Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Skirts as Flags: Transitional Justice, Gender and Everyday Nationalism in Kosovo

2020; Wiley; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/nana.12593

1354-5078

Vjollca Krasniqi, Ivor Sokolić, Denisa Kostovicova,

Turkey's Politics and Society

Wartime rape is ubiquitous in contemporary conflicts. Its commission is deeply implicated in the gendered notions of a nation: a woman's body is constructed as a target in a conflict that involves different identity groups and as an object of protection within a nation. Addressing past wrongs in view of repairing relationships after human rights violations across the identity divide is an integral part of post-conflict recovery (Murphy, 2017, pp. 22–23). The practice of transitional justice also has a "constitutive" effect on the building of the new democratic order and peace (Teitel, 2000). Post-conflict justice provides an opportunity for reordering gender relations within post-conflict nation building. This process requires the recognition of both a victim- and a gender-specific harm, such as wartime rape. However, the practice of transitional justice often perpetuates "transitional in justice" (Loyle & Davenport, 2016), of which gender injustice is a part. In this article, we bring the perspective of everyday nationalism to the feminist theorizing in the field of transitional justice and investigate gendered dimensions of post-conflict nation building. Our aim is to understand possibilities for achieving gender-just peace characterized by the transformation of gender relations, as well as their obstacles. Feminist scholarship has captured complex, contested, and ambiguous dynamics of shifting gender relations in conflict and post-conflict settings in the everyday domain. Despite increasing understanding of women's agency and its limits, the entrenchment of dominant hierarchical norms at the intersection of gender and the nation remains puzzling. Everyday nationalism directs attention to mundane aspects of nationhood. It also offers a bottom–up perspective on top–down processes of "formal" nationalism and their interplay with everyday constructions of nationhood. The alignment between these bottom–up and top–down processes reveals how national ideologies are legitimized and hierarchical gender relations entrenched. We ask, does the public recognition of wartime sexual violence and women's suffering challenge the norms and habits of masculine nationhood and pave the way for a new start free of patriarchal hierarchies? Or does it entrench a gendered war "metanarrative" (Björkdahl & Mannergren Selimovic, 2015, p. 172) and with it, unequal gender relations? We study a public art installation about wartime sexual violence in Kosovo aimed at tackling the stigma and silence about wartime rape. The analysis is focused on how this artistic practice, as a symbol, discourse, and performance, as well as an intervention in the everyday domain, offers recognition of wartime sexual violence, and how this recognition responds to, or interacts with, existing gendered dynamics of nationhood. Drawing on Malešević (2013, p. 14), we argue that nationalism and nationhood transcend the public/private dichotomy by connecting institutions and organizations, such as public art installations, to everyday microinteractions. We show that the public endorsement of the art project and the acceptance of wartime sexual violence result in the recognition of the war crime but not the victim. Dynamics of everyday nationalism reinforce gender asymmetries and women's marginalization in a nation-building process even while their suffering is being acknowledged publicly. Twenty years after the war in Kosovo ended, justice for ethnic Albanian women victims of sexual violence is still largely elusive. Their suffering has been sidelined both in international criminal prosecutions as well as in hybrid domestic war crime trials. The recent adoption by Kosovo's parliament of a reparations law for wartime sexual and gender-based violence marks formal progress. But, its impact on actual redress for this wartime harm has been limited. One of the major obstacles for women coming forward to claim the reparations is the stigma surrounding wartime sexual violence. The stigma is steeped in gendered patriarchal mores playing themselves out in the politics of postwar peacebuilding within the victims' national community, and it pervades everyday life. By focusing on how an artistic intervention can promote justice for victims of wartime rape, we explore an avenue for supporting gender-just peacebuilding that is an alternative to women's activism, legal responses, and formal gender equality policies. Despite the "context-specific natures of claims of justice" (Murphy, 2017, p. 6), the case study of Kosovo reflects the typical pattern of gender-based harm and the challenges of building gender-just peace after a civil war. Therefore, our findings reveal everyday dynamics of gendering nation building and contribute to the wider understanding of how the redress for wartime sexual violence perpetuates gender-insensitive peace (Chinkin & Kaldor, 2013). Empirical research in this article draws on a range of sources. These include the analysis of the Thinking of You art installation, published interviews with the artist, reports of domestic and international media outlets (in Albanian and English), a documentary film about the installation with the same title (Mendoj Për Ty|Thinking of You–Documentary), and speeches by former president of Kosovo, Atifete Jahjaga. We first outline feminist perspectives on transitional justice and present the analytical gains of applying an everyday nationalism perspective to the study of gendered construction of nationhood. This is followed by a background section on the war, sexual and gender-based violence, and postwar stigma in Kosovo, as well as an overview of the art installation. The analysis is organized around three conceptual dimensions of everyday nationalism: symbols, discourse, and performance. Feminist attention to gender in transitional justice is a relatively new phenomenon (Nì Aoláin, 2012; Bell & O'Rourke, 2007; Baines, 2011). It is characterized, first and foremost, "by centralising gender in the analysis of the traditional concerns of transitional justice mechanisms" (Gyimah, 2009, pp. 20–21). As such, it represents a response to the previous neglect of women's experiences during and after the conflict (Simic, 2016a, p. 2). Scholars have shown that the nature of wartime violence against women is related to gendered constructions of a nation. The practice of post-conflict transitional justice in response to the legacy of sexual and gender-based violence provides an opportunity to address this gendered logic and these consequences of conflict. But it also has wider implications for how a nation is constructed after a conflict, including the women's place therein. As a war crime, sexual and gender-based violence reflects the gendered notion of the nation constructed through comparisons of a nation with a family, in which men and women have "natural" gender-specific roles (Anderson, 1991, p. 7; McClintock, 1991; Nagel, 1998; Skurski, 1994; Yuval-Davis, 1997; Žarkov, 2007). Conceived as metaphors, nation-as-woman and woman-as-nation become everyday battlegrounds of actual group struggles (Peterson, 1999, p. 47). The land, or body, and honour of the passive, feminized nation must be defended by males (Helms, 2013; Massad, 1995; Mosse, 1985; Peterson, 1999). Ethnosexual transgression, such as rape of one's homeland or women, is one of the most potent justifications for military intervention against ethnic "Others" (Nagel, 2003, p. 256). In sum, land and history, as Sofos (1996, p. 87) points out, "can be and are conquered over women's bodies." The end of a conflict and, in particular, the practice of transitional justice that recognizes gender-specific wartime violence are indicative of how gender relations within nation building are (re)constructed during peacebuilding. As with the nature of violence in conflict, the practice of transitional justice has also been revealed to be gendered. The omission of wartime sexual violence from transitional justice processes, whether retributive, such as international and domestic war crime trials or restorative, such as truth commissions, has resulted in a reckoning with past wrongs that has marginalized women's experiences of conflict (Kashyap, 2009; Nagy, 2008; Oosterveld, 2009). At the same time, in their lived environments, women often remain silent about wartime rape because of a risk and fear of stigmatization, ostracism, and even physical punishment by members of their own communities. Such stigmatization persists owing to normative, structural, and political factors (Graybill, 2001; Krog, 2001; Simic, 2016b). As a consequence, women's suffering is unacknowledged, impacting the prospects of redress for injustice—despite calls for a subtler understanding of silence as an agential act that is empowering (Porter, 2012, p. 35; Mannergren Selimovic, 2018). Speaking out about gender-based violence can also have a mixed outcome. The assertion of women's agency through advocacy about wartime rape, which may also include public testimony about their suffering, has resulted in normative and policy shifts at international and national levels (Patterson-Markowitz, Oglesby, & Marston, 2012). At the same time, it has also created different gendered dynamics. The sole focus on sexual violence has reduced a range of women's experiences of conflict to one dimension of harm endured by women (Heineman, 2011; Tabak, 2011; Turano, 2011), overlooking many different forms of victimhood such as sacrificing mothers of soldiers or being engaged as fighters (Cockburn, 1998; Griffin & Braidotti, 2002; Reilly, 2010, p. 239; Shadmi, 2000). Furthermore, gendered transitional justice, as a theory and practice, has prioritized analytically women in relation to men victims of sexual violence (Simic, 2016a). In accounting for "gendered peace" (Pankhurst, 2008), scholars have focused on the practice of transitional justice through a range of transitional justice mechanisms, as well as the contents of peace agreements and their gender-responsive provisions (Ellerby, 2016) and formal policies pursued by post-conflict states that instrumentalize justice for wartime rape (Loken, Lake, & Cronin-Furman, 2018). The understanding of the constraints on justice seeking constituted by everyday enactment of nationhood in a post-conflict environment remains a lacuna in this scholarship. We address this gap by heeding the need identified by Ní Aoláin (2012) to return the gaze to the cultural, material, and geopolitical sites where transitional justice is practiced. The theoretical perspective of everyday nationalism allows us to reveal how transitional justice is implicated in reproducing gender hierarchies in post-conflict nation building. Everyday nationalism provides an analytical lens through which to examine gender relations in nation building and their reordering, which may be messy and contingent. Everyday nationalism is a subfield in the study of nationalism that focuses on ordinary people and their agency in order to better understand the lived experience of nationalism (Knott, 2015, p. 1). It posits ordinary individuals as the co-constituents, participants, and consumers of national symbols, rituals, and identities (Knott, 2015). The concept enables us to investigate empirically how nationalism is constructed from below by examining ordinary relations, individuals, settings, and items. Scholars of the field examine how the nation is reproduced by "ordinary people doing ordinary things in their ordinary lives" (Fox, 2018, p. 862). Everyday nationalism is derived from Billig's banal nationalism, although the exact relationship between the two concepts is much debated (including a symposium on the topic in this journal1). Banal nationalism is an understanding of nationalism as a widespread ideology diffused to everyday experience, which results in the unconscious reproduction of the nation by citizens (Duchesne, 2018 p. 844). It reveals the taken for grantedness of nationhood, which it opens for analysis. Billig's approach regards nationalism exclusively as an ideology that can often unknowingly be reproduced by ordinary citizens (Duchesne, 844; Billig, 1995). Banal nationalism is, therefore, seen as inherently negative, and this prescribed normative dimension arguably restricts its analytical purchase. It overlooks broader political, social, and cultural effects of a variety of symbols, discourses, and performances of nationalism. Some of these symbols, discourses, and performances, as we show in our analysis in the case of justice for wartime sexual and gender-based violence, can advance gender-just peace that acknowledges gender-specific harm suffered by women. Applying everyday nationalism to the study of gender relations in nation building helps us understand the role of ordinary people and their agency while taking into account the complex and contingent nature of gender and nationalism (Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox, & Grancea, 2006; Fox & Miller-Idriss, 2008). Gender and the nation are both spoken, chosen, performed, and consumed (Fox & Miller-Idriss, 2008). Both are constructed and unstable categories that are continuously performed and reproduced (Peterson, 1999, p. 55). Gender relations in the domain of the everyday have been extensively examined by anthropologists. Immersion in women's daily lives as a method of scholarly inquiry of gender relations within a nation has revealed the difficulty, complexity, and ambiguity involved in the assertion of women's agency and recognition of their subjectivity. Helms (2013) has shown how Bosnian women activists obtained respect and standing by using essentialist representations of women strategically. New conflicts, which are a consequence of adjusting gender relations, have been exposed, along with their impact on relations between men and women, as well as between women. Aretxaga (1997) recounts how republican women's "Dirty Protest" in the Armagh women's prison in Northern Ireland in 1980 and 1981 addressed the marginalization of women's contribution to the national struggle by using the potent symbolism of menstrual blood, but the protest also caused a fissure in the feminist movement in Ireland. Anthropologists have captured multilayered processes of renegotiations of gender relations, having rejected linear accounts of assertion of women's agency, as, for example, Mookharjee (2015) did when depicting simultaneous processes of shaming and celebration of "birangonas"—the women who suffered gender-based violence in the 1971 Bangladesh war. Although revealing about women's daily struggles for equality within a political space of a nation, this scholarship has not engaged directly with theories of nations and nationalism. Rather, they have used nations and nationalism as concepts through which the feminist analysis of gendered structures, norms, and ideologies are refracted. In our analysis, we reverse the analytical gaze directed at gender relations. Underpinned by feminist theories that conceptualize gender "as a lived social relation; a location that is structural, symbolic and discursive" (McNay, 2004, p. 175), we apply the everyday nationalism perspective to reveal interactions in the realm of the everyday that reinforce subordinate subjectivities through the alignment of bottom–up and top–down constructions of the nation. The expression and contestation of the nation's symbols and discourses in everyday life is an integral part of such investigation (Goode & Stroup, 2015, p. 723). Ethnographic methods have been the most common way of studying everyday nationalism because they allow for a rich observation of the practices of everyday life and capture the lived experience of nationalism (Goode & Stroup, 2015; Hearn, 2007; Knott, 2015). But, as we demonstrate in our analysis, ethnography can also be limited by its microanalytical approach and easily overlooks and downplays the impact and interaction of processes both at the formal and at the informal level (Smith, 2008, p. 567). As Malešević (2013, p. 130) argues, institutional frameworks can come to constitute the intimate world of ordinary individuals, constraining their agency. Consequently, the analysis of the "active construction" of nationalism (Mann & Fenton, 2009, p. 518) in a "naturally occurring" setting of the mundane also ought to investigate the complex dialectic between top–down and bottom–up processes and agents (De Cillia, Reisigl, & Wodak, 1999, p. 153). We can, therefore, simultaneously analyze "formal" nationalism, connected to the nation-state; and "informal" nationalism, associated with collective events, civil society, and ritual celebrations (Eriksen, 1993). Approaching this interplay from the everyday perspective, we reveal how nationalism becomes entrenched. The approach speaks to an identified gap in the everyday nationalism literature, that of the relationship between nationalism, domestic political regimes, and legitimacy (Goode & Stroup, 2015, p. 721). We draw on Malešević's (2013) theoretical framework to show that the top–down and bottom–up are mutually constitutive. Mundane, everyday nationalism could not exist without the elaborate institutions and organizations of "official" nationalism (Malešević, 2013, p. 131). Nationalism's vitality is based on the cultivation of an ideal institutional context, premised on long-term organization and ideological build-up, which allow a mundane and habitual sense of attachment to a nation to proliferate (Malešević, 2013, p. 140). Expressions of nationalism at the everyday level are, therefore, expressions of attachment to a specific social organization, such as the nation-state (Malešević, 2013). From this perspective, the art installation is an institutional site where nationalism can be reproduced at the everyday level (Malešević, 2013, pp. 124–125). Within such a framework, ordinary people are agents that reproduce the nation and nationalism, while their microinteractional lifeworld is influenced by top–down institutions. Individuals and institutions perform, consume, and frame nationhood in different ways, but both place structural limits to what or how widely they can choose (Malešević, 2013, p. 130). Nationalism can become both powerful and taken for granted only if it penetrates the microworld of family, friendships, neighborhoods, local communities, and kinship networks (Malešević, 2013, p. 151). In short, the top–down and bottom–up are tightly woven. Ultimately, the framework of everyday nationalism allows us to glean a different understanding of the obstacles to justice for victims of wartime sexual violence by analyzing gender relations within social processes of nation building. Essentialist representations of women in nation building can limit women's agency, but they can also provide opportunities for engagement and action in the "male" public sphere, as Helms (2013) and Peteet (1991) have shown. They open identifiable opportunities for women to mobilize and act within nationalist constructs, which give their efforts legitimacy and ultimately counter gender norms (Fox, 1996). How these processes unfold and with what effect can be studied by analyzing art as a political and creative practice and tracing how gender and the nation intersect through symbols, discourse, and performance. The following section provides the context for studying these dynamics from the everyday nationalism perspective with an overview of the Kosovo conflict, the pattern of sexual and gender-based violence, and the challenges encountered by women victims of wartime rape. Kosovo was a self-governing autonomous province within Serbia in the former Yugoslavia but without the same rights as the republics: Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević incited ethnic nationalism in Serbia, underpinned by the ideology of controlling all "Serbian lands." This nationalism was centred on Kosovo, the mythical cradle of Serbian nationhood. The policy of all-Serb unification led to bloodshed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile, repressive rule that privileged the Serb minority and oppressed the Albanian majority was instituted in Kosovo. Albanians mounted peaceful resistance that lasted for nearly a decade (Kostovicova, 2005). The worsening human rights situation in Kosovo, combined with a lack of international support for the Albanian nonviolent movement advocating Kosovo's independence, led to the emergence of violent resistance by the Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s (Judah, 2000, pp. 135–197). The Kosovo war broke out in the autumn of 1998. Serbian security and paramilitary forces mounted an ethnic-cleansing operation against Albanians in Kosovo, prompting NATO to intervene militarily in the spring of 1999 to stop the violence. Sexual and gender-based violence by Serbian forces was pervasive during the Kosovo war. Albanian women and girls of all ages were victims of sexual assault in their homes and local communities. Men were as well, although to a lesser extent. Rape camps were also established throughout Kosovo. Estimates about the number of women affected range between 10,000 and 40,000 (Farnsworth, 2008, pp. 13–14). However, these figures remain uncertain. This is in part because of Albanian women's reluctance to talk publicly about their suffering due to social isolation and stigma. The NATO intervention lasted for 78 days until June 12, 1999. It ended the Serbian rule in Kosovo, but Kosovo did not gain independence. The province became a protectorate, administered by the United Nations and other international institutions: the European Union (EU), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and NATO from 1999 until 2008. The Albanian quest for Kosovo's independence continued. In November 2005, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, appointed Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, as his special envoy to oversee negotiations between Kosovo Albanians and the Serbian government. The effort failed to produce an agreement: while the Albanians insisted on independence for Kosovo, the Serbs demanded that it should remain within Serbia. Following the failure of the negotiations, a UN proposal known as the Ahtisaari Plan ensued, calling for the supervised independence of Kosovo. Kosovo Albanians went ahead and declared independence on February 17, 2008 with the support of major Western powers: the United States and the majority of EU member states. The EU's "supervision" of Kosovo ended 4 years later. To date, 116 states have recognized Kosovo as an independent state, while Serbia, with strong support from Russia, continues to oppose Kosovo's independence. Kosovo has been unable to secure a seat in the UN. The continued contestation of Kosovo's independence keeps the Albanian national struggle alive, and it defines the political environment in which claims for post-conflict transitional justice are made. The issue of gender-just peace is integral to those efforts. Studies of nationalism and memory in the context of Kosovo's postwar transition have highlighted the role of historically entrenched, traditional values in processes of social change (Ströhle, 2010). Schwandner-Sievers (2013) argued that international efforts at identity building cannot compete with these values, often expressed at the level of the everyday. Identity building and remembrance in Kosovo, both local and international, are entangled with nationalist discourses (Visoka, 2016), which reinforce patriarchy (Krasniqi, 2007; Perritt, 2008). Efforts dealing with sexual violence in Kosovo have struggled to disentangle gender from ethnicity and have often appealed to local culture, as well as to international norms, for support (Di Lellio, 2016). We lack an understanding of why local and everyday responses to wartime sexual violence (are unable to) challenge dominant gender hierarchies in the process of nation building. In postwar Kosovo, wartime sexual violence has remained a deeply sensitive issue. The commission of wartime sexual violence was written out of the master narrative and collective memory of the 1998–1999 Kosovo war in the immediate postwar period. Stigma associated with wartime rape "overshadow(s) survivors" (Amnesty International Report, 2018, p. 324). Women survivors have by and large kept silent about their suffering. The Thinking of You art installation by artist Alketa Xhafa-Mripa attempted to confront the stigma. The installation took place on June 12, 2015, coinciding with the Kosovo Liberation Day, when the NATO intervention ended Serbian rule in Kosovo. This piece of public art was performed by hanging some 5,000 skirts and dresses from washing lines in the main football stadium in Kosovo's capital, Prishtina. The Kosovo-born artist Alketa Xhafa-Mripa and the producer of the installation, the United States-based academic Anna Di Lellio, travelled around Kosovo to collect skirts and dresses, which were donated by members of the public, as well as local elites. Skirts and dresses were chosen as small, everyday symbols of femininity that could easily be donated by both women and men. They also highlighted the universalist goals of the installation (BBC, 2016). The project was supported, both personally and institutionally, by the president of Kosovo at the time, Atifete Jahjaga. She served as the third president of Kosovo from 2011 to 2016 and was the first nonpartisan candidate and the youngest female head of state in Southeast Europe. She came to power following a political crisis2 and emerged as a consensus candidate supported by ideologically opposed political parties in Kosovo. Empowered by the political role, she took upon herself to confront the gender injustice surrounding wartime sexual violence in Kosovo. Her involvement marked a significant change in the approach to the issue in Kosovo that had previously been almost exclusively championed by civil society. Other than donating a dress herself and promoting the installation (as well as the subsequent documentary), Jahjaga also provided support to the project through the National Council on Survivors of Sexual Violence, which she established in 2014. The project also attracted international support from high-profile political figures, from Cherie Blair (wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair) and Lady Anelay (at the time, the United Kingdom's special representative on preventing sexual violence in conflict) to Western entertainment stars (for example, musician Rita Ora and actress Eliza Dushku). Xhafa-Mripa dedicated the installation to Kosovo's survivors of sexual violence. The installation referred specifically to sexual and gender-based violence in Kosovo, but the artist believed it spoke a universal, visual language that could be understood by everyone (Dickinson, 2016). The stated motivation behind the project was to achieve recognition of the issue since rape victims were being stigmatized in the Albanian society. Members of the public and political elites helped hang skirts and dresses, which was seen as a way to encourage the discussion of private issues more openly by "airing dirty laundry in public" (Women's Views on News, 2015). The collection of skirts, the promotion of the installation, its preparation (the hanging of the skirts), and the day of the installation were featured in a documentary film Mendoj Për Ty|Thinking of You–Documentary produced by Anna di Lellio and Fitim Shala. The skirts installation should be seen as one of a number of public activities leading to a degree of recognition of wartime rape in Kosovo. As a project that received great international publicity, it overshadowed earlier local initiatives aimed at confronting the stigma and seeking justice for sexual violence, such as the Kosovo Women's Network protests, which marked International Women's Day and demanded justice for survivors of wartime sexual violence on March 8, 2012. Kosovo has since made some formal progress in the recognition of wartime sexual violence (Chick, 2016; Ristic, 2017). The amendments to the law on war victims included women survivors of war rape, who are now entitled to reparations (Kosovo Assembly, 2014). This legislative breakthrough also has gendered dynamics. Only a handful of women have applied for reparations so far and whether more will overcome the stigma and claim their rights is yet to be seen. Additionally, the range of entitlements, including the payout, for wartime rape victims is much less than those for other recognized victims of war. Women have thus been positioned as an "Other" within a nation and its hierarchy of suffering during the conflict. Consequently, women survivors of wartime sexual violence have found it difficult to reveal what they experienced, out of fear of being ostracized by families and communities (Halili, 2017). As Haxhiaj (2017) has observed, "stuck in the prison of stigma, victims see no freedom." Art is a powerful form of storytelling with the potential to counter stigmatization by invoking empathy through identification. Excluded within the nationalist discourse, it is in art that stories of women survivors of sexual violence found a place. One example is the film Tri Dritare dhe Një Varje (Three Windows and a Hanging) directed by Isa Qosja (2014), which speaks against stigmatization and gender inequality in everyday life in Kosovo. A further example, Fëllanzat (Blackbirds) by Gazmend Bërlajolli (2017), is a short story based on actual testimonies by women. In this study, we are interested in the power of public art to confront stigma and acknowledge victims. We analyze the Thinking of You art installation to reveal how Kosovo is constructed as a nation at an everyday level through the interplay of performance, discourse, and symbols of the artistic practice. The everyday nationalism perspective allows us to capture the mundane elements