CDRO 24A11 - Gender and transitional justice

This course is about the transitional justice's agenda for gender justice. The field has, over the past years, been seen as representing a unique opportunity to achieve significant social transformations, including the elimination of gender discrimination. This course proposes to survey the complex legal, political, philosophical, historical, and cultural issues that emerge when gender justice is sought by transitional justice processes and mechanisms. Despite a call for gender justice supported by civil society organizations, victims, as well as a large part of the academic literature, the capacity and legitimacy of transitional justice to deliver social justice for women is still considered to be controversial or, to say the least, in a state of evolution. This course aims to equip students to approach transitional justice and the quest for gender justice from diverse and critical perspectives, and to enable them to assess if and how transformation of gender inequalities should be pursued by transitional justice mechanisms and processes. To address these questions, this course will be organized in three parts. The first block (weeks 1-4) focuses on the birth of transitional justice in international relations and the historical development of the concept: ranging from retributive justice to transformative justice and including restorative justice. We will assess why the language of transformation has been so important in feminist literature. We then will critically review the mechanisms and processes that usually help to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses and how conflict-related gender based violence (GBV) is approached by these mechanisms. The second block (weeks 5-8) examines how transitional justice treats the accused and the victims of conflict-related gender-based violence. In doing so, we will explore the legal, political and moral challenges these two types of actors pose when dealing with GBV, whether these challenges are surmountable, what these challenges imply in terms of responsibility, and how they interrelate. The last block (weeks 9-12) considers three agendas for change. That is, we will examine how the processes and mechanisms of transitional justice can best combine local and global responses to deal with GBV, how reparations for GBV can be both corrective and transformative, and, finally, how legal reforms can best adapt to the realities of women in different contexts.

Lucie GEORGE

Séminaire

English

None.

Autumn 2022-2023