Post Conflict and Feminism

Talking about Post Conflict and Feminism

By Felicia Whatley

On Thursday March 24, 2011 Ruth Jacobson spoke at UMass Boston about “Looking for the Post in Post-Conflict: Challenges to Feminist Analysis and Practice, which was hosted by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights as part of gender and conflict series.

“There needs to be awareness for women in political demonstration to ensure women have a place in politics. There is a cost to women who are elected being assassinated. They are expected to do their domestic responsibilities,” said Jacobson.

Ruth Jacobson is an author and speaker from the University of Bradford in the UK having received her Ph.d from there in Gender and Conflict. She worked on issues of gender and conflict since the mid- 1980s where she lived and worked in a war zone in Mozambique.

Jacobson is a popular lecturer at the internationally renowned Department of Peace Studies at Bradford. Jacobson has co-edited the volume States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance and worked at the Oxfam agency as well as International Alert and UK’s Department of International Development.

She began her lecture with a photo of women in Mozambique working at a cashew factory. “Wars are a time of destabilization and after there is new beginnings with a democratically elected government,” said Jacobson.

She said that it was thought that women’s labor was infinitely expandable in such nations during the ‘80s. Or that women should go unpaid for their labor, even if they have taken on leadership roles while the men fight.

“Post conflict has to encompass more than when the guns go silent, but reconstruction starts when the fighting stops,” said Jacobson.

Jacobson defined what “post conflict” is and why it is relevant. The term “post conflict” is now commonplace in the lexicon of security studies and peace building. In its earlier stages, this term reflected the ways in which the previous standard use of “post war” had become inadequate to reflect post Cold War trajectories. To this extent, therefore, it has been a useful tool for a gender analysis: for example, it allows an examination of the fluidity of boundaries around what constitutes war.

“The local officials, traditional political structures, and religious leaders make decisions for authority for women and girls,” she said.

Feminist security analysis has also covered the modalities of international intervention during and after periods of armed conflict or of collective violence. The presentation first argued that the more recent usage had expanded so far beyond its earlier relevance that it now serves to obscure rather than clarity salient issues, particularly around models of state building and governance within the project of “liberal peace”.

“They can vote and there is national liberation, not post conversation. The language does matter especially concentration on gender and the continuities of violence that is intensified in a state of conflict. It is a real task for academics and theorists to unpack this,” stated Jacobson.

The presentation also demonstrated the conceptual challenges for feminist security analysis and the constraints on practitioners in operational agencies.

“Women would ask for individual land ownership but it was legally nonexistent in many post conflict reconstructions. Women found displacement and lose their social responsibilities while there is a backlash against women with stature and voice,” she said.

The Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights is an organization devoted to bringing knowledge about gender and security to bear on the quest to end armed conflicts and build sustainable peace. The Consortium is housed at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The Consortium has been shaping the agenda in gender and security research since its establishment in 2002.

The Consortium is made up of scholars and researchers from academic institutions from the Boston area, and linked with researchers internationally. Throughout its history, the Consortium has worked to: build knowledge and gender, armed conflict and security through holding lectures, discussions, knowledge building workshops and conferences. The organization also works to bridge the gap between research and practice through creative effective collaborations across divides between scholars, policy makers, policy shapers, and practitioners, http://www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/