Description
Categorisation of people who suffered wartime harm as victims is a means of accessing justice and redress. Engaging with the notion of victimhood as a socially-constructed category, scholars have highlighted the role of power and politics in the categorisation of victims. This has led to the creation of victim rivalries, and the neglect of certain types of harms in transitional justice processes, particularly those related to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). This paper critically evaluates the categorisation of victims in transitional justice, which relies on externally-constructed categories as a reference point, overlooks the victims’ multiple identity categories pre- and post-conflict, and prioritises public processes at the expense of the private and intimate. We examine how SGBV victims/survivors navigate their multiple identity categories in the context of post-conflict injustice. Drawing on the voices of women from Rwanda and the Balkans, we analyse how they self-ascribe identity categories and problematize the ‘work’ these categories do or don’t do. We reveal the ways in which women from divergent contexts of war and genocide—and more than 30 years from the original source of violence—embrace, suppress, reject or ambivalently negotiate ‘publicly’ imposed victim categories while contending with their old identities along with those forced upon them, such as motherhood, womanhood, girlhood or survivorhood. These insights reveal a complex terrain of the private, which in turn casts existing categorisation of victimhood related to SGBV and its implications for justice as reductive, incomplete, uncertain, and disconnected from the everyday lives and needs of affected women.
