security remained—long after demilitarization—precarious and marginalized from the core peace processes and reconstruction projects.
Human rights instruments have played an important role in blurring the dichotomous peace-war framework. This traditional framework allocated abuses committed in peacetime to the jurisdiction of the human rights law framework and wartime abuses to the jurisdiction of international humanitarian law. This delineation between war and peace allowed states to summarily “suspend” fundamental rights of civilians in times of emergency or conflict and to put civilians under the less humane protection of the laws of war. Until the early 1990s, at the international level, little recognition was made of the scale of the insecurity women experienced in the various gray zones that mark the continuum of violent economic, social, and political up-heavals caused by armed conflict.
The term wartime rape is very revealing of the gray zones. It suggests that there is something called “normal rape” that happens only occasionally in peaceful societies. “Normal rape” suggests an apolitical offense that does not traumatize or offend the sensibilities of civilized peoples and its victims in the same way that wartime rape does. And indeed, the distinction between peace and wartime rape is often emphasized by observers, such as scholars and the media, by the attachment of adjectives such as “heinous,” “egregious,” “atrocious,” and “brutal” to rapes occurring in armed conflict. Differentiating between rape in war and peace carries the danger of prioritizing sexual assaults so that rape that is used as a tactic of ethnic cleansing evokes moral outrage but forced sex in the privacy of family life is accepted (Nordstrom 1991, quoted by Sideris 2001b: 146). Tina Sideris points out that ultimately this view allows lawmakers, the police, and communities to explain ordinary rape in terms of dysfunctional and pathological relations and attitudes between men and women. The idea of “ordinary rapes” in peacetime separates violent sexual relations and the construction of masculinities and femininities from an analysis of power relations. Deprived of such an analysis, the task of transforming social relations becomes more difficult (2001a: 61).
The idea of something called ordinary rape is propagated at the highest levels of international influence. In what was then a leading report on sexual violence in armed conflict, the Council of Europe described wartime rape as “worse than ‘ordinary’ rape because it is accompanied by other war-related trauma: loss or death of husbands, children, parents or friends, loss of property, etc.” The report emphasizes that “wartime rape differs from sexual assault in peacetime in that it is committed in a political context which often engenders organized violence,” and, further, peacetime rape is isolated and frequently punished.17 These claims do not take into account the organized nature of trafficking in women and girls in peacetime, domestic courts’ systemic discrimination against victims of domestic violence, wardens’ sexual exploitation of female detainees, or police ambivalence about following correct forensic and investigative procedures when women report sexual violence. I do not need to name a specific country or region where such phenomena occur simply because they are pervasive in developed and developing countries. Rape and other forms of gender-based violence in peacetime are also committed in a political context of hegemonic power, which has serious repercussions for gender equality and nondiscrimination in women’s enjoyment of fundamental human rights.
Undertakings to establish accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity have become a feature of negotiated peace. Mechanisms of accountability, such as truth commissions in South Africa and Liberia and ad hoc criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, operate at the official close of armed conflict but often during a state of insecurity for civilians, particularly displaced persons. Bearing this in mind, I choose to collapse the temporal zones of peace, the immediate aftermath of armed conflict, the postconflict, into a zone broadly referred to as conflict. Conflict may precede armed conflict or it may follow the signing of a peace treaty. It is often the site of continuing violence by covert means; however, it is violence tempered by a wide range of developments having an impact on security, such as a partial demilitarization and demobilization process or the wholesale exporting of armed conflict to a third territory or a border region.
Throughout the escalation or transition of conflict to armed conflict; rumors or threats of violence; pockets of violence; arbitrary curfews; shortages of such basic amenities as electricity and water; disruption to daily rituals such as attending school, community meetings, or prayer groups; and battle-rousing propaganda and images destabilize the daily life of the civilian population. Propaganda easily coopts gender into its narrative. Even as masculinity and the male body are aggressively militarized, femininity and women’s bodies are transposed onto the identity of the nation: the vulnerable mother nation must be protected from violation, and the enemy nation must be violated (raped even) and conquered.18
Throughout the deescalation and demilitarization of armed conflict into conflict, the situation of the civilian population can be as dramatic and precarious as during the period of armed conflict, and in some cases worse. The risk of renewed hostilities is high so that the application of the term peace-time is no more than a fleeting fiction. The crime rate goes up, infrastructure (water, health, education, justice, security) has been destroyed, homes lie in ruins, problems of a humanitarian nature are rife, the economy is paralyzed, and the international aid is often woefully inadequate.19
Women’s living conditions in conflict zones are very revealing of the gendered outcomes of violence and their impact on survivors of armed conflict. Violence in the conflict zone is often concealed in private women’s spaces and such acts as child bearing. Thus, women in a war zone experience the collapse of primary health-care services most cuttingly through high levels of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity (Jacobson 1999: 180, quoted by Cockburn 1999: 11). Domestic and community violence against women increases after armed conflict.20 Women, particularly those widowed by the conflict, are exposed to violent altercations over land with strangers as well as relatives, in-laws, children, and aggressive suitors. The adoption of often unfamiliar head-of-household roles for many women who have no sustainable livelihood opportunities and the burden of providing for war-affected dependents may increase vulnerability to exploitative relationships.
Humanitarian workers have gradually expanded their profile of internally displaced persons and refugees to include women with individual as well as gender-specific needs. This inclusion is a marked shift from an androcentric lens that viewed refugees primarily as men plus their dependents (children and wives). A sustained gender assessment of refugee policy has led to a deeper understanding of the ways in which displacement increases women’s vulnerability to exploitation and abuse.21 Women displaced by armed conflict are especially vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation in camps and when they attempt to return and reclaim their homes.22
Advances in media technologies that facilitate live reporting of conflicts mean that we see just how the lives of civilians are marked by gross violations of human rights. The testimony from victims and witnesses before tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the Sierra Leone Special Court (Special Court) reveal that armed conflict takes place in the homes, classrooms, front gardens, fields, and churches of civilians as combatants occupy towns and villages and effectively hold their occupants hostage. These texts or transcripts complement the change in the research focus from battlefield casualties to civilian casualties on the home front. To call armed conflict “armed” conflict is actually misleading because the civilian hostages targeted for enslavement, amputation, mutilation, rape, torture, abduction, summary execution, forced labor, and other gross violations of human rights are for the most part unarmed.
Feminist scholars have led the way in displacing two powerful gendered narratives that undermined the development of relevant international law protection for women in armed conflict. The first narrative restricted women’s victimhood to the loss of husbands and sons on distant battlefields. Scholars do not deny that the loss of male heads of household is a devastating loss for women; however, they have provided the cultural, economic, and legal implications of such
