Critique internationale - Content
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[Theory and Construction of Gender Relations in the Kurdish Guerilla Warfare of Turkey]
Situations of violent conflict are often propitious to the reconfiguration of social relations and, in particular, the renegotiation of masculine and feminine roles. Yet the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) is seen as having gone farther than any other movement in feminizing its recruitment, supplying a complex theoretical foundation for male/female relations and genuinely attempting to apply the resulting principles at the organizational level. But are these quantitative transformations and organizational developments accompanied by distinctive gender relations within the PKK army? Have they dispensed with the sexual division of activist and warrior labor? In fact, the construction of gender relations within guerilla warfare is first and foremost a response to the questions raised by feminine involvement and is ultimately associated with a rationalization of “traditional” practices. Beyond this, it seems necessary to rethink the feminine question in terms of domination within the PKK: from this perspective, the liberation of women appears to be nothing more than the feminine version of the desexualization and submission of activists.
[The Question of Gender in the Context of Armed Conflict: The Experience of the Women Combatants of Peru (1980-2000)]
In Peru, women’s participation in armed struggle is a major phenomenon, with women representing up to 40% of guerilla fighters and often holding positions of leadership. This was particularly true of the Peruvian Communist Party, or Shining Path, one of the conflict’s main protagonists. Yet, in a more general way, women’s participation in the guerilla warriors’ revolutionary struggles reflects a series of profound disruptions that have taken place in Peruvian society since the late 1960s. Feminine subversive activism thus reveals the social and political issues associated, not only with the question of women’s emancipation, but also the role played in the conflict by fundamental institutions such as the school and the family. For women combatants, the conflict’s end was similarly accompanied by specifically gendered violence that underscored, not only the limits of genuine armed emancipation, but also the manner in which gender was used in discourses and practices legitimating the criminalization of armed struggle in Peru.
[Mobilized and Incarcerated Femininities in Palestine]
From 1967 till today, the gendered subjectivities of Palestinian activists incarcerated in Israel have evolved according to their political and armed mobilizations and the conditions of their detention. Up till the First Intifada, prison was a site of training for political women who asserted their activism in the context of secular parties (Fatah, leftwing parties) and feminism. When, in the course of interrogations, the Israeli intelligence services turned to forms of physical and psychological abuse tied to their gender and sexuality, these women violently experienced the conflict at the level of their bodies. In response, they resignified these stigmata as so many markers of their engagement. Following the Oslo peace agreement, their actions became more diversified. Faced with the repression of the Second Intifada, they threw themselves into martyrdom operations. Violence, however, is denied in their accounts and bodies appear sexualized and feminine. Secular activists were then joined by others belonging to religious parties (Hamas, Islamic Jihad). As the experience of incarceration became commonplace, new ways of living beyond prison gradually emerged. Former inmates established feminine collective networks and their activism and periods of imprisonment came to be seen as sources of transformation for gender relations.
[Gender and Violence in Women Soldiers’ Accounts: The Case of Israel]
The military is a hyper-masculine organization designed to manage violence for the state. As such, the military and militarization processes create a tight link between gender and violence. Most often, the literature on militarization of women’s lives focuses on women as victims of military violence. As Israel is unique among Western states in that it imposes compulsory conscription on both men and women, we ask how gendered militarization in general and serving in the army in particular shapes women’s lives. Particularly, we explore how women relate to gender and to violence in their accounts of military service, by analyzing retrospective accounts of women veterans from three groups: women who served in clerical roles; women who served in “masculine” roles; and women who served in the occupied territories and gave testimonies to the anti-occupation movement. Our analysis shows that women’s accounts of military service are dominated by their gendered position as “outsiders within” a hyper-masculine organization. This dual position sharpens their gendered lenses, and they interpret their military experience mostly from a gendered perspective. At the same time, their vulnerable position in the military pushes them to cooperate with socio-cultural mechanisms that mask or blur the military’s violence, and thus the military’s violence remains generally hidden and invisible in their accounts.
[Discreet Repression: The Economy of Anti-Trade Union Practices in the Factories of Guatemala]
In Guatemala, levels of trade union membership are among the lowest in Latin America and, for many years, violations of union rights there have been regularly denounced at the international level. An examination of the handful of trade union mobilizations that have taken place in some textile and clothing factories (maquilas) shows how practices of repression are rendered invisible by a set of employer strategies, intentional or not, and how criminal groups, often left out of examinations of social movement repression, are involved in the repressive management of these mobilizations. The particularly violent social order of this country facilitates the use of repressive practices while simultaneously authorizing strategies for washing politicians and employers’ hands of responsibility.
[Paths of Declonization Today: Perspectives from the Pacific Islands]
Contemporary Oceania is simultaneously marked by the persistence, birth and resurgence of struggles for self-determination. The separatist, autonomist, regionalist and “native” demands that rub shoulders there (without excluding one another) evolve in keeping with the reconfiguration of local political fields. This article seeks to understand the very diverse manner in which these separatist mobilizations have been given expression by focusing on the various levels and fields that determine them: colonial history, the demographic weight of native populations, the recent emergence of a culture of apology, recognition of indigenous peoples law at the international level, contemporary forms of capitalism and the identity-based demands they favor, the ideology of “less state”, “custom” as a form of regulation and so on. The idea is to hold together this bundle of opportunities. Drawing upon the theoretical model of world-systems anthropology developed by Jonathan Friedman, the present article examines the influence of the colonial experience on the post-colonial imaginary, the weight of regional and international contexts in the choice of types of sovereignty and, finally, the role played by an ever less “visible” – but still just as present – state
[The Guatemalan State and Mayan Populations: Negotiated Strategies of Ethnic Identification among the Chuj (1821-2011)]
The history of Guatemala, today an intermediary space between North and Central America, is punctuated with outbursts of racial violence. Though the majority of its population is Indian, the state is not controlled by them, in contrast to Bolivia and Equator. By studying the case of this Central American democracy, one may thus identify variations in the political expression of ethnicity. Formerly a warzone and bordering Mexico, northwestern Guatemala became a zone of international migration. There, ethnicity is mobilized and used by political (parties, guerilla fighters, the army) and civilian actors alike. Since the late 19th-century, the state’s relationship with the Chuj Indians has been marked by the establishment of the international border, policies of assimilation and violence inflicted on Indians. In the context of recent struggles to prevent multinationals from developing open pit mines, however, the reformulation of “Mayan” identity has been associated with the idea of environmental protection and the defense of Indian territories.
Jelena Subotić Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans Ithaca/Londres, Cornell University Press, 2009, XVIII-201 pages.
Lara J. Nettelfield Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal’s Impact in a Postwar State New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010, XVII-330 pages.
Vincent Bonnecase La pauvreté au Sahel : du savoir colonial à la mesure internationale Paris, Karthala, 2011, 290 pages.
Dario Battistella Un monde unidimensionnel Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 174 pages.
