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Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.

Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights

How does war impact societies in its aftermath? How does war impact women in particular? At its most fundamental level, war is an accelerated period of social change: it destroys social structures, dismantles institutions, and forces power relations to shift. This dissertation seeks to understand how violence can transform social structures, using the experience of women after violence as a lens through which to do so. Case studies of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina animate the project. Drawing from ten months of fieldwork and interviews with 238 women in both countries, I illustrate how war can serve as a period of rapid social change that can trigger a reconfiguration of gender roles. I argue that war does this by precipitating three interrelated and overlapping shifts: (1) a demographic shift, due to the disproportionate death, conscription, and imprisonment of men and the massive displacement of people from their homes; (2) an economic shift, due to the destruction of infrastructure, agricultural capacity, and the arrival of international humanitarian aid; and (3) a cultural shift, due to the reconceptualization of women as legitimate public actors, as women juxtapose their "more peaceful" nature with men's propensity for war. Then, these three shifts lead to a fourth: an increase in women's political engagement. A focus on both informal and formal politics allows me to analyze the multifaceted and varied ways that violence restructured women's lives and allowed for some women's increased participation in public, political spaces. As the closing chapter shows, however, many of these gains were short lived, as international actors, the state, and revitalized patriarchal norms intervened to undermine and set back women's progress.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of contributors -- List of figures and tables -- 1 Introduction -- Part I Incorporating trauma healing into peacebuilding practice -- 2 Fundamentals of trauma: confronting the myths and widening the spectrum for peacebuilding -- 3 Holistic healing: a case for integrating trauma recovery and peacebuilding -- 4 Building peace in complex contexts of psychosocial trauma: an integrated framework -- Part II How to remember and tell stories of trauma -- 5 "I can(not) remember": the creation of collective narratives in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina -- 6 Creating a multidirectional memory for healing in the former Yugoslavia -- 7 Remembering side by side: transforming relationships through storytelling -- Part III Women's resilience -- 8 Victim or survivor? Choosing identity after wartime sexual violence -- 9 "The war changed me": Bosnian women, resilience and the search for peace -- 10 From subjects of stories to agents of change: countering dominant discourses of gender and peacebuilding -- Part IV From justice to artistic expression: practices of working with trauma -- 11 Towards social restoration in Bosnia and Herzegovina: exploring the place of symbolic forms of transitional justice -- 12 Taking play seriously: creative processing of trauma through expressive arts -- 13 Conclusion: lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Index.

The lack of convergence towards liberal democracy in some African countries reflects neither a permanent state of political aberration, nor necessarily a prolonged transitional phase through which countries pass once the "right" conditions are met. Examining the cases of two ruling parties, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the African National Congress in South Africa, we develop the concept of productive liminality to explain countries suspended (potentially indefinitely) in a status "betwixt and between" mass violence, authoritarianism, and democracy. On the one hand, their societies are in a liminal status wherein a transition to democracy and socio-economic "revolution" remains forestalled; on the other hand, this liminality is instrumentalized to justify the party's extraordinary mandate characterized by: (a) an idea of an incomplete project of liberation that the party alone is mandated to fulfil through an authoritarian social contract, and (b) the claim that this unfulfilled revolution is continuously under threat by a coterie of malevolent forces, which the party alone is mandated to identify and appropriately sanction.

Many view civil wars as violent contests between armed combatants. But history shows that community groups, businesses, NGOs, local governments, and even armed groups can respond to war by engaging in civil action. Characterized by a reluctance to resort to violence and a willingness to show enough respect to engage with others, civil action can slow, delay, or prevent violent escalations. This volume explores how people in conflict environments engage in civil action, and the ways such action has affected violence dynamics in Syria, Peru, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Spain, and Colombia. These cases highlight the critical and often neglected role that civil action plays in conflicts around the world.