Barriers to Women’s Progress After Atrocity: Evidence from Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

Researchers have recently documented the unexpected opportunities war can present for women. While acknowledging the devastating effects of mass violence, this burgeoning field highlights war’s potential to catalyze grassroots mobilization and build more gender sensitive institutions and legal frameworks. Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina serve as important examples of this phenomenon, yet a closer examination of both cases reveals the limits on women’s capacity to take part in and benefit from these postwar shifts. This article makes two key contributions. First, it demonstrates how the postwar political settlement created hierarchies of victimhood that facilitated new social divisions and fractured women’s collective organizing. Second, it argues that while war creates certain opportunities for women, a revitalization of patriarchy in the aftermath can undermine these gains. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with women in both countries, this article ultimately questions the extent to which postwar mobilization can be maintained or harnessed for genuine gender emancipation.

Keywords

Rwanda Bosnia genocide empowerment victimhood women

Women suffer tremendously from armed conflict. With the death, conscription, and displacement of their male relatives, many find themselves the sole breadwinners for their families. They are disproportionately targeted for rape and sexualized torture during conflicts—in some cases as a matter of policy. Trauma, financial insecurity, and physical vulnerability plague women during war, often while they continue to fulfill their regular caregiving obligations. Yet, recent research has emphasized that this focus on women’s suffering overlooks many examples of women’s agency and collective action. While devastating, war is also a period of rapid social change that can disrupt gender norms and create space for women’s increased participation in public, political life (see Berry 2018; Hughes 2009; Hughes and Tripp 2015; Tripp 2015).

Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) serve as important examples of this phenomenon. Both countries experienced devastating periods of war and genocide in the early 1990s. In the years that followed, women increased their engagement in public spaces by founding and joining community-based organizations, participating in rights campaigns, and politically mobilizing in ways that were not feasible prior to the outbreak of conflict. Notably, merely ten years after the Rwandan genocide claimed an estimated 800,000 lives, Rwandans elected the world’s highest percentage of women to parliament, passed gender-sensitive legislation, and established myriad institutions designed to bring about women’s empowerment (Burnet 2012). In Bosnia, women’s organizations led important parts of the postwar recovery effort, providing critical services in lieu of the state and catalyzing a feminist movement that publicly challenged the ethno-nationalist rhetoric of political elites (Helms 2013).

Thus, to different extents, Rwanda and Bosnia reflect recent research suggesting that war can create fluidity in the gender order that allows women to make social and political gains. Scholars have honed in on the opportunities that the postwar transition period can open for advancements in women’s rights and representation. For instance, Tripp (2015) argued that for the most part, the Sub-Saharan Africa states with the highest levels of women in politics and the strongest legal protections for women are those that experienced war after 1985. Civil conflict is also associated with higher rates of women’s legislative representation in Sub-Saharan Africa (Hughes and Tripp 2015), and globally (Hughes 2009). Reflecting work by Anderson (2016), Ní Aoláin, Haynes, and Cahn (2011), and others, these studies show how war can create institutional openings for the domestication of international norms and frameworks—such as the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW); the UN Women, Peace, and Security agenda; the Beijing Platform for Action at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women; and, most recently, the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

This emerging scholarship extends a more established field of research focused on how women’s participation in armed struggles can serve as a launchpad for their political gains (see Kampwirth 2004; Viterna 2013). However, these gains are often curtailed in the aftermath of conflict, as the masculine ethos of military victory denies women their place in the postwar transition, and the patriarchal gender order is once again established within the home (Cockburn 1998; Enloe 2000). To counter this regression, scholars, activists, and policy makers have highlighted the importance of amending domestic legal frameworks and institutions during postwar transition periods. The UN’s Women, Peace, and Security agenda has shaped a massive effort to ensure women’s equal and full participation in preventing and resolving conflicts. These international frameworks offer an array of mechanisms (e.g., constitutional gender quotas) to make women’s wartime gains more durable. In these efforts, it is often assumed that women will inevitably benefit from rights-based protections and inclusion in formal political or peacebuilding processes. Further, it is assumed that de jure inclusion is enough to secure fundamental change in women’s lives.

There are several flaws in these assumptions. To begin, such approaches position women as vulnerable subjects in need of protection by states, human rights discourses, or international entities, which can demobilize and depoliticize them (see Choo 2013; Hesford and Kozol 2005). Further, as generations of postcolonial and feminist scholars have warned, rights can differentially empower groups within nonegalitarian social orders (Brown 2000; Spivak 1988). Many efforts to include and empower women after violence presuppose the internal homogeneity of “women” as a category, failing to account for the role of membership in different ethnic, racial, sexual, and class groups (Mohanty 1988). Finally, inclusion and rights are not sufficient for empowerment; such approaches fail to dismantle the underlying systems of oppression that perpetuate women’s subordination (Kabeer 1999).

War in Rwanda and Bosnia catalyzed women’s mobilization through the formation of community-based organizations focused on critical material needs (see Berry 2018). With the arrival of international actors attuned to gender equality, many informal organizations formalized, positioning their founders as powerful community leaders on issues like refugee return, postwar justice, and peacebuilding. In Rwanda, many of the women involved in these community organizations joined government, especially after the revised 2003 Constitution included a gender quota mandating that one-third of all government positions be held by women (Burnet 2012). In Bosnia, grassroots organizations emerged as a parallel power structure to the state, and international advisors set up a Gender Coordination Group charged with implementing CEDAW and mainstreaming gender throughout national policies and projects (Helms 2013). In short, both cases reveal how war can open spaces for women’s social and political gains.

Yet, a closer examination reveals that women’s ability to participate in and benefit from these postwar shifts is not uniform: women of different ethnicities, classes, and categories of victimhood faced varying impediments to sustaining postwar mobilization. Moreover, in both countries there is a pervasive gap between the rights and frameworks that exist on paper and the reality of many women’s daily lives. Drawing from more than 250 interviews, this article investigates how social and structural barriers fractured, constrained, and undermined many postwar gains. While the emerging literature highlights war’s potential to shift the gender status quo, here I illustrate how women’s advancement is not a linear, uniform process; rather, it is a series of fits and starts, progress and slippage, in which women from certain backgrounds experience gains while others lag behind.

While there were many barriers to women’s progress in both cases, here I focus on two processes that emerged most frequently in my interviews. First, the political settlement structured—and often impeded—women’s mobilization. By “political settlement” I refer to the process of bargaining among elites and international actors that brought about an end to the conflict and shaped the postwar transformation (Bell 2015). To consolidate power in the aftermath of violence, political elites in both Rwanda and Bosnia mobilized ethnically defined social groups and elevated certain groups as those “most victimized.” These efforts created hierarchies of victimhood that facilitated new social divisions and undermined the possibility of a cross-cutting women’s movement. International actors frequently relied on victim categories propagated by political elites. This resulted in more funding for preferred groups and thus deepened divisions both within and between women’s groups organized around certain identities. This analysis suggests that after atrocity, victim categories interact alongside ethnicity, class, and gender to create power differences that limit the ability of women’s groups to establish momentum around shared gender interests.

The second process underscores the first, and reflects the reinvigoration of patriarchy in the aftermath of war. While the gender order was in flux during the violence and women made many social and legal gains in the aftermath, this progress was undermined by an uptick in gender-based violence. Though this violence stemmed from the traumatic legacy of war, it was also likely a reaction to women’s gains and increased autonomy during the war, which threatened men’s power. As a result, women’s political, social, and legal gains have been undermined by a patriarchal backlash, which has extended violence beyond the theater of war and into women’s daily lives. This article thus questions the extent to which postwar mobilization and formal, institutional rights can be harnessed for genuine gender emancipation.

Methods

This article stems from a larger study on the impact of war on women’s political mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia (see Berry 2018). During six months of fieldwork in each country, I conducted more than 250 semistructured interviews with women in order to investigate how war shaped their lives, careers, families, and motivations.¹ I selected interviewees using a stratified purposive sampling design that aimed to interview respondents from three categories: political elites and executives in large nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); founders, employees, and members of civil society organizations; and poor urban and rural women. I interviewed each respondent in English, or in their preferred language with the help of a local research assistant; interviews were then transcribed and coded for common themes in Dedoose (a qualitative coding software). A subset of the interviews in category three were conducted in small groups to facilitate a more comfortable environment for participants (see Berry 2018). Because of space constraints, I only include a small number of excerpts from these interviews here, which capture patterns present across multiple respondents. Each interview is assigned a pseudonym, although I refer to several respondents who are public figures by their full names.

My initial focus in these interviews was on women’s postwar political mobilization. As my research developed, however, I began to notice women’s frustration about how much initial progress had not been sustained. Thus, in addition to interview data, this article draws heavily from hundreds of informal conversations I had with locals and international development personnel, analysis of more than 200 organizational reports and government documents, and participant observation that I conducted with several women’s organizations at various intervals between 2009 and 2016. In Rwanda, these additional data sources provide especially important context, as many scholars have noted the difficulty of having open and forthright conversations with Rwandans around politically sensitive topics such as ethnicity and gender-based violence (see Fujii 2010; Straus 2006). As such, silences—what was not said, or topics that were explicitly avoided during my interviews—also shape my analysis of the Rwandan case. In both cases, these varied sources allowed me to identify how the broader social and political context impacted individual women’s lives.

Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s, with high levels of ethnic violence against noncombatants, alarming rates of sexualized violence, and population displacement rates of around 50 percent. In addition, there was a massive influx of humanitarian aid in the aftermath of violence, which was often earmarked for survivors of sexual violence or promoting women’s economic empowerment. Of course, there are many differences between the cases. Rwanda is a low-developing country in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa; until the 1980s, women lacked the right to open a bank account or join a for-profit organization, and they only gained the right to inherit property in 1999. Bosnia, by contrast, is a middle-income, former socialist country in the heart of Europe with a long history of women’s rights and organizing. Yet, given the widely different political contexts, histories, and levels of wealth in both places, similarities between women’s experiences reveal patterns in how the social processes stemming from war can shape women’s gains and setbacks. In what follows, I describe how the postwar political settlement and a revitalization of patriarchy fractured, constrained, and undermined some women’s progress.

The Postwar Political Settlement

In the aftermath of any episode of large-scale armed conflict, bargaining between elites, internal actors, and external interveners determines the political, social, and economic direction the postwar state will take. Such “political settlement” processes are profoundly consequential for women’s lives, although most work in this field has devoted little attention to their gender dynamics (Di John and Putzel 2009). The political settlement processes in Rwanda and Bosnia looked very different, although women were largely shut out of both. In Rwanda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), led by current president Paul Kagame, took control of the state in 1994 and purged the government of former regime elites. Because the RPF was, at its origin, a primarily Tutsi party operating in a majority Hutu country, it needed to quickly gain the trust of a suspicious population. It did so by consolidating control through its security services and using violence to eliminate threats. The RPF also rejected the international community’s push for democratic elections, claiming such neoliberal ideals created a climate conducive to genocide in the first place (Reyntjens 2013). Instead, the regime prioritized security, rapid development, and women’s empowerment to legitimize its rule to both Rwandans and international observers.

In Bosnia, international actors brought about the political settlement at the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) in coordination with nationalist political elites. Because a power-sharing agreement was put in place, those who were in power during the war remained in power afterwards. The DPA divided the state into two semi-autonomous entities: Republika Srpska (R.S.) and the Federation of Bosniaks and Croats (“The Federation”). The agreement granted a representative from each of the primary ethno-nationalist groups—Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats (Catholics), and Serbs (Orthodox Christians)—a seat on the rotating tripartite presidency. While women were completely shut out of the DPA, since 1995 internationals have pressured political elites to integrate women in formal politics and pass gender-sensitive legislation.

The Rwandan Political Settlement

Since coming to power in 1994, Kagame’s RPF has prioritized modernization as it has worked to fundamentally transform the country from an example of cataclysmic genocide to a model of development success. It has done this by erasing ethnicity from public discourse, reorganizing the rural population, and “cleaning up” urban areas to make them appear modern and suitable for foreign investment. Despite the pervasive use of coercion to achieve these ambitious goals, the RPF has harnessed women’s grassroots organizing to push for gender equality. Since 2003, Rwanda has boasted the world’s highest percentage of women in its legislature. One Member of Parliament described how women’s advancement was, in part, a legacy of the war and genocide:

Before 1994 women were usually in traditional roles—raising the kids, domestic chores. . . . But after the genocide, and all its consequences, women were now forced to find other ways to survive. And to do jobs that men had traditionally done, like construction, like commerce and business, because they had to [take care of] themselves and their children. So they started occupying those positions.

The government of Rwanda helped formalize these shifts by creating institutions to further women’s rights and equality, such as the Gender Monitoring Office and National Women’s Council. Yet, the regime has simultaneously politicized victimhood in a way that has paradoxically undermined women’s ability to organize.

Part of the regime’s vision to modernize the country centers on the elimination of the ethnic categories that purportedly led to the violence in the first place. Under the theory that ethnicity promotes “divisionism,” a 2003 law grants police the authority to arrest anyone using ethnic language in public. In lieu of ethnic categories, the regime has sanctioned new forms of social categorization based on one’s experience during the genocide: minority Tutsi as survivors (or rescapés), majority Hutu as perpetrators or bystanders, and the Tutsi-dominated RPF as the country’s liberators (Republic of Rwanda 2007). The regime has put forth an official narrative of the events of 1994, blaming European colonialists for creating ethnic categories and Hutu extremists for initiating the atrocities against Tutsi. This narrative oversimplifies the violence, ignoring the war that the RPF began in 1990 as well as the RPF’s multiple subsequent invasions of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not all victims of violence were Tutsi, and not all perpetrators of atrocities were Hutu (see Hintjens 2008; Thomson 2013). The Tutsi-led RPF likely committed tens of thousands of extrajudicial murders and untold forms of abuse beginning with its invasion in 1990 and continuing throughout the following decade (Reyntjens 2013). Furthermore, Hutu extremists targeted tens of thousands of their co-ethnics for political reasons during the violence, and many Hutu women were subjected to forms of sexual torture that had little to do with their ethnic identity (Burnet 2012).

Making ethnicity coterminous with a category of behavior was particularly detrimental to Hutu, who were collectively considered guilty perpetrators. Mamdani (2001, 266) cites one official’s estimate of “perpetrators” rising from three to four million in 1995 to four to five million in 1997—far higher than the entire adult male Hutu population at the time. Other government officials advanced similar numbers, globalizing the guilt of a few to the guilt of the entire ethnic group (Vidal 2001). Hutu who fled after 1994 were particularly likely to be considered perpetrators; when these “new caseload refugees” returned to Rwanda, the local population treated them with suspicion. In essence, the regime—through political speeches, state-controlled news outlets, and so on—fused victim categories and social categories together, elevating the suffering of Tutsi victims and disregarding others. Hutu are not permitted to have a formal victim identity; according to many women I interviewed, they are not even permitted to bury their dead in the same cemeteries or memorial sites as victims of genocide (see also Jessee 2017). Hutu women who were raped by Hutu militias during the war cannot access the same resources offered to Tutsi rape victims, as their rape is not considered “genocidal” rape, but rather belongs to the less-political arena of interpersonal violence and domestic abuse (Burnet 2012, 111; Buss 2009). Moreover, the regime has aggressively suppressed studies or reports that demonstrate its culpability in atrocities against civilians.

The simplified narrative of the violence—that of the “evil Hutu” against the “innocent Tutsi”—has affected the distribution of aid and other resources in the decades since the violence. For example, the UK-based Survivor Fund supported initiatives for “survivors” of the Rwandan genocide, funding domestic organizations like Avega-Agahozo (for widows) and the Association of Student Genocide Survivors. Survivors were entitled to all of the resources that these various organizations provide—including cash payments, medical care, housing assistance, school fees, and trauma counseling. Since only Tutsi could be considered “survivors,” and only Tutsi women married to Tutsi men could be considered “genocide widows,” all survivor organizations were essentially for Tutsi (see Hintjens 2008). As a director of Avega-Agahozo put it, “[The organization’s] role is not to bring together women whose husbands are in jail or exiled . . . it is specifically for women whose husbands died during the genocide.” The fact that many organizations were set up around particular victim identities allowed them to become ethnically homogenous. Hutu women who lost their husbands, children, or survived sexualized torture are implicitly excluded, except under exceptional circumstances. As a result, Tutsi-led “widow” or “survivor” organizations were better positioned to access international funds and more likely to formalize and develop a platform from which members could ascend the economic ladder, enter public spaces, and fill new political vacancies.

By distributing funds along these victim categories, the international aid community endorsed the government’s erasure of Hutu experiences of survival from political discourse. Moreover, international NGOs prevented Hutu from organizing in public spaces, assuming that such groups posed a security risk (Pottier 1996). This meant that dozens of Hutu women I interviewed had little social space in which to mobilize around their interests. Although it is illegal to discuss ethnicity in Rwanda today, nearly all my respondents that I understood to be Tutsi mentioned their membership in a community organization during the course of our interview. In contrast, nearly all my respondents that I understood to be Hutu did not mention their affiliation with a community organization, an omission that reflects what Lee Ann Fujii (2010) has called valuable unspoken “meta-data” in Rwanda’s contemporary political context. Moreover, when I asked the question, “When you have a problem, who helps you?” Hutu respondents were more likely than Tutsi respondents to answer “no one” or “God.”²

Beyond fomenting interethnic divides and suspicion, these hierarchies of victimhood have also deepened divides between members of the same ethnic group. Most notably, the divide between Tutsi “survivors” and “returnees”—those who grew up in exile and then returned to the country after 1994—has been especially pronounced. “Returnees” often occupied a higher social and economic position than those who lived through the violence. Moreover, because the RPF was a political movement built in exile, many who returned had strong connections to the government. Fiona, a Tutsi college student, lamented, “If you were a Tutsi and you were here before 1994, [the RPF] doesn’t know you. What matters is the RPF crew from Uganda.” In contrast to returnees who spoke Swahili or English, Rwandan-born Tutsi learned French in schools, in addition to Kinyarwanda. The RPF privileged English in government positions, generating what one leader of a women’s organization referred to as “a kind of misunderstanding between the survivors and those coming from exile.” These intraethnic divides inhibited the ability of all women to mobilize across ethnic and social differences.

These hierarchies of victimhood—both between and within ethnic groups—have been particularly detrimental for women’s groups. Prior to the RPF’s consolidation of power in the mid-1990s, women’s organizations were some of the only cross-ethnic entities in the country, and they took the lead caring for orphans, rebuilding communities, and creating care groups for psycho-social support (Burnet 2012). Yet, the hierarchies of victimhood proffered by the regime and adopted by international actors catalyzed the work of certain groups, while undermining and repressing the work of others. When combined with the regime’s tight control over civil society, these hierarchies have limited women’s ability to sustain cross-ethnic and cross-class collective action around shared interests, such as access to financial capital or protection against gender-based violence. The fracturing of women’s organizing reveals how social identities linked to an individual’s experience during violence can serve as a regime of difference—similar to ethnicity or class—that can inhibit prospects for inclusive or intersectional emancipation.

The Bosnian Political Settlement

While the Rwandan political settlement resulted in a tightly-controlled state led by the RPF, the postwar Bosnian state was more dysfunctional. Nevertheless, its structure, and the dynamics of the postwar political settlement, similarly limited women’s gains by fracturing their ability to organize and by codifying divides between women with different war experiences. When the DPA divided the country into two semi-autonomous entities, it endorsed different laws and institutions for each. It also left the same elites in power who had been responsible for the war in the first place. In the years since, a “political-business-criminal nexus” (Bassuener 2012) has masqueraded as a democratic party system. Formal political power lies in the hands of international actors, such as the Office for the High Representative and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). During the war, women’s organizations and advocacy networks were widely acknowledged as some of the only entities able (and willing) to cross ethnic lines, granting them a crucial social and political role (Cockburn 2013a). Moreover, women founded and formalized community organizations during the war, which in the postwar period became essential service providers. International actors also made a concerted effort to crystallize these grassroots gains into formal legal and political progress for women. The OSCE, the League of Women Voters, and a host of other international organizations have worked to spearhead efforts to promote gender equality at all levels of government, increase public awareness of women’s political participation, and reform electoral systems to better engender women’s inclusion.

Yet, the legal and institutional divides between the entities and persistence of nationalist politics also paradoxically have fractured women’s ability to engage in effective collective action. This is in large part because the laws, institutions, and political elites in each entity differ. For instance, women’s organizations campaigned for a 2006 federal law that classifies women rape survivors as civilian victims of war, entitling them to benefits. But, to be classified as such, women who live within the R.S. must have a health commission determine they have 60 percent “bodily damage”—in other words, permanent physical disfigurement or disability (Amnesty International 2009). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other psychological ailments are not covered. In contrast, the Federation has declared that the 60 percent threshold does not apply to survivors of rape, opening the possibility that such cases may be deemed eligible. These structural divides complicate the potential for women’s cross-entity and cross-ethnic collaboration, since, as Fadila, a rape survivor, lamented, the DPA “put us in these ethnic cages.” Within these structural divides, international actors have identified women with particular war experiences as more deserving of aid, services, or status than others. As in Rwanda, this has resulted in hierarchies of victimhood that have weakened women’s ability to engage in sustained collective action around their shared gender interests.

Since the fall of Yugoslavia, politicians in Bosnia have rallied support by elevating the suffering of their own ethno-national group. As the war unfolded, Bosniak nationalists created a victim hierarchy, endorsed by Western governments and media, with non-Serb “raped women” and widows or mothers from Srebrenica at the top. Global media reports of mass rape horrified observers and galvanized the international response to the crisis. Bosniak politicians took cues from this international response, decrying the abuse of Bosniak women at the hands of Serb aggressors and politicizing (and perhaps exaggerating) the number of women raped in order to legitimize the scale of the crisis and elicit a more formidable international response (Korac 2010). Humanitarian NGOs picked up on this focus on raped women and widows, constructing centers for these special victims to offer psychological therapy, financial resources, and various types of social support.

The problems with this hierarchy are myriad. To begin, while women with all sorts of war experiences were undoubtedly in need of such aid, the elevation of these special victim categories assumed that survivors of sexualized violence would willingly assume the identity of “rape victim,” ignoring the potential for the distribution of aid on the basis of this identity to create new forms of harm. Many organizations that formed during and after the war coalesced around whatever singular marginalized identity its founders believed could solicit the most funds from donors. In essence, in order to garner funds organizations competed in “oppression Olympics” by claiming that the people they served were more victimized or more oppressed than others. Such incentives were ultimately disempowering at an individual and collective level, as they stripped women of agency in determining the most salient identities in their lives and presumed a greater understanding of what women needed than women themselves. Moreover, the distribution of aid on the basis of victimhood served to deepen social divisions and reduce women’s experiences to a single, marginal, and disenfranchised identity (see also Lake, Muthaka, and Walker 2016). Groups who most effectively displayed their victimhood held all the moral—and financial—capital.

Rape survivors, in particular, faced profound risks in publicly identifying as such. Bakira Hasečić, president of the Association of Women Victims of War, described these risks by stating,

I come from a family of 17 members, and I did not mention that I was raped, because that was a taboo subject. I was putting myself at risk if I said that. . . . Part of society considers that a disgrace for women . . . a lot of marriages fell apart, because they could not cope with that. Their kids left them, as well, because they could not cope with it.

As Bakira notes, in the patriarchal local context, being identified as a rape victim had deeply negative repercussions and led to a stigma that women were “soiled,” pitiful, or sexually promiscuous. Moreover, being incentivized to identify as a rape victim through the promise of services marginalized those who articulated their experience as one of survival (Summerfield 1999). Further, this approach assumed sexual violence harmed women more than other forms of violence. Tabiha, a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp, described how Serb forces killed her eldest son during the war. They also detained her at Omarska and raped her. In her mind, her own experiences pale in comparison to the pain she feels about her son’s murder. And yet, many journalists and NGOs with whom she has interacted over the years have been primarily interested in her experiences at Omarska, imposing on her the identity of “rape victim.”

The elevation of these “special victims” over others who also had suffered greatly from war fractured the women’s movement. Whereas during the war many women had come together to form small, informal self-help organizations (Helms 2013), in the aftermath many of these organizations became specialized—they were exclusively for rape victims, widows, survivors of concentration camps, and so forth. Not only did these specialized groups ignore women who were situated in multiple categories or who did not fit cleanly into a particular one, but they also pitted “rape survivor” groups against widows, concentration camp survivors, and returnees in competition for donor funds; this lead to infighting, a lack of trust, and limited opportunities for collaboration. Medina, a middle-aged woman who survived a concentration camp but escaped sexual torture, described how this prevented her from feeling welcome in one women’s group:

[I was in an organization that had] knitting circles and they would pay us and give us a bus ticket, and most of the women who were coming there were victims of sexual violence. But I’m not, and we asked if we were going to get paid for anything they were producing and the woman said that I wouldn’t because I wasn’t a victim of sexual violence. . . . I was then excluded from the circle.

The hierarchy of victimhood established by the political settlement in Bosnia also focused almost exclusively on Bosniak and Croat woman who had been abused by Serb men, neglecting the thousands of Serb women—not to mention men of all ethnicities—who also experienced sexualized violence during the war, as well as the Bosniak women who were abused by their co-ethnics (see also Korac 2010). Like Hutu victims in Rwanda, Serb women who were subjected to sexualized torture during the war had their experiences relegated to the less-political arena of interpersonal violence and criminality, rather than genocide. While estimates of Serb victims of rape are exceptionally politicized and thus unreliable, in one sample of rape victims, five percent were Serb—a number that likely vastly underreports the scale of Serb suffering (Delić and Avdibegović 2015).³ Their suffering was similarly unrecognized by international actors and legal frameworks, and they were unable to join many organizations or claim benefits related to their war experience.

There were other hierarchies of victimhood in Bosnia, including the elevation of the massacre at Srebrenica over all other crimes in the country. Srebrenica, the site of a massacre of more than 7,000 boys and men by Serb forces in July 1995, was declared a genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice. For those living in the Krajina region—the area with the second highest rate of civilian killing, but denied the genocide designation—the international community’s disproportionate attention to Srebrenica’s victims generated tremendous frustration. According to Tabiha (mentioned above):

I am very angry because of that. I am really angry because we [in the Krajina region] do not get the attention we deserve. They do not care about us. I am angry at internationals and those in the Bosnian government, as well. What happened in Srebrenica—they got killed in a few days, but we were bleeding from the knee. We had camps, rapes, [Serbs] stole stuff. They set our houses on fire. They put bombs on our doors. . . . All of the humanitarian aid that came to Bosnia went to Srebrenica, and they behaved like we do not exist.

These hierarchies of victimhood between and within different ethnic groups have fractured the momentum women generated after the war; competition for resources has led to infighting and a lack of trust. When women adopted victim identities that satisfied donors, they lost claim to the power they might have gained during war. Combined, these hierarchies limited the prospects for cross-entity, interethnic collaboration and peacebuilding in the long run.

Revitalization of Patriarchy

While the postwar political settlement forged hierarchies of victimhood that limited the ability of women in Rwanda and Bosnia to engage in cross-cutting collective action around their gender interests, a second process undermined progress toward genuine intersectional emancipation. Despite the suspension in the patriarchal order as men were displaced and women took on new roles, in the aftermath of both wars patriarchal norms were revitalized, reflecting men’s “perennial sense of entitlement to women’s bodies” (Cockburn 2013b, 3). Studies have suggested that there can be an increase in domestic violence after episodes of armed conflict (see Pankhurst 2007), although a pre-conflict baseline is often difficult to establish. The mechanisms posited for this increase include war trauma, an increased availability of weapons, heightened alcoholism and drug use, and the celebration of militarized masculinity during periods of armed conflict.

In addition to these mechanisms, here I suggest that we also consider a revitalization of patriarchy as a reaction to gains women make in their homes and communities during war, which threaten men’s hegemonic control. Women’s rights and progress, therefore, mask “hidden cruelties,” to borrow Wendy Brown’s phrasing, and “unemancipatory relations of power . . . in [their] sunny formulations of freedom and equality” (2000, 230). This echoes research that documents links between women’s economic or educational gains and rates of domestic violence within the home (see Rahman, Hoque, and Makinoda 2011; Vyas and Watts 2009). Women’s political gains can also instigate a patriarchal backlash. Mona Lena Krook (2015), for example, demonstrated how growing numbers of women in politics can provoke hostile (and even violent) responses. Moreover, Sylvia Walby described how women’s advances are often met “with renewed determination by patriarchal forces to maintain and increase the subordination of women” (1993, 76).

During my fieldwork, it became clear that some people resented women’s increased rights and autonomy since the war. Studies on masculinities in both countries found that men firmly viewed themselves as the power-holders and decision-makers within the household, while they viewed women as primarily responsible for children and the domestic sphere (Dušanić 2013; Rwanda Men’s Resource Center 2010). Of course, these gender roles were disrupted during the conflict, and since the war international and domestic actors have advanced legal frameworks and public awareness campaigns designed to challenge these beliefs. These efforts have unsurprisingly been insufficient; there is a “stickiness” to patriarchal power relations in both countries. More alarming, however, is evidence of a backlash against women’s gains. Women I interviewed in both countries identified violence against women—including physical violence, verbal assaults, accusations about sexual immorality, and so forth—as a way to undermine women’s ability to consolidate their postwar gains and continue mobilizing in their communities. As such, patriarchal violence reflects a profound limitation to women’s gains after war.

Rwanda

Delphine, a 27-year-old woman from Bugasera, was walking down the road in her uncle’s village as a teenager when a young man attacked and raped her by the side of the road. She screamed for help, but nobody came to her aid. Her family forced her to become her attacker’s wife. She bore three children by him. This man regularly beat her, eventually causing her to leave the marriage. Now she suffers because she cannot afford to feed her children, as she is unable to find decent work. Despite the promises of good jobs in the new Rwandan economy, Delphine survives by “digging”—offering her labor to landholders in exchange for about a dollar a day. Delphine’s story is not uncommon among poor women in Rwanda. A nationally representative survey in 2010 found that 57.2 percent of Rwandan women had experienced gender-based violence from a partner (Rwanda Men’s Resource Center 2010). Thirty-two percent of women reported that their partner had forced them to have sex. The same study revealed that men who were directly affected by the war or genocide—nearly 80 percent of all men—had higher rates of violence against female partners than men who had not been directly exposed to violence. This suggests that exposure to violence has led to an uptick in intimate partner violence (Slegh et al. 2013).

But the association between war violence and violence against women in the aftermath is only part of the story. In my conversations with women across Rwanda, some reported that their husbands were most likely to beat them when they returned home from a women’s group, such as income and loan savings cooperatives. National surveys corroborate this, as men also indicated that they beat their wives with more frequency after women became engaged in profit-making activities outside of the home (Slegh et al. 2013, 19). Literate, educated, and employed women experienced the highest rates of community violence, suggesting that men used violence as a way of repressing women’s increased status (Rombouts 2006, 206). Claire, a survivor of domestic violence in her early 40s, captures the way in which women’s increased economic power threatens men’s masculinity:

The biggest challenge that women have right now, which is happening all around in the community, is home-based violence. Most of the husbands are not respecting the rights of their wives, so there are some husbands who think that “if my wife joins a ladies’ group, they may think about some activities which can generate money,” and the wife might outperform the husband at his responsibility . . . so the husband will say, “This lady is no longer my wife. She became a husband.”

Several of my respondents also suggested that men justified spousal abuse by saying that their wives were making the extra income as sex workers (see also Barker and Schulte 2010). This accusation was alarmingly common in both Rwanda and Bosnia. Women I interviewed described how men inside and outside their families often accused them of being “prostitutes” for wearing western clothes, hanging out in mixed-gender groups, or simply existing as a woman. Young, urban, and single women were particularly susceptible. Police and other state security forces partook in this violence, as they monitored women through a paternalistic logic that regulates people’s dress and behavior under the ostensible guise of promoting the country’s development. Several of my interviewees described how security forces accused them of being sex workers for simply shopping at markets or visiting nightclubs. This accusation is a way of policing women’s independence and power by reasserting masculinity.

These and dozens of other similar stories hint at the extent of gender-based violence in Rwanda, reminding us of the persistence of patriarchal power relations more than 15 years after the country first elected the world’s highest level of women to parliament. The pervasiveness of violence undermines the ability of Rwandan women to assert the rights they have gained since the genocide and war, highlighting the distinction between mere access to rights versus control over rights.

Bosnia

Lejia, now in her early 60s, was raped during the war and bore a child by her rapist. It became an open secret in her marriage; her husband pretended that the child was his and they never spoke of it, but he tortured her—physically and emotionally—until his death from “trauma from the violence.” Many knew what had happened to her during the war, and she described constant gossip about her sexual promiscuity. She enjoys hiking, but noted, “Maybe I am perceived as a slut because I go hiking with men in the woods.”

In Bosnia, women of all ethno-national backgrounds and classes face high rates of violence in the family. A 2013 nationally representative survey found that 44.9 percent of women had experienced violence from a male partner (Dušanić 2013). While violence against women certainly existed long before the war, this study showed a positive correlation between war experience and domestic abuse. Like Lejla, women who were raped during the war have reportedly suffered some of the most extreme forms of violence in the aftermath (Amnesty International 2009). The director of a Tuzla-based NGO that works with survivors of war noted that 90 percent of the women who approach her organization after suffering domestic violence are also survivors of wartime sexual assault. Many of these women resist seeking help because they fear further stigmatization. During my fieldwork, I heard countless instances in which men had casually referred to women who survived sexual violence or forced detention as “whores.” This degrading labeling positions men as entitled to women’s bodies long after the end of armed conflict. Many of my respondents explained these heightened rates of postwar violence by suggesting that men drank more alcohol after the war as a result of trauma. According to Lana, a woman in her late 20s, the war emotionally damaged both her and her husband, who now beat her regularly. She described how, “We still remember things. We wouldn’t live like this if there wasn’t war . . . because the war influenced anything everyone could remember from the age of 7 to 77.”

Like in Rwanda, there is also evidence that some forms of violence may have been a backlash to the gains women made that threatened men’s masculinity. For example, as Branka, the director of a human rights NGO in Bosnia described:

[After the war] women got offered to take bigger power. More power. Because foreigners tried to empower women through a lot of projects. But it wasn’t very wise because of the mentality of Bosnia. Women got empowered, men came back from war, they’re traumatized after war without work. And then the war in families start. Because men weren’t in charge anymore. And war empowered women. And the balance in the marriage was disrupted.

This response suggests that the disruption in the gendered status quo as a result of the war triggered a patriarchal backlash, whereby women’s gains were met with resistance. Men—especially former combatants—also experienced a decline in their material and symbolic status after the war. Today, most Bosnians struggle to find employment. This financial insecurity, when combined with trauma and violence “know-how,” likely amplified rates of violence. As Vedrana, a woman from the region around Srebrenica, put it, “When husbands have no work they can’t provide what the family needs . . . they sometimes turn to alcohol, they go to the coffee bar, make a problem over there and get drunk, and women suffer in silence.” Like in Rwanda, the pervasiveness of gender-based violence in Bosnia suggests that men have increasingly used violence to curtail women who threaten their dominance, limiting women’s ability to exercise control over their postwar gains. Despite the fact that gender relations can be in flux during war, as society stabilizes patriarchal power relations are firmly reentrenched.

Conclusion

This research cautions against seeing women’s social and political gains after war as durable and equitable indications of all women’s progress. As Rwanda and Bosnia show, war can catalyze women’s increased mobilization and open spaces for the domestication of international frameworks advancing gender equality. Yet, myriad social processes intervene to complicate these gains. Women’s ability to participate in progress is thus not uniformly felt by all women; women from particular groups are privileged by elites, while others are seen as suspicious or less deserving of aid. While women were widely recognized as some of the only actors able to cross ethnic lines during and immediately after each period of violence, hierarchies of victimization eventually fractured women’s ability to organize around their shared interests. Further, in both countries, violence extended beyond the theater of war and entrenched itself in women’s daily lives. This violence suffered at the hands of family members, partners, security forces, and others in the community can limit women’s ability to take advantage of the rights and opportunities that were established since the war, undermining women’s overall emancipation.

To be sure, scholars have argued that even if women’s gains are not uniform, some women’s progress can open spaces for additional egalitarian progress. Further, some posit that a patriarchal revival should not surprise us after war—even in the United States after World War II, women saw their wartime economic and social gains rolled back in the 1950s. By this logic, then, we should look toward future generations to fulfill emancipatory change. These are valid arguments. However, they miss the fact that tolerating differential empowerment can institutionalize ethnic, gender, and class advantage, thereby perpetuating and deepening inequality and gender oppression. In Rwanda today, for instance, many women in government are Anglophone Tutsi raised in Uganda; their supposed gender emancipation has masked the consolidation of ethnic power and privilege, deepening the disadvantage of other groups. Likewise, in Bosnia, some widows from Srebrenica have capitalized on their victim status for personal power, excluding widows from other parts of the country and fomenting new inequalities and grievances. Drawing from Audre Lorde, I contend that without the genuine interdependency of women with different oppressions in the process of empowerment, “there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression” ([1984] 2007, 2).

While Rwanda and Bosnia are unique in many ways, their similarities suggest that women’s gains are not a linear, uniform process, but should be better understood as a simultaneous process of progress and slippage, where empowerment frameworks can aggravate divides between women from different backgrounds, and where one woman’s social and legal gains may come at the expense of another’s. There is also a “stickiness” to patriarchal power relations: while gender norms are often in flux during periods of war, the legal frameworks and policies designed to protect these gains are insufficient to fundamentally transform women’s lives.

This has profound implications for policy makers and practitioners working in postwar contexts. Policy makers should consider whether these barriers might be weakened by giving local actors—including women of all war experiences, classes, ethnicities, religions, abilities, and sexual orientations—stronger incentives to collaborate, rather than compete, for support, and the autonomy to seek aid through whichever identity they find most salient. Aid models that put funding decisions in the community’s hands and which do not require professionalization or cumbersome reporting are also more conducive to funding dynamic women’s initiatives. Finally, there is an urgent need for international legal frameworks to integrate a gender analysis that is more sensitive to the multiple and intersecting oppressions—including victim status—that different women experience after war.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful, first and foremost, to the many women in Rwanda and Bosnia who agreed to meet with me for this project. I am also grateful to Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Gail Kligman, Milli Lake, Evan Perkoski, Pamela Prickett, Trishna Rana, Bill Roy, Jessica Smith, Abigail Saguy, Emily Van Houweling, and Sarah Watkins for their detailed comments and reading of the manuscript as it developed, as well as to the three anonymous Gender & Society reviewers who provided incredibly helpful suggestions. Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the 2016 International Studies Association meeting and the 2016 American Sociological Meeting’s Comparative and Historical Mini-Conference.

Funding was provided by U.S. State Department Title VIII funding through IREX, the UCLA International Institute, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the University of Denver’s Faculty Research Fund.

Notes

Marie Berry, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she is an affiliate of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy. She is the co-director of the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative. Her forthcoming book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press), examines the impact of war and genocide on women’s political mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia. Her work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, New Political Economy, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, Foreign Policy, The Society Pages, and Political Violence @ A Glance.

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