Economic violence against women: Testimonies from the Women’s Court in Sarajevo

Abstract

This article uses a feminist political economy framework to analyse economic violence against women in the context of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the introduction of neoliberal regimes in its successor states from the late 1980s until 2015. The authors’ focus is on the following processes before, during and after the breakup: the wider social, political and economic context of Yugoslavia before the war, already marked by the introduction of orthodox neoliberal standards and practices and combined with nationalism; the period during the war, with escalation of conflict and growing nationalism; and the post-socialist transformation, marked by aggressive neoliberalism. The analysis is based on women’s testimonies given in preparation of (from 2011 until the end of 2014) and during the Women’s Court in Sarajevo in 2015. It points to the conclusion that orthodox neoliberal policy and privatization, intersecting with patriarchy, nationalism and conflict, induced economic violence against women in the region.

Keywords

Breakup of Yugoslavia economic violence against women neoliberalism women’s testimonies

We all became losers … Nobody cared about our lives, or about justice. And today it is the same.

(Testimony, Montenegro, majority ethnic group, worker engaged in hunger strike because of the loss of rights during privatization of the company for which she worked, Sarajevo, 2015)

Introduction

Economic violence can broadly be defined as ‘unequal control over the collective resources, denial of access to money, employment or education’ (Klasnić, 2011: 342). More precisely, ‘economic violence refers to acts of control and monitoring of the behavior of an individual in terms of the use and distribution of money, and the constant threat of denying economic resources. The control mechanisms may also include controlling the victim’s access to healthcare services, employment, etc.’ (EIGE, n.d.). The allocation of and access to economic recourses is linked to gender, in both the public and the private sphere.

We adopt a broader perspective on economic violence, following Galtung’s (1969) view of structural violence, which includes multiple forms of oppression, exploitation and exclusion, and systemic social injustice. In this respect, economic violence against women can be seen as structural oppression based on gender in the sphere of work, including a whole range of productive and reproductive activities taking place within and outside the household and local community: care work, domestic work, subsistence and informal work, and different types of formal employment. Economic violence against women has been studied much less than forms of violence marked by direct physical, sexual or psychological manifestations (Fawole, 2008). Especially missing are studies that situate gendered forms of economic violence within wider social processes, in different parts of the world; qualitative studies that grasp the subjective dimensions of gendered economic violence; as well as studies that systematically and comprehensively explore the links between gender, economic violence and post-conflict economic and social developments marked by neoliberalism.¹

Building on these arguments, we start from the perspective that economic violence and injustice should be observed contextually, in relation to wider socio-economic and political processes and structures. In this article, we examine gendered economic violence in the workplace and local community during the process of the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, and the post-socialist neoliberal transformation of its successor states. The analysis is illustrated using women’s testimonies² made in preparation of the Women’s Court in Sarajevo in 2015 (from 2011 until the end of 2014), and during the Court itself. The Women’s Court (from now on: the Court) is an alternative court based on feminist approaches to justice, organized by various civil society organizations from Yugoslavia, and held in Sarajevo from 7 to 10 May 2015. The Court was established ‘in order to disclose the crimes against women, prevent further silencing, forgetting, impunity for crimes and subsequent revision of history, to introduce women’s access to justice and to create a permanent record of women’s testimonies’ (Vitas et al., 2015: 13). The leading narrative of the Court was the persistence of violence against women in war and peace, understood within a macro context. We work with this idea and analyse the persistence of economic violence against women within the global, regional and local contexts in which it occurs (neoliberalism, transition and conflict). The Court in Sarajevo was previously analysed through the lens of feminist justice by Daša Duhaček (2015), Maria O’Reilly (2016) and Staša Zajović (2015) as well as by Janine Natalya Clark (2016), who uses a wider concept of justice as recognition, within a transitional justice framework.

In this article we depart from this perspective because our focus is not on the Court as an instrument of justice, but on the testimonies, which reveal economic injustice and violence against women in the form of an individualized, ‘bottom-up’ truth-telling project (O’Reilly, 2016). Thus, our analysis is not grounded in feminist debates on justice (which are addressed in all of the aforementioned articles) but in a feminist political economy perspective to violence that, as stated by Jacqui True (2012: 7), ‘attends to the local and global context in which violence occurs and, in contrast to classical economy, makes explicit linkages between economic, social and political realm’. Our explanation of the gendered nature and effects of the structural politico-economic forces that produce conditions for economic violence against women in the ex-Yugoslav region includes war, neoliberal economic restructuring, and loss of secure employment and formal jobs through privatization of social property during the transition, all of which are clearly reported in the testimonies.

We start our analysis by briefly situating gendered economic violence within the global neoliberal policy environment, and then briefly turn to its manifestation in other Central and Eastern European countries. We then look at the post-socialist and post-conflict context of Yugoslavia, and finally turn to the Court’s women’s testimonies. Our analysis points to the conclusion that orthodox neoliberal policy and privatization, intersecting with patriarchy, nationalism and conflict, induced economic violence against women in ex-Yugoslav region.

Neoliberal globalization and economic violence: Gendered aspects

The institutionalization and realization of neoliberal principles, standards and regulatives has led to growing structural inequalities between and within different parts of local communities, cities, states, regions and the world (Harvey, 2005; Milanović, 2016). These consequences do not appear out of nowhere, but result from the strategic choices of institutional actors, formulated within the local social context as well as in global neoliberal ideology (Steger et al., 2013). By claiming that culturally specific gender differences are crucial elements of social hierarchies, while ignoring issues of class, the ‘identity turn’ in western feminism was often blind to economic violence and to the role of neoliberalism in creating new, and widening old class inequalities among women (and men), as Nancy Fraser (1998) and Eszter Kováts (2016) argue. A growing body of literature, with contributions both from feminist scholars and international organizations, associates gender inequalities with the introduction of orthodox neoliberal policies (Cornwall et al., 2008; Elson, 2001; Razavi, 2012; World Bank, 2012). As a group of female feminist political economists already anticipated, from the early 1990s structural adjustment policies imposed by government and international institutions did not succeed in creating universally higher and better employment opportunities for women (Boersma el al., 2002). During the 1990s, orthodox neoliberal policies ‘led to increased impoverishment, displacement and internal strife resulting from political instabilities caused by devaluing national currencies, increasing debt and dependence on foreign investment’ (UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, 2000). Günseli Berik, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers and Stephanie Seguino (2009) and Kate Bedford and Shirin Rai (2010) have critiqued the mainstream neoliberal policy agendas for their uneven distribution of effects across gender, ethnicity and class, and shown that fostering competition and labour market efficiency creates new and deepened, gendered, class-based, racialized and ethnic inequalities While neoliberal policies have contributed to an increase in female labour force participation in specific countries and sectors, they have also resulted in an increase in informal and unprotected forms of work, and pushed many workers, especially poor women, into low-paid, informal and precarious types of employment (Benería, 2001; Chambers, 2000; Razavi, 2012).

This body of knowledge, produced within feminist political economy, contributes to further understanding the ways in which neoliberal policies and discourses are enmeshed in the crisis of global capitalism, and how conflicts and wars have further impoverished societies, creating conditions for severe violence against women (Sequino, 2008).

Gender and economic violence in the context of European countries in transition

According to Anna Pollert (2003), despite the different impact of globalization and transition on the position of women in labour markets across the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, these countries share the failure to build on the gender equality advantages of the communist legacy. Beverly Dawn Metcalfe and Marianne Afanassieva (2005) draw similar conclusions, while Sonja Avlijaš’s (2017) empirical research, on the other hand, shows how different components of economic restructuring in Eastern Europe have variable effects on the position of women across labour markets. Pierella Paci’s findings (2002) show that at the beginning of transition, the gender gap in economic activity was small, which is attributed to the former socialist governments’ engagement in securing gender equality: universal access to health care, and education and employment for both men and women. The tendency of concentrating women in relatively low-paid, high labour intensity occupations – such as the garment industry, teaching and health – accounted for a large proportion of the countries’ gender pay gaps. Still, these were relatively small compared not only to other countries with similar income levels worldwide, but also to Western European and other OECD countries.

As patriarchal relations continued to exist inside the private sphere, the key economic disadvantage of women during socialism was their double burden, which was not compensated for by husbands but by the active help of the state (Paci, 2002). The post-socialist transformation came with a sharp reduction of state support for care work, and especially child and elderly care, and has shifted the entire responsibility for care work back to women. Coupled with women’s continued high labour participation rates, transition has increased the double burden on women. Declining GDP and increasing income inequalities have made women’s earnings essential for household incomes, but are simultaneously seen as a factor contributing to the erosion of the male breadwinner model (Paci, 2002).

Price and trade liberalizations and the privatization of state-owned enterprises have brought about radical changes in the characteristics of the formerly controlled socialist labour markets. Full-time employment in a formal labour market in which the state was the primary – often the only – employer has been replaced by a broader mix of more flexible employment conditions and a growing proportion of informal employment in highly unregulated and increasingly polarized labour markets. Such a transition relates to gendered differences in access to means of production – e.g. land and capital – and differential access to bank loans. As the process of privatization expanded in CEE, men disproportionally acquired private property, broadening gendered inequalities (Paci, 2002) and exacerbating gender pay disparities (Pollert, 2003). Cristiano Perugini and Ekaterina Selezneva (2015) have shown that deregulation and weakening of labour market institutions in CEE countries led to a downward convergence of male earnings and the lowest levels of wages for female workers. As a result, the gender gap decreases in the low-paid sector but increases at the middle and at the top of the wage distribution. According to Elissa Braunstein (2012), low female wages in the transition economies of CEE were functional because they helped the export competitiveness of these countries. Barbara Heyns (2005) also points out that neoliberal policies have elevated those types of inequalities that are functional for economic growth, and consequently, differentiation among women is becoming equally important as the differentiation between men and women. Based on case studies across 15 CEE and Baltic countries, Yulia Gradskova and Ildikö Asztalos Morell (2018) have recently shown how neoliberal ideology contributes to new multiple and multifaceted gender injustices and retraditionalization in the region.

In sum, neoliberal transition in CEE has led to the breakdown of state social support and existing gender equality regulations and practices, increased inequality and unemployment, and raised women’s vulnerability to different types of violence.

While most of the other CEE countries transitioned to capitalism relatively peacefully, for socialist Yugoslavia the wars were the main socio-political context of transition.

Gender and economy during and after Yugoslavia: From socialism to post-socialist/post-conflict transformation

Yugoslavia passed through two transitions in the 20th century: from capitalism before the Second World War to socialism after the war, and back to capitalism after the wars of the 1990s, when Yugoslavia disintegrated. After the Second World War, the newly established socialist country was predominantly underdeveloped, agrarian and patriarchal, with low levels of education and a high illiteracy rate, especially among women. Very large regional disparities were, according to Marina Blagojević Hjuson (2015), clearly reflected in the economic, political and educational position of women in the different Yugoslav republics,³ with Slovenia as the most developed, and Kosovo as the least developed. The number of employed women increased rapidly all over the country, however. In 1939 there was one employed woman for every five men, in 1970 one for every 3.2 men, and in 1990 one for every 2.5 men (Latifić, 1997). The rate of illiteracy also drastically fell, first only for men and later for women too, and overall education increased. Of the total number of students in secondary schools in 1989/90, 48% were women. The enrolment of women in higher education at the end of the 1980s was double that of the prewar situation, bringing women to 47% of the total number of graduates (Latifić, 1997). In socialist Yugoslavia, women made up a relatively large share of the labour force and public life. The state, as Maja Solar (2014) claims, had had an active role in promoting various policies for women’s inclusion into formal employment, politics and education. Dubravka Stajić (1998) has demonstrated that women were concentrated in the public (state-owned) social sector and had difficulties breaking through the glass ceiling in prestigious professions and sectors, where the most important decision-making positions were occupied by men. Despite the obvious improvement in women’s position in socialist Yugoslavia, patriarchal ideology successfully and stubbornly coexisted with the new ideology of equality, while the contradictions between the two were resolved through women’s extraordinary efforts to cope with the double burden, as Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj and Marina Hjuson (2018) recently wrote.

Those were the basic structural premises that were reproduced and intensified during the wars of the 1990s and the subsequent transition to capitalism.

Three periods should be highlighted as relevant for understanding economic injustice and violence in the context of transition of the Yugoslav successor states: the prewar period (until 1990), the war period (1990–1999) and the postwar period (2000). The period just before the wars of the 1990s, with nationalism and encroaching privatization, is essential for explaining the governmental and institutional processes that laid the basis of future economic violence. In the second half of the 1980s, rising nationalism, strengthened by religious institutions, created a setback for women’s achievements, and opened the public space for gender discourses that called upon women to return to the domestic sphere. Women were pushed back from the labour market into the private sphere, to take care of the family in conditions of low economic standards and the dismantling of the institutions providing social security and public services (Blagojević, 1991). Growing conservative, nationalist, patriarchal and corporate pressures drastically reduced the capacity of the socialist state to protect the public interest and the already achieved levels of gender equality (Đurić, 1995). In Serbia specifically, a systematic and complex mechanism of state-directed non-development was institutionalized at the beginning of the 1990s, and while ruling elites largely benefited from this model of economic power, most of the citizens were impoverished, as shown by Tatjana Đurić Kuzmanović (1997).⁴ Moreover, the imposition of international sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in 1992 served these elites with a perfect justification for all economic problems.

The war period of the 1990s was a time when economic injustice intensified, and when the new states started to allow, sponsor and legitimate economic violence. The wars brought destruction of property, industrial infrastructure and natural resources, and were accompanied by economic recession and hyperinflation. Total institutional breakdown and violence enabled predatory processes of primary capital accumulation through corrupt privatization, criminal dispossession and marginalization, while nationalism channelled those processes along the lines of ethnicity, class and gender. According to David Keen (1998: 11), in the structural theoretical sense, today’s ‘civil wars’ are not unrestrained violent conflicts of two or more political factions; rather they are wars in which an alternative power structure, protection system and profit-making environment are built. ‘War economies are, thus, composed of dynamic forms of economic reproduction that range from surviving with the help of violence, to financing military expenses, to the accumulation and new investments of capital in the world market. The global structures of liberal economy enter a symbiotic relationship with local violent structures and in this way, self-serving “market violence” is built’ (Jung, 2004: 14). Vesna Nikolić-Ristanović (2002) observes that ethnicization and gendering of war violence contributed significantly to women’s vulnerability to various forms of violence in this region. And while sexual violence against women received considerable attention of regional and international feminist scholars, the economic violence and its gendered and ethnicized forms that affected the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of women have mostly remained unexamined.

The postwar period of post-socialist transformation and the institutionalization of the neoliberal economy did not bring the expected prosperity to the majority of the population, nor an end to women’s economic deprivation. On the contrary, as recently shown by Milica Lupšor and Vesna Đorđević (2017) as well as Tatjana Đurić Kuzmanović (2018), it fostered connections between the state and capital and redesigned relations between labour and capital, further collapsing workers’ rights and increasing all forms of discrimination and exploitation in (and outside) the workplace. Marina Blagojević (2002) observes that the structural premises of gender inequality inherited from the socialist period were reproduced and highly enhanced under the influence of capitalist dynamics. Women in the Yugoslav successor states are overrepresented in declining public sector and low-paid jobs, often underemployed or unemployed, suffer more from a lack of social and labour protection, have less control over economic and financial resources, and are forced to accept marginal and precarious employment. Consequently, the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the health sector, with a decline in size of the public sector, all results of the neoliberal macroeconomic agenda, have had clear gendered effects in the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

In the following section we illustrate the main structural politico-economic forces that produce conditions for economic violence against women in the ex-Yugoslav region using the testimonies collected through the Women’s Court in Sarajevo.

The Women’s Court: Women’s experiences of economic injustice and violence

The organization of the Court started in 2010. During the trial, 36 women gave testimonies that were presented in Sarajevo from 7 May to 10 May 2015, in five thematic sessions (cf. Zajović, 2015; Zajović and Urošević, 2017). In the final session on economic violence against women, six women testified. The testimonies given in other sessions often included experiences of economic injustice and violence, indicating the multidimensionality of violence. Therefore we analysed the complete documentation given in front of the Court, and selected 23 testimonies that are related to economic violence against women directly, or contain parts related to it, for inclusion in this article.

These testimonies were given by women of different nationalities (Serb, Croat, Muslim, Montenegrin, Albanian, Roma), living as members of both majority and minority ethnicities in all the successor states (e.g. Montenegrins in Montenegro as the majority or Serbs in Croatia as the minority). They were of different age groups (from girls in their teens to those older than 65), with different levels of education (from barely literate to the highest academic degrees). Among them were unemployed and self-employed women, women working in the private sector as well as those employed in the public sector. Many had left or lost their previous jobs under the pressures of war and ethnicized violence, regardless of the position they occupied in their companies. Others were pushed out by the neoliberal transformation of their companies during and after the war.

In writing this article, one of the challenges the authors faced was classifying the diversity of economic injustice and violence. Different forms of economic violence are related to, and also interlinked with other forms of war and postwar violence. The classification devised by Court organizers included five main types of violence against women: ethicized, militaristic, sexual, gendered and economic. Women gave testimonies about the many forms of violence and losses they experienced from the late 1980s until 2014. Many of these experiences are similar, and at the same time specific to the given contexts of war (1991–1995) and postwar in particular towns and villages, territories and regions, in very specific time-frames. Thus, on the one hand, their experiences are framed by different contexts of prewar, war and postwar/post-socialism; and on the other hand, by ethnicity, gender and class. Therefore, we opted to analyse the testimonies from several perspectives simultaneously, seeing gender, class and ethnicity as important to economic violence. Not all of them were equally important in every case, however. Sometimes, clearly, being a woman was central to the exposure to blackmail, related to requests for sexual favours at work. Very often the experience of economic violence was related to the question whether the Court witness belonged to the ethnic majority or minority in her republic/state, as minority women were much more vulnerable than women belonging to the ethnic majority. But some testimonies indicate that in certain contexts, ethnicity and nationhood were not crucial at all. Privatization or bankruptcy of companies for example often resulted in all workers – regardless of gender and ethnicity – losing jobs simply because the new (foreign or domestic) owner looked for new workers, changed the direction of production, or closed down the company. Sometimes factories were sold for less than the price of the plot of land on which they were built. The socio-economic background of women appears important in almost all cases, however. It is worth noting that most of the women who testified at the Court belonged to the impoverished working classes – and thus had few choices and resources to flee the war and fight against economic violence.

In order to explore these similarities and differences, the common as well as the particular of these women’s experiences, we systematize the testimonies in the following way: (1) those involving processes that affected all workers, regardless of gender and national belonging, and were directly linked to the neoliberal post-socialist transformation and economic restructuring through privatization; (2) those showing gendered economic violence against women specifically, and often (though not always) indicating links between nationalism, patriarchy and neoliberalism.

Encroaching neoliberal transformation

Some testimonies identified the socio-economic context of early privatization, which coincided with the war, and during which many workers lost jobs regardless of their gender and ethnicity:

I started working in 1985. I tried almost everything, from tailor to assembly-line and the press … I was satisfied with whichever workplace in the shoe factory. That way I learned to produce shoes on my own … I was satisfied until the early ’90s. Then came inflation, lowering of salaries, shops were being sold out to private persons. Both I and my husband became technically redundant … I submitted a request for my 24 months of pay [severance cheque].⁵ After a lot of trouble they gave it … (Testimony, Montenegro, majority ethnic group, worker)

Factories were declared bankrupt or economically unsustainable and then sold for a pittance to private investors or (foreign) companies. Many workers were declared redundant without actually being fired, thus neither receiving their salaries nor being able to look for other jobs. Many were forced to sign declarations of loyalty to the employers stating that they would come to work without getting paid.

My trauma is caused by discrimination at the labor market because of criminal privatization. It is well known that the state is the main culprit here … Workers were thrown out on the street … I worked for 18 years … For eleven months we did not get any salary. The factory directors destroyed us. And none of them was brought to court! This is not just discrimination! This is killing people! We were not allowed to fight but we did it anyway. The union was against us. We were all fired but that would have come anyway. (Testimony, Croatia, minority ethnic group, worker)

The testimonies show privatization drastically changed the power relations between the state, the new owners and workers, severely limiting access to work and income, and producing structural economic violence and injustice. The examples above show the effects of early privatization, which affected both male and female workers, regardless of their ethnic status. But female manual labourers – such as those in the garment and shoe industry – were especially vulnerable as they were majority workers in those sectors, their wages were already low, and massive unemployment meant that after losing jobs they hardly had a chance to find a new one. The next examples show how such conditions, coupled with nationalism, aggravated the situation of women – especially (but not exclusively) those belonging to ethnic minorities.

Nationalism and neoliberal transformation working together

With no significant changes to the ruling elite, the collapsed old socialist system in the newly created states was replaced by ethno-democracy: a system in which democratic benefits were denied to the ethnic ‘other’. Women’s testimonies reveal the links between the war, nationalism and the spread of neoliberal globalization in postwar transitional society.

Our politicians do not quarrel about ideology! They are all for one and the same option: neoliberalism! And they are all for nationalism. They manipulate nationalist sentiments to gain economic profits. (Testimony, Montenegro, majority ethnic group, civil sector, psychologist)

In the early 1990s I was still employed, and I can freely say that that’s the period when all of my problems began. Because me and my husband were Muslims we started to experience various humiliations, insults and threats. It was very difficult to go to work those days. Everything was about war and Serbhood. Many of our colleagues came to work drunk and even tried to attack us. Soon we were both dismissed as technically redundant. And all of this was a prelude to the ruining of the company and its privatization. (Testimony, Montenegro, ethnic minority, worker)

In Serbia, a closed economy was accompanied by the absence or paralysis of institutions, due to criminality and corruption. Thus, through a strategy of ‘government-directed non-development’ (Đurić Kuzmanović, 1997), the national oligarchy brought great benefits to a small group of powerful men, and robbed and impoverished a great number of citizens. Social integration was based on the public consensus that ‘the Serbs’ as a nation were under threat and that there was an international conspiracy against them.

Then after the UN sanctions came inflation. I give birth to a son in 1993. I bring home my salary – one pack of baby food. At that time the regulations for pregnant women were still good.⁶ But our director at the time took 20 percent of the paycheck from us, pregnant women. And then at some point he started taking a share from our salaries. From 20 to 60 percent, whatever he felt like … I worked until 2004, until the end. Then it was rumored … no more work. The director wanted to convince us that it was not true. But it was already arranged … He did everything in agreement with the politicians … And we all registered as being technically redundant. (Testimony, Serbia, majority ethnic group, worker)

Women’s testimonies suggest that nationalism and the wars were also a way of introducing capitalism, through the initial accumulation of capital and return to traditional gender relations. The capitalist war logic created the conditions for the robbing of public property, which, legitimized by war and violence, came to be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful men.

I am a single mother of two children, I always managed alone, the state never gave me anything, it just took. Now I have a job on the black market because in this country working legally does not pay off. Before my shop stopped working, an inspector came and gave me such a high fine that I had to close the shop. I went to the Social Service to see what to do, I did not have the resources to pay that penalty … Then the police came to arrest me and the social worker said she would take my children away. (Testimony, Serbia, minority ethnic group, worker)

After the prevailing predatory type of privatization of most of the social (i.e. state-socialist) enterprises, a similar fate awaited health and education systems and public services, in line with the interests of newly rising capitalist elites. The redistributive role of the state in preserving social and economic justice dramatically collapsed, as it turned to the interests of local tycoons, foreign investors and international financial institutions with the systematic subordination of the collective interests of citizens. In this process, the state was not the passive victim of external forces, it was an active agent in restructuring gendered labour markets and allowing economic violence to happen. Women clearly recognize this in their testimonies.

This is a society of rich people who have been stealing all along, first they were stealing during the war and then after the war they stole our jobs. This society loves you only if you steal, lie, kill or commit other crimes. This society only cares for itself, and not for me, whom they destroyed. This society recognizes a person only as long as it can use her … Empty promises from election to election … The state didn’t ask me anything when it went to kill people all around, it didn’t ask me when it closed the factories. I exist only to vote and to support their good lives. (Testimony, Serbia, minority ethnic group, worker)

Women’s testimonies also indicate that the combination of war, nationalism and economic violence was reinforced by patriarchal values. Forced privatization, plunder and precariousness of work conditions exposed women to specific forms of sexualized violence such as demands for sexual favours, in exchange for economic protection:

One inspector courted me … He told me: ‘Come on, let’s make a deal.’ I said there’s no way we can make a deal … But he insisted: ‘Grab your suitcase and children and move in with me.’ I told him: ‘Come on man, I may be a woman without a man but not a woman without morals. (Testimony, Montenegro majority ethnic group, worker)

Another testimony illustrates the practice of sexual blackmail:

When our boss hires a young woman, he wants to sleep with her as well. Women are forced to sleep with employers in order to get or keep a job. That has to be known. (Testimony, Bosnia and Herzegovina, majority ethnic group, worker)

Being a woman – and having a female body with its reproductive physiology – also became an issue. A woman tells about her specific experiences related to menstruation:

They put red tape on us when we have our periods so they can check how many times we use the bathroom. You had to have a doctor’s statement saying you have menstruation or bladder problems to allow you to use the bathroom more than twice a day. (Testimony, Serbia, minority ethnic group, worker)

The above testimonies reveal the way in which the new economic system came to draw upon the (pre)existing socio-cultural patterns and norms rooted in ethno-nationalism and patriarchy. In that sense, they confirm previous findings about the gendered aspects of economic transition in Yugoslavia but also bring them into closer connection with war and the global neoliberal macroeconomic environment. As in the global neoliberal environment generally, increasing economic and political insecurity in Yugoslavia is often expressed through violence against women and articulated in the form of defending nationalist culture and patriarchal traditions (Bakker and Gill, 2004).

Concluding remarks

The analysis presented in this article indicates that neoliberal transition in the countries of the former Yugoslavia was a class-based, gendered and ethnicized process that induced structural violence against the most vulnerable groups in society, with the active help of the state, and especially exacerbated in the context of war. The empirical evidence presented in this article is not sufficient to draw hard and fast conclusions about the precise role of different factors in the reproduction of economic violence against women and this is, perhaps, the main methodological limitation of this study. However, the testimonies presented in the article repeatedly point to the fact that different sources of economic violence (patriarchy, nationalism and neoliberalism) often cooperated and mutually reinforced one another. Thus, the three analytical categories (gender, ethnicity and class) are structurally intertwined, thereby highlighting the value of an intersectional approach to gendered processes of marginalization in the countries of the former Yugoslavia.

Privatization was a major aspect of the transition towards a neoliberal economy in Yugoslavia and its successor states, and the main contexts enabling privatization were war and nationalism: the old (socialist) elites and new elites (war profiteers, newly formed state bureaucracies, etc.) and foreign companies became new owners of the formerly public (socialist, state-led) companies, often in semi-legal or illegal, corrupt ways. The state withdrew in order to let the market ‘regulate itself’, while changes in the legal frameworks allowed for ever more lax conditions of privatization, a sharp worsening of work conditions and the destruction of labour rights.

Initially, the transition to neoliberalism did not significantly influence the participation of women in the labour market, but produced qualitative, structural changes, reflected in various types of economic injustice and violence. The situation started changing, however, with heightened nationalism and war, as well as in the aftermath of the war. The nationalist retraditionalization and patriarchalization of society severely undermined the former socialist gender equality practices, polices and discourses, placing women in a particularly precarious situation. Women started losing jobs, were forced to accept precarious work, to enter black market jobs, faced severe abuse of labour rights, or were forced to submit to various forms of sexual blackmail and harassment in order to keep their jobs.

The wider socio-political context of ethno-democracy has impacted different women in different ways. Women (and men) of minority ethnic groups faced much more economic violence. They were among the first to be fired, or faced various pressures on the shopfloor (such as threats or the dramatic worsening of work conditions) that forced them to leave. The testimonies also suggest that women in different positions (workers, skilled labourers, managers) faced similar kinds of violence at the workplace, for example, sexualized violence, demands for sexual favours and sexual blackmail. However, neoliberal structural reforms and privatization impacted the vulnerable working class most of all.

While similar neoliberal processes were also happening in other CEE countries, war and its aftermath sharpened the economically injust environment in the Yugoslav successor states. One of the values of the Women’s Court is that it has highlighted the nature and the crucial causes of economic injustice and violence, the price for which the witnesses at the Court paid, and to which they bravely testified.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Women in Black and Anima for the testimonies, Dubravka Zarkov for her valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Alexander Chaplin for suggestions and translation of the article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Ana Pajvančić-Cizelj

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