Women's Rights After War: A Critical Approach to Women’s Empowerment

• In Event: Gendered Implications of War

Abstract

Scholarship on women in war often focuses on the devastating and disproportionate toll that conflict wreaks on the lives of women. Less studied, are the openings and opportunities that frequently follow war, derived from its potential to disrupt and fundamentally reorder gender relations (Berry 2018; Hughes 2009; Hughes and Tripp 2015; Tripp 2015). Through a systematic comparative examination of post-conflict gender reforms in ten war-affected contexts, this project evaluates postconflict women's empowerment opportunities in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, DR Congo, Iraq, Liberia, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. We map new opportunities for women that have emerged after war in social, economic and political spheres, evaluating law, policy and mobilization side by side. Through research undertaken at the level of national policy, subnational implementation and individual engagement with law and policy, we evaluate the de facto impact of postwar women’s equality and empowerment efforts. Critically, we ask which women benefit from new opportunities, suggesting that the implementation of gender egalitarian law and policy often maps onto existing socio-political cleavages. Particularly when the postwar political settlement benefits a single political faction, gender reforms tend to ensure that women affiliated with other political, religious or ethnic identity groups remain sidelined. Reforms heralded as emancipatory and egalitarian in one domain often, therefore, reproduce conflict-era fissures, ensuring marginalized women’s continued political and gender oppression.

Authors

• Marie Elizabeth Berry, University of Denver

• Milli Lake, London School of Economics