Gender-Based Violence, Heritage, and Power at Timbuktu

• In Event: Sexual Violence

Abstract

This paper addresses gendered dimensions of war and political conflict by examining sexual violence and cultural violence in Mali. We examine how global governance institutions construct, adjudicate, and remediate cultural harm, and with what consequences for victims of sexual violence. We compare two cases at the International Criminal Court: The Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi (2016) and The Prosecutor v. Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud (2019). Both were legal watersheds. Al Mahdi was the first ICC prosecution of cultural heritage destruction as a standalone violation. Al Hassan was the first ICC prosecution of gender-based violence (GBV). Al Mahdi pleaded guilty and his case ended before a trial verdict was issued. The judges in the Al Hassan case acquitted the defendant of GBV. Both cases were celebrated by legal advocates, for different reasons—differences that we analyze in the broader setting of the global governance of cultural harm.

Global governance produces a hierarchical ordering of harm that separates symbolic destruction from embodied and gendered violence. This separation has significant implications for restitution, accountability, and postcolonial justice. Our intervention speaks directly to sociological scholarship on sex and gender, postcolonial theory, and international human rights. We construct a theoretical framework that draws on ideas from Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hemmami, and other feminist scholars of gendered governance, and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the overrepresentation of Man in “universal” humanism. With this framework, we show how the ICC’s first conviction based exclusively on the destruction of cultural heritage crystallizes a broader institutional logic: cultural heritage becomes hyper-visible as an object of universal concern, while sexual violence—although pervasive in the Malian conflict—remains marginal to the legal narrative and reparative framework. The result is omission by institutional differentiation. Sexual violence and cultural harm were governed through distinct organizational systems, evidentiary regimes, and moral vocabularies that rarely converge.

Authors

• Fiona Greenland, University of Virginia

• Mahso Gichiki, University of Virginia