On Monday 20 February, LSE’s Centre for Women, Peace and Security hosted a seminar by Dr Denisa Kostovicova (Department of Government) and Tom Paskhalis (Department of Methodology) on ‘Women Deliberators and Post-conflict Justice: What Kind of Voice?’
The Centre for Women, Peace and Security, London School of Economics and Political Science
20 February 2017
Women Deliberators and Transitional Justice: What Kind of Voice?
Denisa Kostovicova (Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science) and Tom Paskhalis (Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science)
This first exploratory paper, part of the LSE’s programme of research of the ‘Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community’ project, addressed the role of women in reconciliation. The recent turn in the scholarship on transitional justice that studies how states and societies engage with the legacy of mass atrocity has been to investigate the women’s perspective on post-conflict justice. This welcome development in the field is part of an effort to investigate a paradox: transitional justice measures do not necessarily deliver either justice or reconciliation, which are their key aims, and, by contrast, often entrench injustice. The gender perspective has shone the light on blind spots in this scholarship that result in highly gendered masculinized versions of post-conflict justice. This paper furthers the study of women’s voice in post-conflict justice processes, by overcoming the silence-voice dichotomy in theorising women’s contribution to peace-building. It brings together the scholarship of transitional justice and the theory of deliberative democracy. Scholars of deliberative democracy have also highlighted inequalities in women’s participation in deliberation, concerning both the conditions for deliberation and the frequency of women’s contributions. We argue that more can be gleaned about women’s contribution to transitional justice understanding the ‘kind’ of voice women have in these processes by investigating the women’s role in the RECOM, which is the unique regional civil society justice-seeking initiative in the Balkans. We combine quantitative content analysis and quantitative text analysis to answer the following questions: Can women deliberate as capably as men? Do they use more stories than men? Are their contributions more reconciliatory?