Martin und Grabska

Ellen Martin (ODI London; Humanitarian Policy Group): Gender, Violence and Survival in Juba, South Sudan

Abstract: The signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 marked the end of 22 years of civil war in Southern Sudan between the government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). Since then, efforts have been made to promote equal citizenship rights, with an emphasis on women's inequality in society and the importance of women's empowerment during peace building efforts. There are many areas where women have unequal positions in society, and clearly, women have traditionally not been able to exercise their full citizenship rights, and very few have held official positions or had the freedom to exercise the right of political participation. However, during more than two decades of war the majority of Southern Sudanese, both men and women, were prevented from exercising these rights. Current approaches fail to recognise the levels of disenfranchisement and exclusion felt by many, not just by women but also by young men in particular, and risk reinforcing negative patterns of need and violence. As the presentation will argue, broader gender analysis, one that considers the needs of both men and women, can help inform more strategic peace building programmes that recognise the diversity of people's needs and vulnerabilities.

Ellen Martin is a research officer with the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) at ODI, London. Her current research focuses on displacement in urban areas in South Sudan (Yei), Afghanistan (Kabul) and Somalia (Bosasso).

Katarzyna Grabska (Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute Basel, Switzerland): The practice of everyday feminism: war-time displacement, violence and post-war settlement in southern Sudanese women’s experiences.

Gendered divisions of labour and gendered experiences of everyday life are common knowledge within any society. However, to state that women and men experience war, displacement and post-war return and settlement differently cuts short of the gendered politics of everyday life under abrupt often violent conditions. It is rather how these experiences and memories of narratives of these experiences are operationalised, politicised and used within the context of the emergence of a new independent state of Southern Sudan.

This paper presents narratives of everyday life experienced by women during different stages of the war-time migration and post-war settlement in Southern Sudan (1983-2005). Conceptualising war-time displacement as a catalyst of social change, this presentation explores the experiences of return of the displaced southern Sudanese Nuer women to Ler in Western Upper Nile in the aftermath of recent war. It is based on ethnographic research among the displaced in Kenya and in Southern Sudan. It considers the narratives and experiences of everyday struggles of women in the war-zones, during displacement and in the post-war setting. It argues that being a feminist comes often through everyday struggles with the unjust patriarchal relations, in invisible and often not conscious struggles for greater autonomy, freedom of choice and need to survive. As the experiences of some of the women in Ler show, to see partial truths of who we are as women, men, girls and boys, is to see beyond the hegemonic and dominant categories of gendered images, and rather to extend the spectrum of possibilities, risks and challenges of being a social woman or a social man.

Katarzyna Grabska is a postdoctoral research fellow with the National Research Centre North-South (NCCR) at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland. She holds a PhD in development studies/anthropology from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on livelihood strategies, access to rights and social change among forcibly displaced populations. She has done extensive ethnographic research among southern Sudanese refugees in Egypt and Kenya as well as among Nuer communities in southern Sudan. In particular, she was interested in changes in gender and generational relations in the context of displacement, war-time migration and post-war return. This presentation is based on her doctoral fieldwork carried out among southern Sudanese refugees in the camps in Kenya and returnees in Southern Sudan. Her current research examines migration, mobility and movement as governed by regional and national policies in West Africa and Central Asia.