Challenging the perception that women are exclusively the victims, the caregivers or the passive supporters of men in times of armed conflict, Listening to the Silences: Women and War exposes the reader to a diversity of women’s voices. These voices, both personal and academic, demonstrate that women are increasingly taking on less ‘traditional’ roles during war, and that these roles are multifaceted, complicated and sometimes contradictory. The experiences of a judge, forensic anthropologist, survivor of sexual slavery, soldier, activist, journalist, humanitarian worker and others provide the reader with the opportunity to consider the depth of women’s involvement in armed conflict. Their voices highlight the fact that the international community at large has historically failed to listen to women, even as they have tried to tell their own individual tales of horror, heroism, courage, devastation, betrayal, violence and integrity during armed conflict. Concurrently the book examines in detail the legal infrastructure in this area, including debates on the adequacy of international law; developments in jurisprudence and the implementation of international resolutions. This book reveals that responses to women’s requirements during times of war will continue to be inadequate so long as we persist in silencing these differing perspectives and fail to take account of women’s dynamic and changing needs during war. Listening to the Silences: Women and War is a collection of women’s voices, each of which makes a unique contribution to a topic that is gathering international momentum and interest. The perspectives of these women greatly enhance our understanding of the gendered dimensions of armed conflict - they help to move the discourse beyond silence and towards inclusion, greater understanding and peace.

Demonstrates that women are taking on increasingly less traditional roles during war, and that these roles are multifaceted, complicated and sometimes contradictory. Reveals that women's requirements during times of war will continue to be inadequate so long as we continue silencing the differing perspectives. Australian editors.

The role that gender plays in determining the experience of those caught up in armed conflict has long been overlooked. Moreover, the extent to which gender influences the international legal regime designed to address the humanitarian problems arising from armed conflict has similarly been ignored. In the early 1990s, prompted by extensive media coverage of the rape of women during the conflict in Bosnia Herzegovina, the international community was forced to critically examine the capacity of international law to respond to such crimes. The prevalence of sexual violence, is, however, merely one aspect of the distinctive impact of conflict on women. Although a range of factors influence the way individual women experience armed conflict, the endemic gender discrimination that exists in all societies is a common theme: from Cambodia, where women land-mine victims are less likely to receive treatment for their injuries than are men; to South Africa, where women widowed during the Apartheid years have become outcasts in their own society. To date, the extent to which international law addresses the myriad of ways in which women are affected by armed conflict has received little attention. This work takes the experience of women of armed conflict, matches it with existing provisions of international law, and investigates reasons for the silence of the latter in relation to these events for women. It is the first broad-based critique of international humanitarian law from a gender perspective. The contribution of the United Nations, through its focus on human rights, to improving the protection of women in armed conflict is also considered. The authors underscore the need for new approaches to the issue of women and armed conflict, and canvass a range of options for moving forward.

Global and local contestations are not only gendered, they also raise important questions about agency and its practice and location in the twenty-first century. Silence and voice are being increasingly debated as sites of agency within feminist research on conflict and insecurity. Drawing on a wide range of feminist approaches, this volume examines the various ways that silence and voice have been contested in feminist research, and their impact on how agency is understood and performed, particularly in situations of conflict and insecurity. The collection makes an important and timely contribution to interdisciplinary feminist theorizing of silence, voice and agency in global politics. Interrogating the intellectual landscape of existing debates about agency, silence and voice in an increasingly unequal and conflict-ridden world, the contributors to this volume challenge the dominant narratives of agency based on voice or speech alone as a necessary precondition for understanding or negotiating agency or empowerment. Many of the authors have engaged in field research in both the Global South and North and bring in-depth and diverse gendered case studies to their analysis, focusing on the increasing importance of examining silence as well as voice for understanding gender and agency in an increasingly embattled and complicated world. This book will contribute to and deepen existing discussions of agency, silence and voice in development, culture and gender studies, political economy, postcolonial and de-colonial scholarship as well as in the field of International Relations.

A qualitative analysis of societal silences, demonstrating how the unsaid directs social action and shapes individual and collective lives.

Gender and Transitional Justice provides the first comprehensive feminist analysis of the role of international law in formal transitional justice mechanisms. Using East Timor as a case study, it offers reflections on transitional justice administered by a UN transitional administration. Often presented as a UN success story, the author demonstrates that, in spite of women and children’s rights programmes of the UN and other donors, justice for women has deteriorated in post-conflict Timor, and violence has remained a constant in their lives. This book provides a gendered analysis of transitional justice as a discipline. It is also one of the first studies to offer a comprehensive case study of how women engaged in the whole range of transitional mechanisms in a post-conflict state, i.e. domestic trials, internationalised trials and truth commissions. The book reveals the political dynamics in a post-conflict setting around gender and questions of justice, and reframes of the meanings of success and failure of international interventions in the light of them.

The book presents the international laws on the use of force whilst demonstrating the unique insight a feminist analysis offers this central area of international law. The book highlights key conceptual barriers to the enhanced application of the law of the use of force, and develops international feminist method through rigorous engagement with the key writers in the field The book looks at the key aspects of the UN Charter relevant to the use of force – Article 2(4), Article 51 and Chapter VII powers – as well as engaging with contemporary debates on the possibility of justified force to meet self-determination or humanitarian goals. The text also discusses the arguments in favour of the use of pre-emptive force and reflects on the role feminist legal theories can play in exposing the inconsistencies of contemporary arguments for justified force under the banner of the war on terror. Throughout the text state practice and institutional documentation are analysed, alongside key instances of the use of force. The book makes a genuine, urgently needed contribution to a central area of international law, demonstrating the capacity of feminist legal theories to enlarge our understanding of key international legal dilemmas.