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Advancing Women Agency in Transitional Justice

Björkdahl, Annika; Mannegren Selimovic, Johanna

2013

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Citation for published version (APA):
Björkdahl, A., & Mannegren Selimovic, J. (2013). Advancing Women Agency in Transitional Justice. (Gender
Just Peace and Transitional Justice Working Paper Series; Vol. Vol. 1, No. No. 1). Lund University.

Total number of authors:
2

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!
! !

Gender-just 
peace and 

transitional 
justice !

l u n d  
u n i v e r s i t y  

working paper no. 1 (2013)!

ad va nci ng w om en agen cy in 
tra nsiti ona l justic e 

annika björkdahl 
 

lund university 
 

johanna mannergren 
selimovic 

 
swedish institute of 

international affairs!

u p p s a l a  
u n i v e r s i t y  

s w e d i s h  i n s t i t u t e  o f  
i n t e r n a t i o n a l  a f f a i r s  

 



SERIES EDITOR:  
Ivan Gusic, Lund University 
 
CORRESPONDENCE TO:  
ivan.gusic@svet.lu.se 
 
This project has been made possible by SIDA and the Swedish 
Research Council.  
 
Visit the project’s homepage at: http://goo.gl/5vnqT 
 
 
 
IN SERIES 
 
1. Advancing women agency in transitional justice – Annika Björkdahl & 
Johanna Mannergren Selimovic 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 1 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

  

1. INTRODUCTION 2 

2. ENGENDERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE THROUGH ENHANCING 
AGENCY 5 

2.1. MAPPING THE GENDERED PEACE AND JUSTICE GAPS 6 

2.2. GENDERING AGENCY 10 

3. GENDERED PEACE AND JUSTICE GAPS IN BIH 13 

3.1.THE ACCOUNTABILITY GAP 15 

3.2. THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT GAP 18 

3.3. THE REPARATION GAP 21 

4. CONCLUSION – TOWARDS A GENDER-JUST PEACE 26 

4.1. AGENCY AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF ACCOUNTABILITY, 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND REPARATIONS 27 

4.2. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF ACCOUNTABILITY, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
AND REPARATIONS 27 

4.3. TOWARDS A GENDER-JUST PEACE 28 

5. REFERENCES 30 

 
  



 2 

1. INTRODUCTION 
 

”Peace without justice is only a symbolic peace”  
 
Nobel Price laureate Rigoberta Menchu 

 
This paper contributes to an on-going conversation among scholars engaged in 
the critical peacebuilding research regarding the issue of agency by highlighting 
the central yet often neglected role of women agency in transitional justice 
processes. It takes as its point of departure the critical questions repeatedly 
posed: whose peace, what justice and for whom? Thus, the aim is to critically 
examine where women are located in the processes of doing justice in post-
conflict societies, to map the set of dispositions which exists in these processes 
that inclines women agents to act/react and in doing so theorize women 
agency in transitional justices processes. More specifically, we expose and 
investigate three gendered transitional justice gaps in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 
First, the accountability gap is revealed and we discuss the legal, physical and 
socioeconomic discriminatory insecurities of women witnesses, the overall lack 
of female presence and the misrepresentations of women-as-victims. Second, 
we examine the acknowledgement gap and attempts at gendering the narrative 
of the past -commemoration of rape camp such as the one in Foca. Third, the 
reparation gap is investigated to reimagine reparations programs that may 
contribute to challenge existing gender hierarchies and bring about social 
transformation.  
 
Mainstream understandings regard peacebuilding and transitional justice as 
ungendered practices and discourses that are able to produce just peace in 
societies emerging from violent conflict. In contrast, the critical peacebuilding 
research reads peacebuilding and transitional justice as an inherently conflictual 
process and a site for power relations where the lack of engagement with and 
empowerment of local agents is understood as one of the reasons for the 
limited success of the liberal peacebuilding project (Richmond 2011: 420; 
Björkdahl and Höglund ed. 2013). Such reflexive approach also informs 
investigations of the gendered dynamics of peacebuilding and transitional 
justice. Subsequently, critical researchers have begun to analyze how and in 
what particular ways liberal peacebuilding contributes to the disciplinary and 
normalizing gender-practices that has come to characterize the gendered post-
conflict phase (Meintjes et al 2001; Väyrynen 2010). More recently, focus on 
transitional justice depicts how transitional justice processes produce a highly 



 3 

gendered justice (Bell and O’Rourke 2007; Ni Aolain et al 2011; Buckley-Zistel 
and Stanley ed. 2012). Thus, the gendered hierarchies built into liberal 
peacebuilding and transitional justice and the absence of women in these 
processes produce peace and justice gaps that are gendered. As the 
micropractices of power that takes place in the post-conflict spaces are being 
mapped and investigated it becomes clear that peacebuilding and transitional 
justice assign local women a particular type of agency. Here women agency is 
viewed as passive, protected, civilian and peaceful. Still it is expected that 
women are to provide a voice of the authentic ‘local’ and the marginalized and 
thus vital for localizing peace and justice. Hence a more critical reading of 
processes to build peace and justice in post-conflict societies as called for by 
Väyrynen (2010: 147) is much needed.  
 
Such critical reading of peacebuilding and transitional justice can fruitfully be 
conducted through a gender lens. Yet, the conceptual basis for taking such 
approach is hampered by the fact that gender is a complex, multi-layered and 
contested concept. There is little agreement about the basic definition of 
gender as the socially and culturally constructed identities of men and women 
and the prevalence of women’s subordination to men is key to the gendered 
hierarchies. The view taken here does not couple femininity with peace and 
masculinity with war which may postulate women as “pacific Others” (Elshtain 
cited in Väyrynen 2010: 149). Instead, we employ gender as a concept that 
informs an understanding of exclusion and marginalization more broadly. 
Gender analysis then is a way of exploring the forms that subordination takes 
in any particular spaces, while we choose to zoom in on peacebuilding space 
and within it the processes of transitional justice. 
 
We understand transitional justice as part of the liberal peacebuilding discourse 
– as a site of power production, domination, negotiation and rejection 
involving the collaboration of various actors, institutions and individuals. Our 
ambition is to bridge the ongoing discussion on transitional justice to a 
research agenda concerned with transformative approaches to peacebuilding. 
Such approaches seek to uncover and confront prevailing gendered hierarchies 
and encourage wider social change through changing the antagonistic 
relationships that were present prior to the conflict, or were shaped and 
consolidated during it, and which has become a hallmark of women’s post-war 
experience. Our perspective is that of “transitional justice from below” and we 
attempt to re-imagine transitional justice as a transformative project towards a 
“gender-just peace” (Björkdahl 2012). A gender-just peace is understood not as 



 4 

a reconstruction of the pre-war situation, but as a positive peace that provides 
for social justice and equity and that recognizes women’s social and 
reproductive roles and women’s agency. It is a peace that contributes to a 
fundamental shift in the provision of specific rights related to women’s gender 
roles, a transformation of gender relations in society and redefinition of 
gendered hierarchies. Gendering agency is the starting point for this endeavor. 

By gendering agency we access agents and spaces for agency that may be 
hidden, ignored or misrepresented in mainstream approaches to transitional 
justice and peacebuilding. We are not uncritically relying on concepts such as 
“women’s experience” which may essentialize women and constitute women 
as a homogenous group. Nor do we constitute “local women” as “Others” i.e. 
passive victims in need of protection (Väyrynen 2010: 138).  In this paper we 
conceptualize women’s agency, locate the female agentive subject, and identify 
instances of critical, creative agency that challenge or negotiate patterns of 
gendered relations of domination. In this endeavour we challenge the 
assumption of equality of interest of agents, which is underpinned by the myth 
that men and women follow the same practices and that they are equally placed 
to shape these practices.  
 
By focusing on gendered transitional justice gaps, we aim to disclose the 
restraints and enablements of women’s agency, examine how women exercise 
creative, critical agency to further transformations towards a gender-just peace. 
We do this through specific observations of the post-conflict processes in 
Bosnia-Herzegovina. The peace that has been constructed through nearly two 
decades of extensive peacebuilding including transitional justice processes is 
fragile, externally driven and riven with contradictions and gendered 
inequalities. The Dayton Peace Accord did in fact “not diminish but reaffirmed 
the patriarchal nationalism as a dominant ideology and social system in post-
war Bosnia” and established a peace that is far from gender just (Cockburn 
2013: 127). In the post-Dayton setting, gender identities are being 
reconstructed, reconfigured, and redefined through an interaction between the 
liberal peacebuilding discourse with its transitional justice ambitions and 
nationalism, culture, and religion. The intimate link between gender and 
nation-building post-Dayton has produced a form of victimized and ethnicized 
femininity not conducive to efforts to build a gender-just peace. The post-
conflict phase has meant a backlash for women, peace and women’s rights 
activists strongly testify (Focus Group, Sarajevo Nov 2011). “We have seen a 
re-traditionalization of gender roles”. The period of war and its aftermath 



 5 

brought with it “exclusion of women from the public space, and also the 
hidden discrimination within families” as one prominent human rights 
advocate put it. Women in BiH have seen women agency circumscribed, their 
space to maneuver shrunken and their calls for peace and justice unheard. 
 
The paper proceeds with a conceptual discussion on what it means to 
engender transitional justice and examines gendered justices gaps. From this 
follows a discussion and conceptualization of agency, which situates a critical 
and creative women agency in time and space. Then an empirical analysis of 
gendered transitional justice gaps in BiH follows focusing particularly on 
women agency, the presence of women and the spaces where women agency is 
exercised. The paper concludes with a final discussion of the implications of 
gendered justice gaps for the transformation towards a gender-just peace. 

2. ENGENDERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE THROUGH 
ENHANCING AGENCY 
Transitional justice can no longer be understood as a “neutral” field 
preoccupied with jurisdiction, but rather as a platform for realigning power and 
legitimizing certain narratives, structures and actors  (Moon 2008). A gendered 
reading of the transitional justice project raises critical questions concerning 
the quality of the peace one hopes to achieve in transitional societies. So far, 
mainstream transitional justice and peacebuilding practices have tended to re-
entrench gendered hierarchies, ignore women, or limit their presence to being 
passive victims in need of protection. Despite an increased focus on 
mainstreaming gender in these processes, we have limited knowledge about the 
presence, participation and multifaceted practices of (critical) agency of women 
in doing justice and building peace. Women’s agency is often ignored, deemed 
without importance or misrepresented. Representations of female agency in 
post-conflict processes tend to obscure the subject and transform her into an 
object that is “allowed” to perform a scripted agency of being for example a 
“victim” (of sexual violence) or a “vessel” containing nationalistic pride or 
hurt. Critical scholars have since highlighted that the preoccupation with 
sexualized violence has had the by-effect of locking women into the role of 
passive victims, and has obscured other forms of gender-based violence against 
both men and women (Engle 2005; Campbell 2007; Beltz 2008; Manjoo and 
McRaith 2011).  
 



 6 

2.1. MAPPING THE GENDERED PEACE AND JUSTICE GAPS 

In the last decade scholars have started to unveil how the boundaries of 
transitional justice in plural ways exclude women’s experiences and needs (e.g. 
Bell and O’Rourke 2007; Osterveld 2009). The legal standards, which are the 
foundation for transitional justice mechanisms, and the processes by which 
these mechanisms are designed, tend to be gender-biased. This is a 
consequence of the male domination of peace negotiations where 
contemporary transitional justice mechanisms often are set up as part and 
parcel of the peace accord that establish the new post-conflict order. However, 
the absence of women from these formal negotiations does not equate with 
the absence of women’s demands for accountability, acknowledgement and 
reparation. This said, what exactly does it mean to add gender justice to the 
discussion about transitional justice mechanism. 

2.1.1. ACCOUNTABILITY 
As a core aspect of transitional justice, accountability mechanisms are set up in 
order to end impunity, increase security and change values through the 
prosecution of individual war criminals. Its central functions can be defined as 
retribution, deterrence and expressivism (Drumbl 2007). Through its retributive 
function accountability measures provide a formalized type of revenge, meting 
out punishment of criminal acts that have been committed by individuals. Its 
deterrent purpose is to discourage criminal behavior after war has ended and 
lessen the influence of war criminals. Its expressive function includes the moral 
imperative to put an end to cultures of impunity and show that such crimes 
will not be tolerated in the new post-conflict order where other values are to 
be (re)-established. In this sense accountability measures are bestowed a 
transformative, norm-generating role (Drumbl 2007: 73f; Teitel 2000). 
  
Accountability mechanisms are set up in order to end impunity, increase 
security and change values through the prosecution of individual war criminals. 
The purportedly neutral and objective character of legal measures is 
undermined by inherently subjective demarcations of what constitutes a crime 
and who is regarded as a victim (Franke 2006). These lines have until recently 
excluded crimes concerning gender-based sexual violence. Important steps 
have been taken over the last decade to begin addressing this gap and a new 
legal framework that recognizes gender-based violence has developed, now 
permanently installed in the statutes of the International Criminal Court 



 7 

(ICC).1 While the legal framework is a central building block for narrowing the 
accountability gap, cultural values and norms mean that gender-based sexual 
violence continues to be marginalized or ignored. The lack of protection of 
female witnesses and lack of understanding of the often staggeringly great 
social prize women have to pay for witnessing have been pointed out as 
important obstacles. The few convictions worldwide concerning these crimes 
indicate that impunity is widespread and that the implementation of legal 
frameworks in domestic contexts is slow (O’Rourke and Bell 2007). 
 
The overall presence of women in legal proceedings is low, and when they do 
testify, it is primarily in cases concerned with sexual violence. While gender-
based sexual violence constitutes a large and destructive part of the harms 
suffered by women, they have also been the objects for other types of war 
crimes. The sole focus on women as victims of sexual violence reduces 
women’s experiences of war and violence to only one aspect, meaning that 
women’s plural experiences are largely missing from the legal history that is 
being written (Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos 2012: 2).  

2.1.2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
Accountability mechanisms are complemented by tools for acknowledgement. 
They aim to provide a space for victims, clarify the events during conflict and 
detail the pattern of human rights abuses. In the long run it aims for 
reconciliation by providing space for plural accounts of the past, and laying to 
rest contentions over past events. While acknowledgement measures tend to 
stress the individual victim’s experiences, its peacebuilding function is primarily 
concerned with the collective dimension. Central for this endeavor is the 
construction of a shared narrative of the past – as such acknowledgement can 
be defined as “what happens to knowledge when it becomes officially 
sanctioned or enters into the public discourse” (Cohen 2001: 224).  
 
The most popular tool is the fairly recent phenomenon of truth commissions. 
Close readings of truth commissions have revealed that women’s experiences 
and agency are excluded or marginalized. A highly gendered script has emerged 
from platforms such as truth commissions as the “asked-for” stories have to a 
large degree centered on men’s narratives and muted women’s experiences (e.g. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 The Rome Statute of the ICC explicitly defines sexual and gender-based violence as crimes 
against humanity (article7g) beyond the act of rape; war crimes (article 8.2xxii) and to a certain 
extent as genocide (article 6d). 
 



 8 

Ross 2002; Coulter 2008; McDowell 2008: 337). Such gendered silences distort 
the historical record and entrench impunity (Ni Aoláin et al 2011: 184f). 
 
Beyond the institutionalized acknowledgement processes of truth 
commissions, acknowledgement is sought through commemoration practices 
including museums and memorials remembrance days as well as public, 
discursive practices such as public apologies by leaders. Museums and 
memorials are becoming increasingly important ingredients in the transitional 
justice package and attract outside donors and policymakers (Hamber et al 
2010) but the emergent focus on commemoration as part of transitional justice 
has so far hardly generated any studies of its gendered implications (McDowell 
2008 is an exception). The materiality of museums and monuments is 
sometimes read as solid statements about the violent past, however it is 
increasingly recognized that they are highly charged sites where cultural values 
are (re)inscribed. Often centered on idealized masculinity, they enroll images of 
women in the service of a patriarchal, (ethno)nationalist post-conflict order. 
The image of “woman-as-victim” functions as a vessel of a nation’s pride as 
well as hurt  (McDowell 2008: 337; Yuval-Davis 2008). In this process the 
multiple roles that women may perform in wartime are erased – as fighters, as 
peacemakers and as providers of security, food and shelter (Meintjes et al 
2001). 

2.1.3. REPARATIONS 
The right of individuals to reparation for the violations of human rights in 
violent conflicts has been increasingly recognized in international law and it is 
also a growing theme of research (Rubio-Marín 2006; de Greiff 2006). Rubio-
Marín and de Greiff (2007: 321) find that “reparations are best conceptualized 
as rights-based political projects aimed at giving victims due recognition and at 
enhancing civic trust both among citizens and between citizens and state 
institutions”. Reparations are thus rights-based claims and they may be the 
most “tangible manifestations of the efforts of the state to remedy the harms 
victims have suffered” (de Greiff ed 2006: 1-2). The connection between 
reparation, reconciliation, acknowledgement and healing is complex but 
undeniable and thus reparation delayed is healing retarded (Orr 2000).  
 
The basic distinction in reparations programs is between material and symbolic 
benefits of either individual or a collective nature. Material reparations take 
different forms and shapes including for example individual financial 
compensation, restitution of material goods and access to services such as 



 9 

education, health-care and other measures necessary for the rehabilitation of 
the victims. Symbolic reparations may include official apologies, change in 
names of public spaces, establishment of dates and places for commemoration. 
Reparations programs differ in scope (that is the total beneficiaries it covers), 
completeness (the categories the programs are able to cover), 
comprehensiveness (crimes and harms that lead to reparations), complexity 
(the diversity of benefits), internal and external integrity or coherence finality 
and munificence (de Greiff 2006) as well as transformative potential and 
openness (Rubio-Marín 2009: 12). Increasingly, reparations are understood to 
be not only a juridical question but also a political one. Reparations is a means 
to provide individual remedy to the victims of the rights infringed, but it is also 
recognizing victims as citizens and equal rights bears, as well as an act of 
assertion of these rights themselves, and an exercise of constructing and 
validating the legitimacy of the political order that respect and uphold such 
rights.  
 
Reparations have of late received a lot of attention as a tool to re-adjust socio-
economic consequences of war and thereby broaden the scope of transitional 
justice to also encompass long-term development (Couillard 2007; Rubio-
Marín and De Greiff 2007; Bernstein and Seibel 2011). It requires attention to 
the social and economic dimension of violence, including the feminization of 
poverty that war often brings, and the potential of transitional justice to 
address it (Valji 2010). Reparations thus hold the promise to transform gender 
relations in society at large (O’Rourke 2008; Grina 2011). Yet, reparations 
programs have not been designed with an explicit gender dimension. Feminists 
continue to point out that war to peace transitions often fail to do justice to 
the victims of sexual based violence. The gendered nature of sexual violence 
and its continued social, psychological, economic impacts reinforce inequality 
beyond the peacebuilding processes. Thus programs for reparations for victims 
of sexual violence in conflict could figure as a special category in state 
reparations programs. However, gender bias construct normative and practical 
barriers prevent women to access the benefits of such reparations programs. 
Reparations programs, like many other transitional justice mechanisms for 
redress and recovery continue to be largely gender-blind. Thus, there are few 
reasons according to Rubio-Marín to believe that such programs will expedite 
and assist the achievements of the principal goals of reparation, including 
recognition, civic trust, and social solidarity between men and women, which is 



 10 

intimately linked with building a just and peaceful foundation for a transitional 
society emerging from violent conflict (Rubio-Marín 2009).2 

2.2. GENDERING AGENCY  

Transformation calls for a deeper understanding of agency and the role that 
critical agentive subjects play for change. Agency as a concept is often referred 
to in critical peacebuilding literature, yet seldom theorized. In its most basic 
meaning, agency has to do with the human capacity to act; a capacity that is 
not exercised in a vacuum but in a social world in which structure shapes the 
opportunities and resources available in a constant interplay of practices and 
discourses (Giddens 1984, see also Cleaver 2007). The relationship between 
structures and agents is highly gendered, as our identities are performed and 
narrated through certain norms and practices that uphold gendered hierarchies, 
creating a “matrix of intelligibility” that circumscribes and prescribes what is a 
“liveable life” (Butler 1999: 24). The mapping of the peace and justice gaps 
above indicates how gendered practices enable or restrain what type of agency 
individuals can exercise; to what extent differently placed agents are able to 
exert influence and whether they partake in the endorsement and acceptance 
of unequal relations and structures; as well as how agentive subject’s narratives 
of intentions and desires are read and interpreted. By gendering agency we get 
access to an understanding of these dispositions. 

2.2.1. CRITICAL AGENCY – REACTIVE AND ACTIVE 
The exercise of agency involves mutuality and interdependence as well as 
relations of domination and subordination. The two are mutually implicated 
(Rao 2003; Shepherd 2012: 6). Within these relations multiple degrees of more 
or less reflexive agency is exercised. On one end of the spectrum, self-
disciplining agents accept and even endorse relations of inequality as they 
enroll in projects of others and internalize hegemonic norms (Foucault 2000). 
At the other end of the spectrum, agents exercise their critical agency to 
challenge power relations, question existing norms and practices, challenge 
inequitable distribution of resources and claim and extend their rights. 
 
In feminist research women’s agency has often been equated with intentional 
resistance (Ahearn 2001: 115) and the search for the critical agent within 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2 One example is the reparations program recommended in the final report of the Truth, 
Reception and Reconciliation Commission in Timor Leste (CAVR) lists gender equity as one 
of five guiding principles that guides the reparations program (Rubio-Marín and de Greiff 
2007) 



 11 

critical peacebuilding research has mostly taken an interest in intentional acts 
of resistance. These contributions have been valuable in making visible agents 
“in the margins” (e.g. Richmond 2010).  However, a sole focus on resistance 
limits our understanding of agentive critical subjects, as they move within an 
intricate web of embedded power relations. Their agency can “include 
everything from outright rebellions at one end, to ... a kind of complex and 
ambivalent acceptance of dominant categories and practices (Ortner 2006: 
144). Hence there is a danger in defining agency only as a form of intentional 
resistance. We stress that agency should not only be understood as overt 
political action, but must also conceptually encompass what we do as we go 
about our daily lives making meaning, pursuing desires and intentions and our 
own “projects that infuse life with meaning and purpose” (ibid, 145).  
 
From this follows that, while agency may be constrained and marginalized, 
there is no such thing as “absent agency.” It has bearings on how gendered 
agentive subjects not only have the capacity to react to structures of 
domination, but also to act and enroll in projects of their own, and how they 
both react and act in relation to socioculturally mediated structures. Such a 
reading of women’s agency resists the temptation of reducing agency to 
(western) ideas of the autonomous subject, thereby “(i)nscrib(ing) the desire 
for liberal agency into women of the ‘South,’” which may lead to the ignoring 
of women whose agency may be exercised in other spaces and in relation to a 
different set of dispositions (Auchter 128: 2012: 128).  
 
We hence use the term critical agency to encompass both active and reactive 
agency. It acknowledges agency’s reflexive and creative character, yet we 
neither understand agency as necessarily an individualistic project, nor solely as 
a project of resistance. 

2.2.2. SITUATING AGENCY 
The agentive subject is always situated. We therefore need to think more 
closely about the spaces in which women’s agency is exercised. Our interest in 
this paper lies in transitional justice “from below.” It means searching for 
women’s agency beyond organized (political) space, and listen to the “whispers 
in the margin” that may have transformative effects. 
 
We do know that in post-conflict settings women agents are often active in 
informal spaces such as civil society, and less often take part in formal spaces 
for decision-making. The spaces where women perform agency are often 



 12 

ignored, belittled or marginalized, hence women face double exclusions based 
on both a gendered bias as well as a bias against civil society (e.g. Meintjes et al 
2001; Wanis-St. John and Kew 2008: 13). Critical questions must also be asked 
around how agency is restrained or enabled within these spaces, as informal as 
well as formal spaces are imbued with power relations and hierarchies that may 
mute people (Gaventa 2006; see also Mannergren Selimovic et al 2012).  
 
An effect of this blindness is the shutting out of the “domestic sphere” as 
irrelevant for peacebuilding research. However the private-public divides are 
“ideological constructs” that delineate spaces and persons as well as activities 
in ways that shift over time. Further, an individual may be quite powerful in 
one realm and less powerful in another (Mosedale 2005: 251). We need to 
explore how restraints on women’s agency in the domestic sphere are upheld 
through norms of patriarchy and/or continuities of violence, and how these 
constraints travel to the public domain affecting the role women may play 
there. An analysis of gendered agency in peacebuilding and transitional justice 
must therefore transcend divides such as domestic/public and 
informal/formal, thereby making visible the micropolitics that many women 
engage in for addressing and coping with the deep contestations in “the 
ordinary” that shattering violence has inscribed (Das 2007). Such a reading 
opens up for an interest in the everyday ”doing” that resonates with the 
understanding of agency as both active and reactive.  

2.2.3. AGENCY IN TIME 
Temporality is an important aspect for understanding how women’s agency is 
played out over longer time, how gains may go backwards, how progress may 
be reversed and how windows of opportunity may open for women’s agency at 
unexpected moments. The space for women’s agency often expands during 
times of upheaval such as conflicts when embedded power structures shift and 
adapt to new demands (Yuval-Davis 2008: 171). As the case of BiH aptly 
illustrates, the closing of such windows may be abrupt during the aftermath. 
Patriarchal, nationalist and religious values and norms have established a far 
from gender-just peace with shrinking political space for women (Björkdahl 
2012; Cockburn 2013: 127).  
 
An analysis of agency in relation to gendered gaps of peace and justice must 
relate to the temporal aspect, as mechanisms of transitional justice are 
intimately linked to notions of development and the temporal move from war 
to peace through the implementation of certain measures for accountability, 



 13 

acknowledgement and reparations. A gender analysis of how women’s agency 
may actually shrink as peace proceeds opens our understanding for the fragile 
assumptions such projects rest upon, and how a lack of gender awareness may 
in effect create space for conservative backlashes, stripping women of agency 
and closing off spaces for informal agency.  
 
Fundamentally, without an understanding of the temporality of agency it is 
hard to understand what restrains and enables transformation. Bringing in time 
as part of conceptualizing gendered agency makes it possible to approach the 
underlying objective of this paper, which is to further critical thinking on 
transformations towards gender-just peace.  
 
We have here raised, and inevitably left unanswered, a number of questions 
about agency. When we now move to the empirical part of the paper, which 
analyses gendered peace and justice gaps in BiH, we will attempt to approach 
at least some of these queries. 

3. GENDERED PEACE AND JUSTICE GAPS IN BIH 
During the 1992 – 1995 war BiH witnessed large scale violence and war 
crimes, ethnic cleansing and displacement, mass rapes, sexual torture, sexual 
slavery and other forms of sexual violence directed against women, men and 
children which resulted in an estimated 100.000 deaths, 2,2 millions refugees 
and internally displaced persons and 20,000 victims of rape and other forms of 
sexual violence. War survivors want to know the truth about the conflict, need 
to see that their experience of the war is acknowledged, and that the harms 
suffered is recognized. They need to see that justice is being done in order to 
build their lives in peace. 

The BiH transitional justice process is slow and arduous, and constantly 
hampered by the ethno-nationalist centrifugal powers with little agreement on 
the past, present or future. The transitional justice is now moving from mostly 
being an external affair with the International Criminal Tribunal for Former 
Yugoslavia (ICTY) as its central mechanism to an internal domesticized 
process as The War Crimes Chamber of Bosnia’s State Court is picking up 
speed and war crimes are also being processed at entity levels. The new 
National Strategy for War Crimes Processing aims to process all war crimes 
until 2023. It is complemented by the Transitional Justice Strategy, which is in 



 14 

its draft stage and focuses on truth seeking, reparations and reform of 
institutions3 (Impunity Watch 2012: 8).  
 
Despite the fact that BiH has an institutional structure for gender 
mainstreaming most of the transitional justice programs are not gender-
sensitive. The Gender Equality Agency and two entity-gender-centers have the 
potential to advance gender awareness and push towards a transformation of 
post-conflict BiH in a direction of increased gender equality. BiH was the first 
country in the region to adopt a National Action Plan for the Implementation 
of UNSCR 1325. In addition, BiH has adopted a Gender Action Plan (GAP) 
2006-2010 and a five year financial mechanisms for its’ implementation 
(FIGAP) (Impunity Watch 2012: 63). These programs aim to increase gender 
mainstreaming both in public and private spheres. Women have a strong 
presence in the Expert Working Group that drafted the Transitional Justice 
Strategy for BiH. Yet practical progress on these issues is still limited. Lack of 
political will is the common explanation for why transitional justice processes 
have not been made gender-sensitive. 
 
Thus, the legal framework of Bosnia and Herzegovina has not addressed the 
issue of the gendered gaps concerning accountability, acknowledgement and 
reparation in an adequate manner. Public awareness and interest, as well as 
overall social status of the survivors of crimes related to sexual violence in 
conflict, is at a low level. The phenomenon of conflict related sexual violence 
is still perceived as a private matter, even though it is formally recognized as a 
public problem and a human rights issue. Despite the progress BiH has made 
in terms of advancing human rights and gender equality, the women survivors 
of conflict related sexual violence are still not sufficiently protected, and their 
rights guaranteed by the BiH laws are not fully respected. The high level of 
violence registered in the present day Bosnia and Herzegovina, which can to a 
certain extent be traced to the experience of violence during the conflict or its 
legacies, seem to manifest itself in increased and more severe cases of domestic 
violence enhancing women’s sense of vulnerability and lack of rights (UN, 
2012: 18). 
 
A number of paradoxes come to the fore illustrating women’s sense of 
injustice. First, the number of war crime cases that involve sexual violence that 
have been prosecuted are extremely low, while at the same time the fight of 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3 There is also a state-level law on Missing Persons. Also in its draft stages is a programme of 
assistance for women victims of war rape, sexual violence and torture 2013-1016. 



 15 

impunity remains a top priority. Second, the victims of conflict related sexual 
violence remain socially and economically marginalized, and there is no 
comprehensive reparations program to redress the human rights violations. 
Third, complicated legal framework, institutional complexity and the absence 
of rights for victims of wartime rape imped access to care, while at the same 
time there is a great awareness that unhealed war traumas lead to deterioration 
of survivors wellbeing and health. Fourth, state service for victims of conflict 
related sexual violence has at large been absent and in the mean time women 
organizations have stepped in to assist the victims. Thus the gendered 
accountability gap, acknowledgement gap and reparations gap remain to a large 
extent, as do the patriarchal, religious and nationalist discourses that imped 
efforts to address these gaps. 

3.1.THE ACCOUNTABILITY GAP 

3.1.1. GENDERED POLITICS OF ACCOUNTABILITY IN BIH 
The accountability process in BiH has to a large degree been defined by the 
ICTY, which began its proceedings in 1992 when war was still ongoing. The 
convictions for rape as a crime against humanity in the ICTY have been 
seminal for the development of international law, and some key individuals 
have been convicted for their crimes (ICTY 2001; 2007), Nevertheless, the 
general recognition of these crimes in BiH has overall been very low, partly 
because the ICTY’s verdicts have been used by ethnonationalist entrepreneurs 
to entice divisionism and the tribunal’s work is therefore read as inherently 
biased (Delpla 2007; Mannergren Selimovic 2010).  
 
As the ICTY now moves to a close, the domestic legal system in BiH is taking 
over responsibility for the postwar accountability process through The War 
Crimes Chamber of Bosnia’s State Court, as well as courts at the subnational 
entity levels. A gendered analysis of its work so far raises serious concerns. The 
domestic system has generated only a couple of convictions and a handful of 
ongoing trials and the legal framework is inconsistent with international 
standards and jurisprudence of international courts.4 One such consistency 
concerns the whether the use or threat of force has to be present in order to 
prove that the act was not consensual.5 Contrary to international jurisdiction, 
this is the case in Bosnian law (United Nations, 2012).  The need to prove the 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4 The complexity of the justice system in BiH means that two criminal codes are in use with 
sometimes contradictory approaches (Impunity Watch 2012: 41).  
5 Articles 172 and 173 in the Criminal Code of BiH. 



 16 

use or threat of force lead to interrogations into the sexual conduct of the 
witnesses before and after the crime. As reported by the legal monitoring 
organization TRIAL, many women testified about “the tendency to interrogate 
the conduct of the victim in ways that are humiliating and legally irrelevant” 
(TRIAL 2012: 461). Henry’s words that we repeatedly … “see the replication 
of denial, minimization, and disbelief where victims of wartime rape are 
concerned” without doubt ring true in the Bosnian context (Henry 2010: 
1101). It is not rash to say that the international gains concerning the 
criminalization of conflict-related sexual violence are not gained permanently, 
but rather under constant negotiations, an important observation that should 
feed into analyses of relationships between the ICC and national jurisdictions.  
 
Another aspect of the gendered accountability gap concerns the structural 
conditions for women’s participation in these trials. Prevailing insecurities 
partly due to the impunity of war crimes means that women take certain risks. 
Several witnesses have been threatened and programs for witness protection 
are either non-existent or very marginal. Witnesses have had to share waiting 
rooms at the courts with the accused and in some cases, their identities have 
been leaked despite guarantees of anonymity (TRIAL 2012). Another 
marginalizing factor is the vulnerable economic situation that many Bosnian 
women face. As witnesses are not reimbursed for their travels to court, and as 
the court system often fail to provide information about the right to claim for 
allowances, the economic burden may be yet another discouraging factor for 
women to take part in criminal proceedings (Impunity Watch 2012). 
 
These types of justice processes can provide women not just with relief but 
also wounds. By coming forward to testify Bosnian girls and women bring 
social shame on themselves and their family. Whatever good that may come 
out of the ordeal is offset by the risks of being met with incredulity, being 
blamed for the rape or having their experiences trivialized (Hunt 2004: 177-
179). The long-term consequences of being ostracized in their communities 
combined with on-going threats and feelings of insecurity may prove too 
overwhelming for many women (Focus Group Sarajevo November 2011). 

3.1.2. RECOGNIZING FEMALE WITNESSES AS AGENTIVE SUBJECTS 
Despite these difficulties, Bosnian women and girls have taken on the 
challenge and exercised effective and multifaceted agency in criminal 
proceedings concerning BiH with tangible results. Their testimonies at the 
ICTY, coupled with women’s groups’ international advocacy campaigns and 



 17 

the work of key individuals in the courts, have had lasting impact on a global 
scale. This agency continues today, but now in places far away from 
international spotlights as women victims sit in Bosnian courtrooms to face 
accused perpetrators. They are agents “from below” that step into the formal 
spaces of courts to exercise their agency, often in the face of economic and 
physical insecurity as well as cultural restraints. They often come to these trials 
on their own in defiance of the wishes of their families; many travel in secret, a 
few with support from women’s groups, others utterly alone (Focus group 
Sarajevo November 2011).  
 
Given the high social prize that those women who do testify pay, one must ask 
what entices them to actually take part in these processes. Their choices to 
participate in accountability mechanisms and demand justice for crimes 
committed against them in the face of certain social repercussions, is an 
example of critical agency that we contend has often been misrepresented and 
misunderstood, as a consequence of narrow configurations of what women’s 
agency entails, coupled with a general disregard for the victim within criminal 
proceedings (Stover 2004).  
 
The perpetuation of the stereotype of “woman-as-victim” has been an 
unfortunate effect of transitional justice’s preoccupation with women (solely) 
as victims of sexual violence (Campbell 2007). An added stereotype is the 
prevalent idea that women testify in criminal courts with the main focus to 
help their own very personal “healing” (Mertus 2000; 2004). While many 
victims no doubt seek personal closure by testifying in courts, such a frame is 
too narrow to encompass the multiple reasons for women to testify. We here 
want to highlight the court as a site for victims to exercise critical and creative 
agentive subjects, and address not only the perpetrators but also take on the 
challenge of the deep-seated patriarchal norms that is an on-going feature of 
their lived experiences of the post-conflict everyday.  
 
In a rare report based on interviews with female witnesses in BiH, it is 
concluded that the respondents were not primarily focused on their own 
personal healing. The strongest reasons for giving testimony among them was 
“to make the perpetrator accountable for what he did and to see him punished, 
to prevent other women and girls from being raped, and to tell ‘what really 
happened’ (Medica Mondiale 2009: 52). They also wanted to act against 
impunity and increase security: “I decided to testify to protect our children… 
We had to testify in order to remove war criminals from the streets.” (ibid, 54). 



 18 

Finally they wanted to contribute to far-reaching transformations of underlying 
societal values: “These person cannot be idols and role models to future 
generations. The only way to prevent this is to reveal the truth about them” 
(ibid, 55). 
 
Through the construction of woman-as-victim, women’s critical agency in 
these proceedings has been narrowly interpreted in a way that may obscure and 
render her political work invisible. The constraints on women’s agency within 
criminal accountability mechanisms are numerous. In order to narrow the 
accountability gap these restraints need to be lifted. The fact that legal gains 
made in the international system have not fully travelled into the domestic 
system in BiH, is a further imperative to monitor how possibilities for agency 
may close in time as well as in space.  

3.2. THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT GAP 

3.2.1. GENDERED POLITICS OF ACKNOWLEDGEMENT IN BIH 
Post-conflict acknowledgement processes are driven by the desire for an 
inclusive narrative of the past. While the overarching goal may be to contribute 
to reconciliation, the struggle around what is to be remembered and what is to 
be forgotten is a highly contentious and gendered process whereby power 
relations are produced and maintained. In deeply fractured post-war BiH, 
claims for acknowledgement are interpreted as part of ethno-nationalist 
reconfigurations of the political. As a consequence, several attempts to 
organize a national truth commission have failed (Kritz 2002: 60f; Freeman 
2004: 7f), political elites routinely protest any verdict by the ICTY that 
infringes on their own version of the truth (e.g. Mannergren Selimovic 2010, 
2011) and commemorations are highly politicized as the different “sides” of 
the conflict celebrate their own “war heroes.” Suggestions by women peace 
organisations to create a “Victim’s Day”  - a day when survivors would join 
across ethnic divides and together mourn innocent victims from all sides - have 
been vehemently turned down by political entrepreneurs on all sides (Focus 
Group, Sarajevo November 2011). Reconciliation projects are on-going as 
local projects but without any bearings on national and entity levels.  
 
As the struggle continues over who was a victim and who was a perpetrator, 
the intertwined representations of gender and nation have distorted and 
rendered women and women’s experiences and agency invisible (Zarkov 2007). 
While the particular harms suffered by women in the Bosnian war – as rape 



 19 

victims – have been turned into an internationally emblematic image of that 
war, these experiences have been silenced in the national and local context, 
only invoked in the abstract as a symbol of the nation’s collective hurt and 
suffering.  

3.2.2. AGENCY FROM BELOW - RESISTING SILENCE 
However, despite these restraints, women have attempted to break these 
silences. A specific event in the Bosnian context serves to illustrate the writing 
out of women’s experiences, and how women “from below” exercised critical 
agency by attempting to challenge these blanks and demand acknowledgement 
of women’s experiences. In 2004 a group of women travelled together to the 
small town of Foca in Republika Srpska, during wartime the site of several rape 
camps. The crimes committed there have in detail been documented through 
the ICTY proceedings and the verdicts from these trials were seminal in stating 
that conflict releated sexual violence may constitute a crime against humanity 
(ICTY 2001; 2007). Nevertheless, the rape camps and the crimes that were 
committed there are erased from the public discourse as well as from the 
physical space. The white “Partizan” building where women and girls were 
imprisoned is situated in the town centre. An anonymous building used for 
sports and cultural activities, nothing marks it as a site where crimes against 
humanity have been committed. Close-by, an impressive monument 
commemorates the fallen Bosnian Serb soldiers from the area6. 
  
Some of the women who embarked on the bus journey to the town in 2004 
had been held prisoners there and they had returned with the aim of putting up 
a commemoration plaque on the Partizan building. When the group of about 
ten women arrived to the site, they were turned away by police on the official 
grounds that they did not have a permit. Inhabitants congregated around them, 
throwing stones and shouting abuse (BBC News, 2004). Recalling the event 
some years later, one of the women who had been part of the protest 
commented: “They did not want us there… They were afraid, they just wanted 
us to disappear, to shut up…. But we only wanted to acknowledge the victims. 
We did not take anything from them. “ (Interview Sarajevo 2008). 
 
The vehement reaction to this demand for inclusion in the official discourse 
has many layers. The women challenged the highly ethno-nationalist tale of 
victimhood among Bosnian Serbs. At the same time as they disrupted the 
image of the heroic soldier (commemorated only a few metres away), they 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6 Mannergren Selimovic conducted fieldwork in Foca during 2008-2009. 



 20 

unsettled stereotypes of the silent and passive female victim. The demand for 
physical recognition was an act that not only concerned the particular victims 
in the Foca camp, but also insisted on an overarching story of the war, its 
perpetrators and victims, of far greater complexity than the highly polarized 
narratives spun around the twin structures of nationalism and patriarchy. This 
was not only unsettling for the “other side” whom they openly challenged 
through their action - it may be noted that neither did they get any public 
support for their actions from their “own side” (Interview Sarajevo 2008). 

3.2.3. BREAKING THE SILENCE IN UNEXPECTED SITES 
The critical agency exercised by the former victims in Foca did not yield any 
direct results. Public silence still engulfs the specific rape camps in Foca. 
Nevertheless, the process of opening up “the story of war rape” at a more 
general level is slowly developing – but in sites that we normally do not think 
of as part of transitional justice. In BiH it has been foremost a process driven 
by actors within popular culture and a critical debate around the invisibility of 
the conflict-related violence has been expressed in fictionalized form.  
 
The Bosnian film Grbavica (English title Esma’s Secret - Grbavica) released in 
2006 and directed by Jasmila Zbanic is about a rape victim who deals with 
post-war life in Sarajevo as a resourceful but struggling single mother. The role 
turns the nameless victim into a subject dealing with the on-going 
consequences of the crime and as the film also criticized and complicated the 
post-conflict state’s celebration of its heroes, it led to some public debate 
(Dogwoof Pictures, 2006). The recent international film production In the Land 
of Blood and Honey (directed by Angelina Jolie), which frames the topic of the 
rape camps with a love story across ethnic borders, sparked a lot of 
controversy, which in itself opened up a debate on the voice of rape victims, 
raising contentious questions around who could speak for them and who had 
the right to control their story (The Guardian, 2011).  
 
This observation encourages further thinking of cultural engagements as a 
potentially fruitful and little explored aspect of transitional justice in a broad 
sense. Both these fictional accounts have complicated and challenged the 
narrow role for women in the post-conflict context. Clearly, we need to look 
beyond “acceptable or ‘appropriate’ victimhood for women” (Ni Aoláin et al 
2011: 180) to identify expressions of critical agency that refute essentialist 
configurations of gender and nation. A deepened understanding of the 



 21 

gendered dimension of ethno-nationalism is hence needed in order to grasp 
how acknowledgement processes can come to fully encompass women.  

3.3. THE REPARATION GAP  

The gendered reparation gap that we notice in transitional justice programs 
conceived as redress for gross human rights abuse are caused by a gender bias 
inherent in many rights system (including human rights law). This gender gap 
is magnified by the absence of women in the design and implementation of 
reparations program, and the lack of engendered reparations are a cause of 
major concern as such reparations programs will inevitably reproduce gender 
biases, and compound gender hierarchies of post-conflict societies.  
 
The right of individuals to reparations for gross human rights violations in 
violent conflicts is part of the shift in transitional justice from a focus on 
perpetrators to the needs of victims. Reparation also holds the promise of 
transformation of pre-existing order if individual rights are linked to a broader 
political project, such as engendering peace and justice of the post-conflict 
order. So far the engendering of transitional justice has for the most part had 
little impact on the design and implementation of reparation programs in BiH. 
 
Given that women represent a large proportion of the victims of contemporary 
conflicts such as the one in BiH, and women experience conflicts in different 
ways, reparations programs need to be designed to redress women more fairly 
and efficiently while also seeking to subvert gender hierarchies that often 
antecede the conflict. When asked what their preferred type of compensation 
is victims of conflict-related sexual violence in BiH tend to answer that they 
prefer services that meet their and their families’ basic needs over the 
restitution of lost property or monetary compensation. 

3.3.1. REPARATION PROGRAMS IN BIH 
The question of reparations for victims was neglected by the ICTY 
(Nollkaemper 2009: 204) and BiH does not have a comprehensive reparations 
program at the state-level to redress human rights that have been violated 
(Martin-Ortega 2012). As far as reparations-related legislation is concerned, the 
Law on Missing Persons, which regulates the right of civilian victims of war to 
compensation, is the only such law at the state-level. Entity level legislation7 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7 In the Federation of BiH legislation regulates including Law on Principles of Social 
Protection, Protection of all Civilian Victims of War and Protection of Families with Children, 



 22 

regulates war related benefits for veterans and civilian victims such as 
payments and disability pensions paid on basis of social and economic status 
(Impunity Watch 2012: 74).8  
 
The draft of the Transitional Justice Strategy for BiH holds, in addition to 
gender provisions, two distinct approaches to reparations: A victims’ centered 
approach through activities that consider recognition of victims’ suffering, 
regaining of their dignity and re-socialisation through redress for past injustice; 
and a development approach for building capacity to provide services to 
victims, compensations and rehabilitation (psychosocial support, employment 
and organizing socio-cultural and sport activities).The drafting process has 
taken in the efforts of the CSOs in this field and suggests measures for 
institutionalization of their programs of reparations. Still, a comprehensive 
reparation program where all victims of sexual violence in conflict are eligible 
based on their rights being violated is lacking. In fact the victims of sexual 
violence in conflict are not recognized as such by any existing law. Progress is 
visible though. As the first post-conflict society BiH, however, provides rape 
victims with a monthly pension (Calypkan 2007: 54). In patriarchal societies 
this is a method preferred to a lump sum cash benefit as it is seen to enhance 
women’s agency, and the money is more likely to be spent by the victim than 
by her relatives (Dugan and Jacobson 2009). 
 
In many ways the distinction between compensation payments, veteran 
benefits and welfare payments are blurred. Most women are not aware of the 
difference between compensation for war crimes and welfare assistance, as the 
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Law on the Rights of War Veterans and Their Family members. In Republika Srpska 
legislation include the Law on Protection of Civilian War Victims of Republika Srpska and the 
Law on the Rights of Veterans, Disabled War Veterans and Families of Soldiers fallen in the 
defensive and Fatherland War of Republika Srpska (Impunity Watch 2012: 49-50). The United 
Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) is currently working together with the BiH Ministry for 
Human Rights and Refugees on drafting a Program of Assistance to Women Victims of War 
Rape and Other forms of War Sexual Violence. The ambition is to develop a decentralized 
scheme forging cooperation between victims associations, centers for social welfare and mental 
health and cantonal/district/municipal courts and authorities in order to provide efficient and 
timely service and assistance to the victims (Conference report 2012; Impunity Watch 2012: 
50). 
8 The government system for compensations to war victims in BiH is complex and the 
recipients are categorized into four categories: 1) disabled war veterans, (military payment) 2) 
payments to families of fallen or missing soldiers, (military payment) 3) payments to civilian 
victims, 4) payments to families whose members where killed or disappeared during the 
conflict. Out of 11.000 recipients of civilian payments only 621 were victims of sexual violence 
in Federation of BiH. In RS 3.843 persons were recipients of civilian payments (probably 
including victims of sexual violence in conflict but no specific category for this) compares with 
69.451 persons receiving military payments. 



 23 

link between war and poverty seems self-evident to most women. Women are 
thus constructed as poor and vulnerable victims that need assistance. Not as 
recipients of reparations to right a wrong. This of course means a devaluation 
of women’s wartime experience and it diminishing their ability to exercise 
agency to shape their own post-war existence. 
 
Reparation programs and policies in BiH are designed in the political sphere, a 
space few women have access to. Women are frequently more active in 
informal spaces but such spaces where women exercise their agency are often 
ignored in the processes of shaping reparations programs. However, by 
opening up a space for participation women can contribute to the design and 
implementation of reparations programs in order to make them better 
addressing women’s needs and concerns i.e. making reparations gender-
sensitive. Such a space may offer women a reparative sense of recognition both 
as victims and as valuable agents of political and social transformation (Rubio-
Marín and De Greiff 2007: 324). So far, there is room for improvement at all 
levels of the complex governance system in BiH for such ‘space-making’ 
efforts. 

3.3.2. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF REPARATIONS 
In BiH it is increasingly recognized that the right of reparations in the 
aftermath of gross human rights violations cannot merely be understood in 
juridical terms as it may have implication for gender-relations in post-Dayton 
Bosnia. “When reparations are thought of as part of a political project of 
(re)creating a more legitimate, democratic and inclusive political order, rather 
than of reverting to a  broken past, they open a window of opportunity– even 
if small– for women to endorse forms of reparations that depart from settled 
practices and norms that are so frequently part of pre-existing hierarchies” 
Rubio-Marín and de Greiff (2007: 325) suggest.  
 
Contrary to expectations, the issue of reparations has played a negative role in 
the reconciliation process in BiH. Particularly in terms of defining victims and 
beneficiaries of reparations, which is a major challenge in post-conflict 
societies where resources are scarce. First, determining the boundaries between 
victims and perpetrators is deeply contested and thereby identifying eligible 
claimants is highly political as the recognition of victimhood “is viewed as a 
micro negotiation about the nature and causality of the conflict” (Aolíne et al 
2011). In BiH, several associations for camp inmates, relatives of missing 
persons and women subjected to sexual violence have thus been divided along 



 24 

ethnic lines making it difficult to come together to advocate for state-level 
reparations programs. Second, reparations have divided victim and survivors 
within the ethnic communities. Due to the particular design of the reparations 
programs victims of sexual violence in conflict have unintentionally been 
pitched against camp survivors constructing a difference between ‘majority’ 
and ‘minority’ victims because of program (Simpson et al 2012: 137).  
 
Reparations holds the potential to strengthen the social contract defined in the 
Dayton Peace Accords and support the transitions towards democracy by 
recognizing the victim citizens as “equal rights holders”. To some reparations 
can be seen as a means to utilize the (modest) transformative potential of 
remedy as it has “a capacity to subvert, instead of reinforce, pre-existing 
structural inequalities” (Rubio-Marín 2009: 17). This may be an important step 
in understanding the difference that gender could make when conceptualizing, 
designing and implementing reparations in BiH. The growing sense that sexual 
violence should be among the violations that deserve reparations is not all that 
is at stake and concerns with gender justice should be mainstreamed in the 
discussions about reparations. If the BiH reparation programs fail to recognize 
legal and other barriers to women, they reinforce rather than subvert 
inequalities.  
 
Rubio-Marín (2009: 66) identifies three criteria for engendering reparations: 1) 
avoid formal gender discrimination in the design and implementation of such 
programs, 2) looking for ways to ensure that patriarchal norms and sexist 
standards and systems of values are not leaked into reparations, 3) optimize the 
transformative potential of reparation programs so they advance towards a 
society free from gender subordination. Encouraging such transformation also 
suggests viewing reparations as a means to give agency to women rather than 
as confirming the status of women victimhood. So far, BiH has not been able 
to develop comprehensive gender-sensitive reparations programs as patriarchal 
structures are firmly in place. 
 
Women in BiH are quite active in movements for justice but they channel their 
engagement through human rights organizations and organizations of victims 
or families of victims and only more recently have they organized around 
gender-specific aspects of their victimization exercising agency to shape 
reparation programs. As a matter of fact, women have been particularly active 
in the filed of reparations. They drafted the Program for of Assistance to 
Women Victims of War Rape, Sexual Violence and Torture 2013-2016. 



 25 

Furthermore, the development of the Programme for Improvement of the 
Status of Women Victims of Wartime Rape, Sexual Violence and Other Forms 
of Torture in BiH was designed through an inclusive and transparent process 
with consultations with local community and participation of key actors.  

3.3.3. AGENCY AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF REPARATIONS  
Women in BiH are not simply defined as victims entitled (or not) to 
reparations. They are agents within civil society – stepping in to perform 
reparations when governments fail to do. This was noted by one of the 
participants in a focus group in Sarajevo stating: “We never speak out about 
policies that the state is not willing to take up responsibility for, that is, policies 
to empower them both economically and socially. If you ask the victims and 
survivors of violence, what they need is housing ... and a job so that they can 
put bread on the table. But we do not fight for their social and economic 
problems, we can simply fight for their temporary sanctuary. We are just in a 
vicious circle. We are forcing the state to prosecute the perpetrators. But we do 
not force the state to provide the victims with housing and so on. And (the 
state) did not in the first place provide the foundations for them to no longer 
being victims at all.” (Mannergren Selimovic et al 2012: 97). Thus by asserting 
their presence in performing reparation programs women enhance their agency 
as shapers of transitional justice practices rather than as passive victims of war.  
 
Medica Women’s Therapy Centre is an example of women performing 
reparations. Set up in 1993 to meet the needs of women raped in nationalist 
ethnic cleansing campaigns in Bosnia it was a women’s project based on 
international-local cooperation, although all staff were Bosnians themselves 
war survivors. Providing medical care, psychotherapy, trauma treatment, and 
various other approaches to healing while promoting gender awareness Medica 
was assisting also a small number of traumatized male victims (Cockburn 2013: 
28). Post-conflict the needs of the women clients increasingly came to include 
also domestic violence, ‘everyday rape’, escape from prostitution and 
trafficking. Medica is now part of an international movement ‘women against 
violence against women’. Today, Medica is recognized by the local 
government, depend on state funding and it has opportunities to take part in 
policy development. Over time it has developed a strategic partnership with 
state services while at the same time challenging politicians lobbying for 
women’s rights and provisions (Cockburn 2013: 32). Many women’s NGOs in 
BiH function as service providers stepping in where reparations are lacking, 
delayed or insufficient. 



 26 

 
Reparations, as we have seen, include a variety of measures that lend it self to 
an array of competing meanings. When examining reparations it becomes clear 
that it is not only about policies and programs but also about reparations 
practices and when it comes to practices, women are not only the beneficiaries, 
but equally important the performers of reparations. Beyond the questions of 
what types of reparations and for whom lurks the more specific question of 
how to imagine forms of redress that avoid reproducing gender hierarchies, 
meet the needs of women and that contribute to transform societies emerging 
from violent conflict towards a more equal, just and peaceful society. Taking 
women performing reparations in post-conflict societies where the state fails to 
shoulder its responsibility is one avenue to explore for designing gender 
sensitive reparations programs that better address the concerns of women. 

4. CONCLUSION – TOWARDS A GENDER-JUST PEACE  
The field of transitional justice has recently been enriched by a gender analysis, 
which in turn has contributed to problematizing the role of women in 
processes of doing justice and building peace. This paper adds to the project of 
‘gendering’ transitional justice as it highlights women’s participation, presence 
and agency in these processes. We have paid particular attention to the set of 
gendered dispositions that exist within the transitional justice framework that 
may enable or constrain women agency. Though our analysis has been biased 
towards three particular areas of engagement of transitional justice; 
accountability, acknowledgement and reparations we have been able to think 
critically about the gendered hierarchies inherent in transitional justice 
processes more broadly and the analysis has revealed the creative and critical 
agency of women doing justice. From this we are able to distil a number of 
broad yet preliminary concluding thoughts. First, we conclude that women’s 
participation in transitional justice and peacebuilding processes is complex, 
multilayered and constrained yet creative, and we have been able to capture the 
ways in which women exercise agency in ‘the margins’, in ‘alternative’ or 
‘hidden’ spaces as well as in the public, political space but there perhaps to a 
lesser degree. Second, to successfully address gendered transitional justice gaps, 
spaces for women to exercise agency must be established and women agency 
should not be neglected or diminished nor contained in the private sphere. 
Third, we also agree that transitional justice carries the potential to add to 
transformative peacebuilding and thus contribute to more gender equality in 
the post-conflict society, yet this potential is often untapped.  



 27 

4.1. AGENCY AND THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF ACCOUNTABILITY, 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND REPARATIONS 

Women engage with transitional justice mechanisms as both objects and 
subjects. By gendering agency we have been able to better map agency and 
access spaces for agency ignored by mainstream transitional justice. The 
gendered interplay between women agency and post-conflict and transitional 
justice structures has been approached through the conceptualization of 
agency in relation to the subject, to space and to time. The concept of critical 
agency pinpoints the agentive subject and the active and reactive ways that 
women exercise agency, including but not confined to resistance.  It captures 
the broad political changes as well as the minute dealings in the “micropolitics” 
of gendered post-conflict life. Situating agency advances our understanding of the 
diverse and sometimes hidden spaces in which women’s agency is performed, 
it points to the need to identify critical agents beyond formal and informal 
structures, to search for the agents in the margins, and listen to the silent and 
silenced voices. Finally bringing in the temporality of agency makes visible the 
opening and closing of political possibilities, the friction over time between 
different actors when hegemonic relations are transformed. Thinking about 
agency in relation to time provides tools to understand the potential for 
transformations and shiftings of gendered hierarchies. This conceptualization 
of women agency and its interplay with transitional justice has provided us 
with an understanding of “transitional justice from below”, in which women 
participate in civil society organizations dealing with “women’s issues” such as 
rape, domestic violence, the disappearance of family members and beyond 
challenging and negotiating gendered patterns and practices of transitional 
justice tools. 

4.2. THE GENDERED POLITICS OF ACCOUNTABILITY, ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 
AND REPARATIONS 

By focusing on gendered transitional justice gaps we have been able to disclose 
transitional justice as a site for the long-term construction of the gendered 
post-conflict order. The gendered accountability, acknowledgement and 
reparations gaps that have been examined here seems to be a consequence of 
structural constraints for women to engage in shaping and implementing 
transitional justice. It is also suggested that these gaps have a strong impact on 
women’s sense of injustice and failure to realize the peace dividend. The 
analysis of these gaps in post-conflict BiH suggests that they emerge from a 
paired marginalization: the marginalization of victims within transitional justice 
and the marginalization of women within it. In addition, it seems that women 



 28 

face double exclusions based on both gender bias in the transitional justice 
project as well as a bias against civil society, the space where women most 
frequently exercise their agency. Where as women have been known to be the 
pillars of civil society, demanding justice for their family members and put life 
together after the conflict, women’s groups have not been particularly engaged 
in shaping transitional justice mechanisms. Furthermore, the gendered gaps 
produce a sense of injustice. Impunity of war crimes involving sexual violence 
persist, women’s experiences risk being trivialized, witness protection is at best 
marginal, the social and economic costs of witnessing are not recognized. The 
harms suffered by women during the war and women’s experience of war are 
not acknowledged in the metanarrative of the war. Instead BiH women as rape 
victims have come to symbolize the victimization of the Bosnian nation and it 
has become the emblematic symbol of the BiH war, reproducing women as 
victims without agency. Interestingly, the challenge against such deeply 
engrained stereotypes have come from popular culture, usually not 
encompassed by the transitional justice debate. Filmmakers have used fiction 
to force the issue of conflict related sexual violence into public discourse, and 
in this process disrupted “appropriate” images of female victimhood. 
Reparations programs are not designed to redress women or subvert gender 
hierarchies and victims of conflict-related sexual violence continue to be 
socially and economically marginalized as the state fail to provide sufficient 
reparations.  
 
Furthermore, it seems as if these three gaps reinforce each other and 
exclusions in one area travels to the next  - i.e. when women are written out of 
the new narrative of the post-conflict nation, it is hard for them to make claims 
for reparation, and when impunity for crimes against women in conflict is not 
addressed, women’s suffering is not acknowledged. Thus we conclude that the 
gendered accountability gap, acknowledgement gap and reparations gap remain 
upheld by the patriarchal, religious and nationalist discourses that imped 
transformation towards a more gender-just peace. 

4.3. TOWARDS A GENDER-JUST PEACE 

A gender-just peace is peace and justice cognizant and inclusive of the gender. 
A critical gender approach to peace develops a positive epistemology of peace 
incorporating both gender critiques and gender-sensitivities in order to develop 
an understanding of alternative social and political ontologies of peace (and 
barriers to them). This approach offers a positive epistemology of an 
emancipatory peace with space for agents resting upon empathy and possibly 



 29 

active care, and a concern with both institutions and everyday life. A post-
Westphalian, emancipatory peace may arise through discourse gender equality. 
A gender-just peace is an aspirational vision associated with the idea of positive 
peace: a society that resolves the conflicts and contradictions within it in a 
constructive, just and inclusive fashion and which is thereby rendered resilient 
and relative resistant to mass or systemic violence. In this conceptualization of 
peace values such as inclusion or gender equality are an inherent and 
indissoluble part of peace. Building such peace then is a transformative process 
driven by creative, critical agents comprising, amongst other things, the 
promotion of women’s rights and empowerment. At the same time, the 
broader processes of peacebuilding and transitional justice can also be used as 
a means of levering social transformation. This includes providing a space 
where women agency can exercised thus permitting women a more prominent 
place in post-conflict transformation processes. Furthermore, it may address 
issues of identity and the idea of “reconstructing masculinities” through 
security sector reform, demobilization, disarmament and reintegration while 
also promoting a human rights agenda as part of governance and rule of law 
reforms. In line with the notion of positive peace, a gender-just peace strive to 
eradicate the socially constructed differences between women and men 
through transforming institutions and structures that reproduce and sustain 
inequality and through empowerment processes that transform both gender 
and social relations, eventually creating greater equality and equity between 
women and men within and between social groups. In such ways, rights that 
are not transformative by themselves can be transformed as part of a larger 
transformative process.  

While a gender analysis of transitional justice so far have led to fruitful insights, 
many gaps remain. The analysis of three gendered transitional justice gaps 
although limited demonstrate the persistence of the gendered hierarchies of 
transitional justice in BiH and evidently gendered justice gaps remain. As in 
many places, a more gender just-peace in BiH remains a distant goal. For 
example, we know little of the impact of such mechanisms as vetting, official 
policies of apology and the societal remembering and forgetting through 
remembrance practices. The new wave of reparations needs to be closely 
analyzed to understand how it affects women’s agency and socioeconomic 
position. Violence in the public sphere is selected for accountability while 
violence committed in the private sphere is ignored; a bias which tends to 
exclude women’s experience of the continuum of violence across conflict and 
post-conflict social and political orders (Franke 2006). This of course opens up 



 30 

for a critique of the dichotomy ‘private’ and ‘public’ and ‘before’ and ‘after’ war 
violence (Hansen 2001). Selectivity of sexual crimes might have 
counterproductive effects for wider questions of gender justice and for 
obscuring women’s role as active agents. Interactions and friction between 
different transitional justice mechanisms as well as actors and stakeholders – 
international, national and local - within the same post-conflict context have 
hardly been studied; a lacuna of the liberal peacebuilding project at large that 
has urgently been pointed out in recent literature. 

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