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The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies while Redressing Human Rights Violations

Authored by: Brandon Hamber and Ingrid Palmary

Categories: Statebuilding
Sub-Categories: Mass Atrocities, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), Transitional Justice
Region: No Region
Year: 2009
Citation: Hamber, Brandon and Ingrid Palmary. "Gender, Memorialization, and Symbolic Reparations." In The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies While Redressing Human Rights Violations, edited by Ruth Rubio-Marín, 324-80. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Executive Summary

With these provisos in mind, this chapter focuses on the gendered dimensions of symbolic reparations. It is concerned partly with how female victims of political violence might engage with or benefit from symbolic reparations. This entails, according to Ruth Rubio-Marín, understanding the different way women experience conflict and authoritarianism, the different needs and priorities that diverse groups of women have, the different obstacles they may face in dealing with a legacy of mass political violence and repression, and how the broader normative aims underlying reparations in transitional setting are defined. The chapter considers also symbolic reparations from a wide perspective, that is, how they can be used to challenge dominant femininities and masculinities that are produced in times of armed conflict and in its aftermath.