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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

Theories of social movement emergence posit "threat" as an important concept in explanations of mobilization. This article uses the case of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to investigate whether threats that stem from mass violence can also have a mobilizing effect. Drawing from interviews with 152 women in Rwanda, I reveal how threatening conditions created by the genocide and civil war initiated a grassroots mobilization process among women. This mobilization featured women founding and joining community organizations, engaging in new forms of claims making toward state institutions, and eventually running for political office. Two mechanisms facilitated this process: the social appropriation of feminine values for the reconceptualization of women as legitimate political actors, and the brokerage of connections between individual women, organizations, and government institutions by foreign actors. I conclude by suggesting that this mobilization served as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the meteoric rise of women in Rwanda's politics.

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.

There is an emerging consensus that women must play a more substantial role in transformations from violence to stability. The UN Women, Peace, and Security framework recognizes the unique challenges women face during war and affirms the important role they play in the prevention and resolution of conflicts. Despite this framework and other related efforts, peace remains elusive for many who have lived through armed conflict. What prevents formal, internationally led peacebuilding efforts from fostering sustainable peace in ordinary citizens' lives? Put differently, despite the variety of peacebuilding mechanisms offered, what prevents peace from taking hold, for women in particular? In this paper, we focus on two postwar cases: Bosnia and Nepal. Drawing on interviews with more than seventy women in both countries, we identify five barriers that prevent women from feeling at peace in their daily lives: economic insecurity, competing truths, hierarchies of victimhood, continuums of violence, and spatial and temporal dislocation. We conclude by outlining ways that women in both countries work to overcome those barriers by pioneering innovations in peacebuilding, which may reveal possibilities for future interventions.

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.