Description
Keywords: Stigmatization, Gender, Feminist Peace Research, Continuums of Violence, Sustainable Peace
Abstract
In most conflicts and post-conflict zones, children born of wartime sexual violence are a hidden population who often lives on the margin of society. Research suggests, that across countries, the stigmatization against these children can be so severe, that the end of conflict is actually not experienced as peace. Rather, some children understand their life to be “a state of war,” and do not perceive their country to be at peace, while others, who were born in captivity, are even longing for the war because back then they were not stigmatized and treated as outcasts. Drawing on Feminist Peace Research the purpose of this study is to contribute to dismantle the binary between war and peace by pointing at how stigmatization against children born of war is not just a side-effect of physical (sexual) violence but is in fact a form of violence in itself. Based on qualitative analysis of a diverse material, this article demonstrates how stigmatization against children born of war in the Central African Republic, Bosnia, and Northern Uganda, can be located on a continuum of violence, rooted in unequal gender relations, and how this dynamic is negatively affecting the achievement of a sustainable peace.
