The Roar on the Other Side of Silence

Joyce Wu presents “The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: A pre-fieldwork presentation for a multi-country research on sexual violence in conflict/post-conflict situation”. Centre for International Governance & Justice (CIGJ), Regulatory Institutes Network, the Australian National University. At Coombs Extension Lecture Theatre, Bldg 8, Room 1.04. Tuesday 11 August 2009, 12.30pm – 1.30pm.

UN Agency for Women – Bargaining with Patriarchy

The idea of a multi-tasking UN women’s agency that is long in teeth (being able to push for women’s rights and gender equality effectively) and well-sourced to deliver programs has been much discussed under the rubric of UN reform. The UN Reform itself came into being after years of the UN system being charged by critics as overly bureaucratic and inefficient. Listed along with sustainable development and human rights, gender was identified as one of those cross-cutting issues which must be an integral part of the UN system.

Wu’s seminar on “From ‘Fallen Blossoms’ to ‘Army Latrines’

In this seminar, I highlighted some of the discourses at hand surrounding the issue of sexual- and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict situation, and the influence they have upon aid agencies.

In particular, I wanted to explore how the prevailing understanding and distinction of the private vs. public understanding about violence against women during the so-called peacetime is carried into discussions about violence against women in conflict and post-conflict situation. This distinction is played out in the prioritisation of different forms of sexual violence, where military-perpetrated forms of sexual violence takes precedence, as demonstrated in wider media attention as well as the rhetoric of aid agencies and donors.

Gender and Security Sector Reform

Without a feminist understanding of what is gender and why promoting gender equality is important in development, a risk with these manuals and guides is the danger of assuming gender is a “fix it” tool, something one whips out of the development kit to solve operational issues, streamline programmatic responses, or donor compliance. The integration of gender into security sector reform may also risk taking certain things for granted, such as the assumption that by reforming the security sector, women will benefit from the trickle-down effect, as opposed to asking the harder questions which feminists have been raising: whether an institution (i.e. the military) which legitimises the use of violence can be made user-friendly? [...]