Naomi Cahn

On the Frontlines: Gender, War and the Post Conflict Process

Our book, On the Frontlines, gives a comprehensive overview of the post-conflict terrain as it is experienced by women across multiple jurisdictions and in the wake of numerous conflicts. In creating and applying the concept of gender centrality the book addresses how gender can be made central to a range of post-conflict processes, and in so doing how the experiences of marginality and exclusion for women can be structurally and substantively addressed. The book draws on a range of contemporary feminist theorizing to frame its analysis of how gender is pivotal to the post-conflict context. We address: intervention, peacekeeping, development, rule of law, constitution making, DDR, security sector reform, truth processes, and criminal accountability for gender based violence. Countries in the post-conflict transition process provide multiple opportunities for transformation on many different levels, including accountability for human rights violations committed during hostilities; reforming local and national laws; reintegration of soldiers; rehabilitation and redress for victims; the establishment or reestablishment of the rule of law, human rights institutions, and governance structures; changing cultural attitudes; and improving socioeconomic conditions. These opportunities are rare in stable and non-transitional societies and explain in part why societies in conflict garner such significant international and institutional attention. The opportunities for massive transformation are, in theory, open-ended.We explore the role that gender plays in the construction and implementation of the post-conflict transitional process. The book’s approach is feminist in form and in methodology. Multiple strands of feminist theorization provide the foundations for our analysis and some offer contradictory advice on how to proceed. As feminist scholars influenced by varying theoretical outlooks, we draw on a wide range of feminist approaches and theories to inform our thinking on the numerous issues addressed. Viewing processes of transition in conflicted societies through the lens of the multifaceted social movement that constitutes feminist theory and action provides a unique means to assess political, social, and economic change as it works or does not work for women. This methodological choice affirms the importance of a gender lens by firmly unmasking the ways in which situations and constructs appear neutral, but are in practice gendered masculine. We situate the visibility of women’s concerns to the forefront of our inquiries and ultimately seek a recalibration that requires a rethinking of both the masculine and the feminine in conflicted and post-conflict settings.Conflicts affect both men and women, but women face additional issues during and after wars that men do not, including, of course, pervasive sexual violence, forced impregnation, reproductive violence, sexually transmitted diseases, and forced abortion. Women and their children experience internal displacement and dominate the refugee populations across conflicts. Women are also differentially affected because of their role as the primary caretaker of the household and family. In this regard, traditional gender dichotomies may be further entrenched and exacerbated during times of extreme violence. By contrast, during some conflicts in which aspects of a functioning state and economy continue to exist, women can take on roles as workers and laborers outside of the home, opportunities which would never transpire were the society not in conflict. In this way, as other feminist scholars have noted, conflict opens up intended and unintended spaces for empowerment, “effecting structural and social transformations and producing new social, economic and political realities that redefine gender and caste hierarchies.” In other conflicts, however, women are the least often employed or employable because of their often legally enforced second-class status in many conflict zones. Across most post-conflict transitions, women are the first to be fired and the last to be hired with the large exception of the false economy build-up around the presence of the international community, in which women are paid to fill the “camp follower” positions as housekeepers, cooks, administrative employees, and, of course, for sex. Peacemaking agreements and transitional structures, however, rarely account for these paradoxical roles.The primary focus of this book is surveying the interplay of gender with conflict and post-conflict processes, allied with the recognition that women must be central to the powerful and transformative potential of the post-conflict terrain. Conflict-ending and transitional processes are already deeply gendered, drawing on existing cultural, legal, and political practices that are deeply embedded across societies and cultures. The entrenched gender coding of such processes is predominantly masculine and operates to include or make women visible in highly selective ways. A core concern here is the assumption by states and international institutions that conflict endings are the same for women as for men. We consistently challenge that assumption. We also contest the idea that the end of conflict constitutes the end of violence, confrontation, vulnerability, or related manifestations of war for women. As the motif of this book’s title suggests, women are invariably at the frontline of conflict, in the physical and metaphysical sense. Their bodies are in the frontline of military strategy and targeting, and the social networks and spaces women maintain are also frontline targets for destruction and undoing. As examples from multiple jurisdictions indicate, the formal end of hostilities between generally male combatants often have little effect on the quality of life for women as they remain vulnerable and at the vanguard of hazards and threats despite paper agreements between elite actors.

Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Market Needs Legal Regulation

Preface Introduction Part I Initial Conceptions1 The Treatment Plan for Legal Issues 2 The Treatment Plan for Creating Babies Part II The State of ART3 Market Regulation 4 Parenting Regulation 5 Donating to Parenthood 6 Donor IdentityPart III Race, Class, and Gender: Who Benefits?7 Barriers to Conception 8 Expensive Dreams 9 What Is Wrong with Technology? Part IV Baby Steps Forward10 Baby Steps: Going to Market 11 Five-Parent Families? A Proposition 12 Finding Out Conclusion Notes Index About the Author

The Triple System for Regulating Women's Reproduction

Analysis of ART and abortion must include the experiences of women at the emerging center of American life, as well as those at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Our contribution explores the triple system of fertility regulation, analyzing the intersections between fertility and class and using the experiences of women in the middle to add depth to our understanding of womens exercises of autonomy.

The Uncertain Legal Basis for the New Kinship

This article addresses the legal regime that affects donor-conceived family communities. It shows how these new relationships both reinforce and complicate the social, cultural, and economic meanings of family, where the law fits into all of these relationships, and why—based on the strong interests and emotional connections between members of these new communities—we might consider broader legal protections. It provides a typology of legal approaches to these new familial relationships created through donor conception.

Red v. Blue Marriage

Marriage has long been a symbol of union – between husband and wife, a compact between the couple and the community concerning support for children, and an institution that, even as it changed or cloaked inconvenient facts about sexuality or paternity, forged shared meanings about family life. Today, however, marriage has increasingly become a symbol of disunion. The disunion involves divorce and the disappearance of permanence as a defining feature of marriage. It extends to a dramatic increase in non-marital births, as marriage has become an optional rather than mandatory aspect of childrearing. And, in the United States today, marriage is increasingly a symbol of what divides us: regionally, economically, racially, politically and ideologically. This chapter first will examine the process of family change and its connections to the changing economy. Second, it will describe the way that family changes play out along regional and class lines. Third, it will consider the relationship between family changes and ideological divisions, describing the differences between strategies that seek to link women to men through control of sexuality versus those that would promote women’s autonomy and insist on neutrality toward family form. Finally, the chapter will conclude that changes in the family magnify the increasing inequality in society, and that the class-based nature of changes in marriage will guarantee increasing disinvestment in the next generation as a whole.

Autonomy to Choose What Constitutes Family: Oxymoron or Basic Right?

Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel and other critics have argued that liberalism is living off the borrowed capital of Western civilization. That is, to the extent that liberalism requires neutrality among theories of the good, the state cannot ensure that the generation of values - of strong families, hard workers, honest people, engaged citizens, and devout church members - necessary to liberalism itself will occur. William Galston responded to this critique by arguing that liberalism does not require neutrality toward the creation of values central to liberalism itself. A liberal democratic state should be able to foster liberal virtues, and, indeed, liberal states have historically done so through the regulation of sexual morality, family stability and educational quantity and content. The issue then arises how a liberal state promotes such values in the absence of consensus not just on the values themselves, but on the institutions necessary to inculcate them. With respect to education today, for example, the United States permits its citizens to choose between public and an array of private institutions, including home schooling. On issues such as traffic regulation, however, the state must elect a single choice; it cannot have its drivers choose on an individual basis between the right or the left side of the road. Historically, the idea of autonomy with respect to the creation of family form would have been considered an oxymoron. The traditional family of biological mother, father and child was often treated as prior to the state, if not foundational to society itself. Nor has the state been neutral among the possible forms of marriage. When the Supreme Court confronted the issue of polygamy as an expression of Mormon religious practice in the Utah territories during the nineteenth century, it had no trouble declaring the organization of a community for the spread and practice of polygamy is, in a measure, a return to barbarism. It is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and of the civilization which Christianity has produced in the Western world. The basis for these decisions, for the denial of autonomy with respect to the choice of institutions, and not just individual behavior, bears revisiting. What if, on questions basic to the organization of family, no consensus exists? What if different demographic and economic circumstances create different family traditions among different states? What if fundamentally different values in different parts of the country produce polarization rather than agreement on the family values appropriate for a liberal democracy? This paper will address these issues by, first, examining the debate about the regulation of morality and distinguishing the control of individual behavior from the selection of basic institutions. Second, it will examine the polarization now taking place on the definition of family values among the states and argue that these differences reflect different challenges produced by the nature of the interaction among marriage, childbearing and the adult life cycle. Third, it will maintain that these differences, while the product of different approaches to family institutions consistent with historic efforts at secular family regulation, interact with religious as well as secular beliefs. Finally, the paper will consider what some measure of autonomy and respect for others might entail in a system in which different states adopt fundamentally different approaches toward the definition and regulation of family values.

The politics of marriage policy

Marriage and the family mark the fault lines of a growing political and class divide throughout the developed world. With rising inequality, family structure increasingly correlates with class. Two...

Unequal terms: Gender, power, and the recreation of hierarchy

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between feminist theory and rising economic inequality. It shows how greater inequality reflects the valorization of the stereotypically male qualities of competition and hierarchy, producing a greater concentration of wealth among a small number of men at the top, shortchanging men more than women through the rest of the economy, and altering the way that men and women match up to each other in the creation of families. By creating a framework for further research on the relationship between the norms of the top and the disadvantages of everyone else in more unequal societies, the paper provides a basis for feminists to develop a new theory of social power. The paper demonstrates how the development of winner-take-all income hierarchies, the political devaluation of families and communities, and the terms of the family values debate diminish equality and community. The paper addresses how to understand these developments as they affect both the structure of society and the allocation of power within our families in ways that link to the historic concerns of feminist theory. It accordingly ends by asking the “woman question” in a new way: one that revisits the stereotypically masculine and feminine and asks how they connect to hierarchy, one that considers whether the inclusion of women changes institutional cultures in predictable ways, and one that wonders whether the values that today are associated with more women than men offer a basis for the reconstruction of society more generally.

Digital Assets and Fiduciaries

This chapter addresses the appropriate treatment of a persons digital life when the account holder can no longer manage it. As the Internet becomes an increasingly important presence in our daily lives, the law has a significant role to play in determining the management of digital assets upon the account holders incapacity or death. In the past, people put hard copies of photos in albums, listened to record albums, and paid bills with a stamped envelope. Today, most people use the Internet to store photos, listen to music, and pay bills. Yet few people have considered how to dispose of their digital assets. This chapter explores the legal issues for trusts, estates, conservatorships, and powers of attorney. It addresses the importance of fiduciaries being able to manage an account holders digital assets, and the obstacles under federal and state law to a fiduciary assuming that role. Finally, it shows how the Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act provides a solution to ensure effectuation of the account holders intent.

Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (review)

No matter how different these books are, their commonality in balancing the duty of punishment with the duty of prevention of human rights violations on the one hand, while attempting to balance peace and justice on the other, continues to be unsettling. Just as making moral and political choices regarding how to confront a legacy of abuse is controversial, so is the method by which such choices are made. While acknowledging that there are many shortand long-term barriers en route to achieving justice and peace, it is worth noting that the progress toward achieving a humane world comes in moral stages, usually—and hopefully— each higher than the previous one.38 The books under review here are a testament to transitional justice’s achievements and limitations.