Maternal Harm in Conflict and Post-Conflict Context: Northern Ireland

• In Event: Gender, Relational Harm, and Justice: Legacies of Political Violence

Abstract

This paper addresses maternal harm through multiple prisms theoretical, empirical and doctrinal. The research in part draws on an empirical study carried out on conflict-affected mothers in Northern Ireland that lost a child during the conflict in violent circumstances, as well as a parallel archival study of women’s representation during the conflict in Northern Ireland as represented in the mainstream media from 1969-1998. I use the insights of the empirical and archival data to develop my theoretical and doctrinal analysis. This analysis seeks to close a conceptual and empirical gap moving beyond the notion that direct and physical acts of violence alone constitutes a harm. The work will develop an independent concept of maternal harm and trace its absence and the significance of this gap in legal literatures in general and law and conflict literature in particular. I address the discourses of victimhood that usually pervade the representation of mothers and motherhood in areas of conflict. It remains important to surface how women as mothers display agency to challenge and negotiate the circumstances of oppression they find themselves in including vulnerability, discrimination and exclusion. Victimization is often intertwined with aspects of individual and collective agency, resourcefulness and remarkable adaptability in the face of tragedy and disaster. Drawing on the work of Takseva and Sgoutas I frame how, “the dialectic of maternal identities [is] often actively negotiated between the poles of victimhood and agency” (Takseva and Sgoutas, 2015: 3). Building on my earlier conceptual work, this work seeks to close that gap on a legal framing of maternal harms, paying particular attention to harms in situations of extremity, specifically conflict and post-conflict settings.

Author

• Fionnuala Ni Aolain, The University of Minnesota