The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies While Redressing Human Rights Violations, Ruth Rubio-Marin, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press/International Center for Transitional Justice, 2009), 416 pp., $99 cloth.
Debra L. DeLaet (Reviewer)
Ruth Rubio-Marín has put together an excellent collection of essays that
make a significant contribution to the study of transitional justice. The book's
primary objective is to provide a gender-sensitive analysis of reparations programs
in transitional and post conflict societies intended to facilitate efforts to
bring justice to female victims of violence as well as their families. The volume
succeeds in achieving this objective and, in doing so, provides a valuable overview
of the gendered nature of violence resulting from armed conflict and political
repression, and of reparations as an approach to promoting justice in societies
emerging from violent conflict. Readers new to the topic of transitional justice
will learn a great deal about gendered violence and reparations programs in general, while
readers already familiar with this subject will still find new insights and useful
prescriptions.
In editing this volume, Rubio-Marín has done a fine job of balancing attention
to theory and to practice. Preliminary chapters establish the theoretical foundations
and normative framework of the volume. The first chapter, by Margaret Urban Walker,
presents an overview of gender and violence, and the subsequent chapter by Rubio-Marín
gives us a thorough overview of reparations as an approach to transitional justice
that weaves considerations of gender into the discussion. Although neither of
these preliminary chapters makes a significantly new contribution to our understanding
of transitional justice, they provide very helpful grounding in the subject for
non-specialists and a solid foundation for understanding the other essays of the
volume.
Subsequent chapters focus on specific gendered aspects of historical and current
reparations projects in a variety of thematic areas, including reparations for
sexual and reproductive violence, for children, for family members of victims/survivors,
as well as specific types of reparations programs, such as symbolic reparations
(for example, public memorials), collective reparations, and microfinance as a
form of pecuniary reparations for individual victims.
One of the key contributions of this volume lies in its attention to empirics.
A number of chapters present essential empirical evidence from historic as well
as ongoing reparations projects; those by Colleen Duggan and Ruth Jacobson, Dyan
Mazurana and Khristopher Carlson, and Rubio-Marín, Clara Sandoval, and
Catalina Díaz are especially noteworthy in this regard.
Scholars of transitional justice have done a great deal of theoretical and normative
work that articulates the importance of a gender-sensitive analysis of transitional
justice and have conducted numerous single case studies. However, to date few
have completed a systematic, comparative analysis of transitional justice programs.
To its great credit, this volume includes a number of chapters that provide empirical
information about reparations programs within a comparative framework, essential
in any effort to assess the effectiveness of reparations programs and to identify
best practices.
Another strength of this volume is its relatively nuanced application of the concept
of gender. Too often the term "gender" is used by scholars of international
relations as shorthand for biological sex. Thus, when scholars use the term, they
are often simply signifying that they are studying women, or perhaps women and
girls. Although The Gender of Reparations focuses primarily on women, it
acknowledges that gender norms can lead to specific forms of violence and harm
against men as well as women, perhaps most visibly and notably when men and boys
are targeted with violence due to the presumption that they are combatants or
potential combatants in armed conflict. Similarly, men are often the primary targets
of gross violations of human rights in the context of political repression due
to the presumption that they are more likely than women to be politically active.
Throughout the volume, contributors acknowledge the potential gendered harms that
men often experience in situations involving armed conflict and political repression.
The book would have been even stronger with a specific chapter on this topic or
if more space had been devoted to this subject in the existing chapters. Nonetheless,
the fact that the contributors acknowledge that gendered violence has dimensions
that harm men and boys (as well as women and girls) distinguishes it from much
of the scholarship in the field.
A final strength of the volume is its broad conceptualization of reparations.
Several chapters make clear that reparations programs go far beyond financial
payments to individual victims. Although such individualized compensation can
be an important form of reparation for victims of wartime or political violence,
as the chapter on microfinance and gender equality by Anita Bernstein makes clear,
a gender-sensitive analysis helps readers to understand the need for and benefits
of collective reparations. The chapter on reparations for family members of victims
of gross violations of human rights, by Rubio-Marín, Sandoval, and Díaz,
underscores the ways in which human rights violations harm the families of victims
and diminish the communities in which they live. In this way, the chapter makes
a compelling case for the need for collective reparations in transitional justice
endeavors. Finally, the theme that successful reparations programs need to attend
to the psychosocial needs of victims and their communities runs throughout the
book.
The Gender of Reparations makes a strong case for the importance of applying
a gender-sensitive lens in efforts to assess and improve reparations programs.
In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of transitional
justice and should be read widely by scholars, practitioners, and engaged citizens
interested in justice for survivors of armed conflict and political repression.
—Debra L. DeLaet
Debra L. DeLaet is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Drake
University, where she teaches courses on human rights, global public health, international
law, the United Nations, and gender and world politics.
