 180) to identify expressions of critical agency that refute essentialist configurations of gen-der and nation. A deepened understanding of the gendered dimension of ethno-nationalism is hence needed in order to grasp how acknowledgement processes can come to encompass women fully. We conclude that women’s participation in transitional justice and peacebuilding processes is com-plex, multilayered, and constrained, yet creative, and we have been able to capture the ways in which women exercise agency in ‘the margins’, in ‘alternative’ or ‘hidden’ spaces, as well as in the




public, political space, but the latter perhaps to a lesser degree. Furthermore, we also agree that transitional justice carries the potential to add to transformative peacebuilding and thus contribute to more gender equality in the post-conflict society, yet this potential is often untapped.

Fundamentally, our analysis bridges the ongoing discussion on transitional justice to a research agenda concerned with transformative approaches to peacebuilding. Such approaches seek to uncover and confront prevailing gendered hierarchies and encourage wider social change through changing the asymmetrical relationships that were present prior to the conflict, or were shaped and consoli-dated during it, and which have become a hallmark of women’s post-war experience. As such, this article is a contribution to the ‘local turn’ in critical peacebuilding and transitional justice.

The conceptual work that we have presented on gendering agency has informed a theoretical development of the powerful and compelling concept of agency along the dimensions of trans-formative, creative, and critical agency. This will hopefully help to develop more stringent empiri-cal research on agency in transformative peacebuilding and transitional justice. Gendering agency is the starting point for this endeavour.

Funding

Research for this article received funding from the Swedish Research Council 2013-2015.

Notes

1. An important event in this process of knowledge production which benefited both ‘the researcher and the researched’ was the focus group held in Sarajevo in November 2011 with 13 Bosnian women peace activists. A full day workshop, run by one of the authors, was held in which the relationship between gender, power, and peace was the starting point for the discussions. The focus group was run as part of a research project initiated by the Swedish NGO Kvinna till Kvinna (Woman to Woman).

2. This claim is supported in a UN report: ‘The high levels of violence registered in the present day can to a certain extent be traced to the conflicts or the legacies of conflict … Violence experienced during the war … seems to manifest itself in increased and more severe cases of domestic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (Report by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict to UN, A/66/657*-S/2012/33, 2012: 18).

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Annika Björkdahl is Professor of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden. Her current research includes international and local peacebuilding with a particular focus on urban peacebuilding, and gender and transi-tional justice. Among her recent publications is the co-edited Rethinking Peacebuilding: The Quest for Just Peace in the Middle East and the Western Balkans (2013) Routledge, co-edited special issue ‘Precarious peacebuilding: Friction in global-local encounters’, Peacebuilding 1:3 (2013), Divided Cities (2015) Nordic Academic Press and she has published articles in journal such as Peace and Change, Human Rights Review, Journal of European Public Policy, International Peacekeeping.

Johanna Mannergren Selimovic is a research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Her research concerns peace processes with a special interest in reconciliation, politics of memory, gender, peace-building in the everyday, and narrative methodology. Recent publications include ‘Challenges of post-conflict coexistence: Narrating truth and justice in a Bosnian town’, Political Psychology (forthcoming 2015), ‘Gendered justice gaps in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Human Rights Review (with Annika Björkdahl, 2013) and ‘Making peace, making memory. Peacebuilding and politics of remembrance at memorials of mass atroci-ties’, Peacebuilding (2013). She is currently involved in research projects on gender and transitional justice, and urban peacebuilding.


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Gendering Agency in Transitional Justice

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