INTRODUCTION

Reparations for harms suffered by individuals in armed conflict are an essential part of the process of transition from conflict to peace and securing postconflict justice. Gender-sensitive reparations for women who are victims of international crimes and gross violations of human rights are an integral part of these processes and a critical element in addressing the long-term impact of armed conflict on women. Although the right to reparations is recognised in international law, the gender dimension of reparations for conflict-related harms has only fairly recently emerged as a topic of inquiry in international law. For instance, the issue of reparations for victims of sexual and genderbased violence (SGBV) suffered during World War II was not addressed at the International Military Tribunals at Nuremberg or in Tokyo.

In the past two decades, international law's efforts to address the long-term impact of armed conflict on women focused predominantly on attempting to close the impunity gap for conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) through the jurisprudence of international criminal courts and tribunals. However, international criminal prosecutions of gender-based crimes have provided an important but somewhat limited avenue of redress for the victims. While international criminal tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) delivered symbolic justice in many cases by holding the key perpetrators of gender-based crimes to account, they did not have the powers or jurisdiction to award reparations for the victims. The jurisdictional and functional distinction between civil and criminal courts meant that in order to obtain further redress for harm suffered, the victims needed to resort to national courts to claim compensation. This process brought inherent challenges, illustrated by the shortcomings in domestic legislation, different rules on the recognition of victims under domestic laws, and substantive delays in adjudication of such claims. In the meantime, women living in post-conflict societies had to face the challenges of day-to-day life with the consequences of physical, psychological and economic harms suffered as a result of international crimes and gross violations of human rights.

Gender is an important factor shaping the reality and lived experiences of men and women in armed conflicts. ‘New wars’ in which violence is directed predominantly towards civilians, have a significant gender dimension. In particular, the use of sexual violence in modern armed conflicts evidences the strategic nature of gendered violence which is commonly deployed to achieve not only political control but also to terrorise or expel members of the opposing group – be it ethnic, religious or national. Furthermore, as the experience of the past three decades of new wars demonstrates, gender retains its significance in the aftermath of conflict, during the time of transition from ‘conflict’ to ‘peace’. Although it is increasingly difficult to draw a defining line between phases of modern conflict, it can be observed that transitional justice processes are highly gendered and oft en lead to exacerbation of gender-based violence and a return to unequal gender relations existing prior to the conflict. Frequently, the ‘postwar’ political reality and the new legal order do not prioritise the need to address the structural discrimination and inequalities nor the gendered consequences of conflict. This oft en leads to the creation of a ‘post-war’ economy where continued violence and gendered abuse are common features, for example in cases of human trafficking from ‘post-conflict'states. Despite the pervasiveness of gendered violence in new wars and in transitional contexts, international law has been crucial in bringing about meaningful change. This book aims to analyse the progress made in relation to addressing gendered impacts of new wars through the lens of the international criminal justice system and transitional justice processes. While these two perspectives represent merely a particular section of the international legal regime, they are representative of the major changes that have taken place in these fields in recent years.

Traditionally, international law has given little recognition to the gendered effects of war and focused largely on prohibiting conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) through international humanitarian law treaties in the aftermath of World War II.

INTRODUCTION

The perspectives represented in this volume highlight some of the most recent developments and debates concerning international and transitional justice responses to addressing gendered realities and consequences of armed conflict. These include, but are not limited to, the involvement of children, especially girls, in modern conflicts and their exclusion from transitional justice processes; pursuits of accountability for CRSV at international and domestic levels; as well as the growing (albeit slowly) recognition of the need for transformative and gender-sensitive reparations.

But first and foremost, this study is a testament to the significant changes to the ways in which we have begun to understand, conceptualise and critique the complex relationships between gender, war and peace. The academic as well as public understanding of these issues has significantly evolved over the past three decades. When the war in the Former Yugoslavia broke out in 1991, the ‘new wars’ fuelled by the competing ethnic, religious and national interests became the reality. Soon after, in 1994, the world woke up to the horrors of mass scale killings and violence during the Rwandan Genocide. Violations of human rights and humanitarian law taking place both in the Former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, have also revealed the highly gendered nature of such violations, especially in the form of mass-scale sexual violence. While today we focus on critiquing how conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is prosecuted by international criminal courts and tribunals, at the time of these atrocities it was far from common to criminalise conflict-related rape, not to mention other forms of sexual and gender-based harms, such as forced marriage, sexual enslavement or sexualised torture. Back in the early 1990s, a significant degree of international feminist activism as well as feminist academic scholarship calling for immediate recognition of rape and other forms of CRSV as tools of warfare as well as for ending impunity for such acts contributed to the momentous shift in not only legal categorisations but also in public perception of these acts.