| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
182616
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
The professionalization of transitional justice (TJ) has received extensive academic attention in TJ and related international relations and peacebuilding scholarship. This article adds an element that has received hardly any attention: namely the presence of activism even among professional and usually donor-funded TJ work. I argue that noticing activism in professional contexts requires attention to the ‘everyday’, meaning to life in between, aside and beyond high politics and officially important actors, actions, processes and events. Based on field research in Sierra Leone and Kenya, I describe and discuss everyday examples of a specific form of activism, namely tacit activism that I encountered with three key interlocutors, one Sierra Leonean and two Kenyan nationals involved in professional donor-funded TJ work. Their activism was ’tacit’ in the sense that it was not part of their official project activities and my interlocutors did not advertise their extra plans and efforts to (prospective) donors. And yet, it was precisely through these tacit plans and efforts that they hoped to meet at least some of the expectations that had been raised in the context of professional TJ projects.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
189900
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article introduces an analytical framework for studying and interpreting the sometimes surprisingly different ‘shapes’ (key topics and approaches) of donor-funded responses to sexual violence in and after armed conflict. Our framework highlights processes of politicization, depoliticization, and technicalization and their influence on interventions. Drawing on available studies, published documents, and our own field research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone, we show that donor-funded responses to sexual violence since the early 2000s have taken remarkably different shapes – despite the emergence of influential international policy narratives and roughly similar forms of sexual violence in both contexts. A focus on context-specific processes of politicization, depoliticization, and technicalization reveals how these differences came about and persisted over time. (De-)Politicization and technicalization of sexual violence as a ‘weapon of war’ in DRC have led to medicalized and security-centred statebuilding interventions in the county's eastern conflict zones. By contrast, donor-funded responses in Sierra Leone framed and addressed sexual violence as ‘domestic violence’ even before the war had officially ended. We find that these different shapes emerged from initial differences in (de)politicization and technicalization processes driven by different ‘first responders’ in both contexts, which created enduring path dependencies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|