Sites of Violence:
Gender & Conflict Zones

Wenona Giles & Jennifer Hyndman (eds.),
University of California Press, 2004

Reviewed by Ilka Thiessen, Malaspina University College, Canada

Sites of Violence arose from a collaboration of the Women in Conflict Zones Network (WICZNET) that began its work in 1996. The book is split into four parts: (1) feminist approaches to gender and conflict; (2) violence against women in war and postwar times; (3) feminist analyses of international organizations and asylum; and finally, instead of a conclusion an outlook: (4) feminist futures: negotiating globalization, security and human displacement. As the split into four parts shows, this edited volume is a multi-layered approach that gains its strength by engaging very different feminist academics and practioners with the question of violence, conflict and women.

The first set of articles looks at armed conflict as an obliteration of spaces (domestic sovereign and global, as well as private and public) and as such calling for an analysis of violence as a continuum that transcends the dichotomy of war and peace (Giles, Hyndman); as a gendered practice (Cockburn); and as an exercise of silencing (Blacklock, Crosby). The second part explores the ethnographic data on violence against women in different conflict zones such as the Sudan (Macklin), Kurdistan (Mojab), Yugoslavia (Morokvasic-Müller) and Ghana (Preston, Madeleine Wong), and ends with a discussion of women, modern warfare and the military, especially in Israel and the US (Yuval-Davis). Migration and refugee camps, and their effect on women, are then examined. Hyndman looks at UNHRC policies concerning refugee women and the failure of those policies, de Alwis examines the effect of displacement on Muslim women in Sri Lanka, Hans studies Afghan women refugees in India, Korac observes refugee women in the post-Yugoslav states, and Klein examines the effect of international intervention and post-conflict democratization in the former Yugoslavia and the oversight of gendered policies. The effect of globalization is discussed in the final section of the volume, which consists of a single chapter by Giles and Hyndman.

The book’s main argument that “the violence of […] conflict cannot be isolated from other expressions of violence” (p. 3) is an important contribution to the understanding of violence towards women and is well-illustrated throughout. However, the book suffers from a too ambitious undertaking of theorizing gender in conflict zones. This book is about women in conflict zones, but issues of gender are startling absent, except for a few side remarks in some of the last chapters. A somewhat simplified picture of women as victims and men as perpetrators is presented. Throughout the book, Cynthia Enloe’s writing is discussed in depth. However, a more direct approach would have been preferred, such as including Enloe’s work in the volume and discussing it’s importance to the authors in the introduction.

Nevertheless, Sites of Violence is a great text for anyone interested in feminist issues and their current applications. It invites one to think about many important processes of our times: globalization, democratization, militarization, nationalism and migration, and how women define and interpret today’s world. The book is well-written, with ethnographic details that will be of interest to students and academics alike.

Many of the articles mention the body as a site of violence but none of the articles ever discuss this very important issue in depth. What is it that makes a person gendered? The social construction of gender is not highlighted in the discussion. A concluding chapter that brings the different strands of the articles together better would have been preferred. Instead, the reader is left with a feeling of disorientation. Why is it that women are subjected to violence more than men, and is this true? Some articles mention the biological aspect of women, categorizing them as the nurturer of children and family, and stating that this is what makes them more susceptible to violence. Some articles, particularly those dealing with the former Yugoslavia, address the nationalist interest in the ‘mothers of the nation’ and the ‘bearers of warriors’, but as no more than a side remark. An analysis should go beyond the data derived from interviews and ask the question: why is it that women’s bodies are sites of violence and power struggles?

There are many questions that will come to the mind of the reader, therein lies the real strength of this edited volume; and it is in this way that the articles in Sites of Violence are useful for feminists. It is thought-provoking and engaging, and it will lead the reader to inquire further into the questions that need to be asked in our times.

Ilka Thiessen received her PhD in August 1999 from the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her dissertation, T'ga za jug - Waiting for Macedonia: The Changing World of a Group of Young Female Engineers in the Republic of Macedonia, examines how the changes in Macedonia’s cultural and national identity influence the construction of gendered identities. She is currently professor of anthropology at Malaspina University College in BC, Canada.

 

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