Sex and International Tribunals
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Before the twenty-first century, there was little legal precedent for the prosecution of sexual violence as a war crime. Now, international tribunals have the potential to help make sense of political violence against both men and women; they have the power to uphold victims' claims and to convict the leaders and choreographers of systematic atrocity. However, by privileging certain accounts of violence over others, tribunals more often confirm outmoded gender norms, consigning women to permanent rape victim status. In Sex and International Tribunals , Chiseche Salome Mibenge identifies the cultural assumptions behind the legal profession's claims to impartiality and universality. Focusing on the postwar tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Mibenge mines the transcripts of local and supranational criminal trials and truth and reconciliation commissions in order to identify and closely examine legal definitions of forced marriage, sexual enslavement, and the conscription of children that overlook the gendered experiences of armed conflict beyond the mass rape of women and girls. In many cases, a single rape conviction constitutes sufficient proof that gender-based violence has been mainstreamed into the prosecution of war crimes. Drawing on anthropological research in African conflicts, and feminist theory, Mibenge challenges legal narratives that reinscribe essentialized notions of gender in the conduct and resolution of violent conflict and uncovers the suppressed testimonies of men and women who are unwilling or unable to recite the legal scripts that would elevate them to the status of victimhood recognized by an international and humanitarian audience. At a moment when international intervention in conflicts is increasingly an option, Sex and International Tribunals points the way to a more nuanced and just response from courts.
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Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
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I argue in Chapter 3 that the TRC final report produces a human rights narrative of gender and violence that essentializes Sierra Leone’s culture as harmful and inherently violent toward women. Building on this argument, I pay attention to the government’s and the international community’s representation of the TRC as a restorative and indigenous model of justice and the impact this has had on the commission’s specific framing of gender and violence in Sierra Leone. In particular, I show how the report’s rights based emphasis on forced marriage and early marriage as forms of gender-based discrimination produces a problematic narrative of marriage as an oppressive institution for women. As in Chapter 2, I introduce narratives in contradistinction to the dominant narrative. I create such categories as “adulterous wives,” “cuckolds,” and “merry widows” to illustrate that women do exercise agency, even from within oppressive social structures. In this chapter, I borrow heavily from narratives produced by ethnographic researchers embedded in Sierra Leonean society whose work inadvertently but importantly disrupts the dominant legal narratives that I question.
In Chapter 5, I provide a final roundup and review of my narratives and arguments. It is important for me to add at this stage that during my field work, I came to consider all Rwandans and Sierra Leoneans, who had lived in their respective countries or even the region during any period between the outset and the close of the armed conflict, as survivors of the conflict. I use the term survivor to convey that the civilian population was disproportionately targeted for and affected by human rights violations and war crimes committed by the conflict. Despite the targeting, they survived.28 This approach in the field allowed me to avoid categorizing individuals dichotomously as either victims (women) or perpetrators (men).
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