Abstract
Post-conflict interventions are dominated by legal, security and development discourses. There is an emerging standardised ‘set’ of international responses to conflict. Many high-status interventions deal primarily with elites from within conflict communities and seek to rebuild on a western neoliberal democratic model with little accommodation of local practices or involvement of those most adversely impacted by the conflict. This model often reinforces pre-existing structural inequalities and further privileges those most able to access power, and further marginalises those with least access to political, economic and cultural power. Meanwhile, non-governmental organisation (NGO) development interventions are fraught with tensions, often emerging from and operating within colonial charitable paradigms which arguably paradoxically reinforce dependency and powerlessness. In this chapter, we draw on fieldwork conducted with women affected by violence in Kenya, eastern DRC and northern Uganda to examine the ways in which a range of transitional justice mechanisms operate. In particular, we explore the effects of such interventions on women’s agency and their self-identification as citizens. We question whether large-scale NGO service provision might be inadvertently distancing women from their own resourcefulness and agency, and shifting women’s identities away from citizenship and towards the more passive role of ‘client’.
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Notes
- 1.
Rita Shackel and Lucy Fiske. 2016 Making Justice Work for Women: Kenya Country Report; Lucy Fiske and Rita Shackel. 2016. Making Justice Work for Women: Uganda Country Report; Rita Shackel and Lucy Fiske. 2016. Making Justice Work for Women: Democratic Republic of Congo Country Report.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
This included 113 women interviewed individually or in focus groups in the DRC, 98 in Uganda, and 63 in Kenya.
- 4.
This included 28 key informants interviewed in the DRC, 26 in Kenya, and 14 in Uganda.
- 5.
Interviewed 17 June 2014.
- 6.
For a detailed and comprehensive account of conditions in northern Uganda’s IDP camps see Dolan, Chris. 2009. Social Torture. The case of northern Uganda, 1986–2006. Berghahn Books..
- 7.
Land on the site of massacres would not be settled and cared for by many people because of the belief that angry spirits would haunt the living for not giving the deceased persons a decent burial.
- 8.
Interviewed in Bungoma, 15 April 2014.
- 9.
Interviewed in Sake, 20 September 2014.
- 10.
Interviewed 27 June 2014.
- 11.
- 12.
Interviewed June 27, 2014.
- 13.
Research reveals the importance of survivors sharing stories and expressing experiences about a traumatic event and related emotional and psychological symptoms: Tuttle, Amy. 2011. “Family Systems and Recovery from Sexual Violence and Trauma” in Surviving Sexual Violence: A Guide to Recovery and Empowerment edited by Thema Bryant-Davis, 142–159. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
- 14.
See Maier, Steven F. and Martin E. Seligman. 1976. “Learned Helplessness: Theory and Evidence” Journal of Experimental Psychology 105 (1): 3–46.; Hiroto, Donald S and Martin E. Seligman. 1975. “Generality of Learned Helplessness in Man.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31 (2): 311–327.; Abramson, Lyn Y, Martin E. P. Seligman and John D. Teasdale. 1978. “Learned Helplessness in Humans: Critique and Reformulation.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 87 (1): 49–74; Wortman, Camille B. and Jack W. Brehm. 1975. “Responses to Uncontrollable Outcomes: An Integration of the Reactance Theory and the Learned Helplessness Model.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 8: 277–336; Peterson, Christopher, Steven F. Maier and Martin E. P. Seligman. 1993. Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford University Press.
- 15.
Interviewed in Rutshuru, 23 September 2014.
- 16.
Interviewed in Rutshuru, 23 September 2014.
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Shackel, R., Fiske, L. (2019). Making Clients Out of Citizens: Deconstructing Women’s Empowerment and Humanitarianism in Post-Conflict Interventions. In: Shackel, R., Fiske, L. (eds) Rethinking Transitional Gender Justice. Gender, Development and Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77890-7_4
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