Jelke Boesten

Service delivery on the cheap? Community-based workers in development interventions

Within current neo-liberal approaches to development, models of community-driven development assume that community-based workers (CBWs) are key actors in improved and accessible service delivery. We argue that use of CBWs is under-theorised and seems to be based largely on untested assumptions about community participation and responsibility. Drawing on case studies on potable-water management and home-based care for HIV/AIDS patients in Tanzania and South Africa, the article explores issues of accountability, professionalism, and personal motivations in systems involving CBWs. It argues that many assumptions in relation to the effectiveness of CBW programmes require re-visiting.

Inequality, normative violence and livable life: Judith Butler and Peruvian Reality.

Despite the ascent to power of several high-profile women throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, many indicators show that women still suffer from high levels of gender inequality. In Peru, women occupy 21.5 percent of parliamentary seats (United Nations Development Program 2013) and have been very visible, some in high-profile positions, within municipal, regional, and national government since the 1990s. A quota system obliges political parties to reserve 30 percent of their electoral lists for women, and since 1996, a women’s machinery within government addresses (some) issues related to women’s vulnerability (although gender equality receives less attention). Indeed, improvement in representation has not solved some of the major ills of gender inequality: violence against women, including rape, continues to be appallingly high, reproductive and sexual rights are still contested, and the labor market continues to favor men.1 How can we understand women’s increasing representation and visibility in politics at a time when women in Peru continue to suffer high levels of gender-based violence and face opposition to abortion?

Of Exceptions and Continuities: Theory and Methodology in Research on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

ABSTRACT In response to an emerging debate around qualitative and quantitative methods in sexual violence research, in this paper I explore the apparent unease between the two methodological approaches, and ask how empirical data with regard to sexual violence in conflict informs policy and calls for justice. I argue that the quantitative turn in conflict-related sexual violence research feeds into its exceptionalization and tends to divorce such violence from more contextualized gender analyses, or perspectives that emphasize continuums of gender-based violence. While in some cases exceptionalization is essential, such as for the purpose of criminal accountability, for the purposes of understanding prevalence we need quantitative and qualitative analysis, and comparative as well as contextual data that will allow us to see the continuities as well. The analysis of gender, understood as a “constitutive element of social relations” (Scott, J. W. 1986. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American Historical Review 91 (5): 1053–1075), is central to such a quest of better understanding both sexual violence and war.

Review Essay: International governance and the politics of sexual violence

Gender issues are increasingly perceived as important in the global governance of war and security. Analysts highlight the centrality of sexual violence in war as one of the main characteristics of contemporary conflict, or ‘new wars’, while every so often stories of mass rape emerge from the rubble of current or past wars. In addition, the global women’s movement has long lobbied for attention to women’s differentiated experiences of war and the need for their inclusion in post-conflict reconstruction efforts. The body of feminist literature on these issues is simultaneously growing, showing that these processes are necessary, arduous, slow and far from finished. Both the books here discussed draw on and contribute to this literature. Carol Harrington looks at how sexual violence has become ‘politicized’ in the last century and a half or so. She provides a detailed account, largely based on secondary literature, of how discourses and practices of international governance around sexual violence in contexts of conflict have served different political purposes and are framed differently at different times. Rape, and sexual violence more generally, is clearly a form of violence permeated with meanings that are reflections of both political processes related to conflicts and of gender ideologies. Harrington moves from the policing of sex as a mechanism to control the nature and size of populations in a context of emerging discourses of abolitionism, to the medicalization of rape as a result of psychosocial understandings of trauma and victimhood. In doing so, Harrington highlights how changing ideas of what sexual violence is, what it does, and what it means are reflected in international discourses around the global governance of war and security.

Revisiting ‘democracy in the country and at home’ in Peru

This article explores the link between state violence, democracy, and violence against women in Peru. Using examples of how the state, at certain points in contemporary Peruvian history, has both used and challenged violence against women as political tools in pursuit of broader political gains, it suggests that the separation between private and public violence is less ‘real’ than political discourse often suggests. The democratic state is seen as a male-dominated historical product of the society from which it emerges and the institutions that represent it. Using gender as an analytical category shows how state violence in war and peace are linked to existing perceptions and inequalities based on race, class and gender. For women, then, the boundary between private and public violence, and between war and peace, is not clear-cut. The lack of consideration for the security of (especially poor and/or indigenous) women by a male- dominated and racist society suggests a serious democratic deficit.

Choices women make: agency in domestic violence, assisted reproduction and sex work

women’s movement; and third, their negotiations of leadership positions in the Islamist movements’ (p. 31). After the 2003 terror attack on Casablanca and the ‘Moroccan Patriot Act’, Islamist women kept a low profile. They also created new spaces to provide women of differing social and economic backgrounds with basic education, and to teach them about their Islamic and feminist legacy. Both Islamist women and feminists faced a public sphere in which the war on terror was foremost and women’s issues were not a high priority. In a concluding chapter, Salime coins the term ‘subversive veiling’ for women who wear a loose head scarf revealing part of their hair, tight jeans, and make-up. She also proposes a new set of expressions to describe trends that she has observed: ‘assertive feminism’ for women who insist on calling themselves feminists despite its western association; ‘difference feminism’ for those who advocate a ‘different and equal’ approach to gender; and ‘distant feminism’ for those who reject feminism as a term yet adopt its politics. Salime places her findings in the context of global developments. Neo-liberalism imposed on Morocco (1983–1994) opened spaces for voluntary organizations, included political reforms, and prompted state adoption of human rights discourse. Feminist groups enhanced the image of the country in international forums, gaining legitimacy in the eyes of the government. Another global influence was the rise of the Islamic religious feminist movement that provided a progressive ideology to reconcile Islam and women’s rights as well as international networks. Finally, the terror attack on Casablanca placed Morocco firmly in the War on Terror. Another important framework that Salime brings to her study is Moroccan state feminism. It began in 1992 when King Hassan addressed the issue of women’s rights in a speech on national television and came to fruition under Mohammed VI. The new king committed himself to women’s rights, and launched the National Plan of Action for the Integration of Women in Development. He appointed a number of women to influential and visible posts, decreed a parliamentary quota for women, and established a Ministry of Women. The highpoint of this policy was the adoption of the most progressive family status law in the Arab world in 2004. Salime’s outstanding book will be required reading for students and scholars of modern and contemporary Morocco, for those studying gender activism in the Islamist movements, and for those who study feminism from a global perspective. Even if all of the terminology she suggests is not adopted, many of her important ideas undoubtedly will be.