The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies while Redressing Human Rights Violations

by Ruth Rubio-Marin (Editor)

Overview

Reparation programs seeking to provide for victims of gross and systematic human rights violations are becoming an increasingly frequent feature of transitional and post-conflict processes. Given that women represent a very large proportion of the victims of these conflicts and authoritarianism, it makes sense to examine whether reparation programs can be designed to redress women more fairly and efficiently and seek to subvert gender hierarchies that often antecede the conflict. Focusing on themes such as reparations for victims of sexual and reproductive violence, reparations for children and other family members, as well as gendered understandings of monetary, symbolic, and collective reparations, this text gathers information about how past or existing reparation projects dealt with gender issues, identifies best practices to the extent possible, and articulates innovative approaches and guidelines to the integration of a gender perspective in the design and implementation of reparations for victims of human rights violations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780511698903
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/31/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ruth Rubio-Marín is a Chair in Comparative Public Law at the European University Institute, in Florence, Italy, and holds a tenured position in constitutional law at the Law School of Seville. She is author and editor of several books, including Immigration as a Democratic Challenge (Cambridge University Press, 2000), The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (2006).

Table of Contents

Introduction: a gender and reparations taxonomy Ruth Rubio-Marín; 1. Gender and violence in focus: a background for gender justice in reparations Margaret Urban Walker; 2. The gender of reparations in transitional societies Ruth Rubio-Marín; 3. Reparation of sexual and reproductive violence: moving from codification to implementation Colleen Duggan and Ruth Jacobson; 4. Reparations as a means for recognizing and addressing crimes and grave rights violations against girls and boys during situations of armed conflict and under authoritarian and dictatorial regimes Dyan Mazurana and Khristopher Carlson; 5. Repairing family members: gross human rights violations and communities of harm Ruth Rubio-Marín, Clara Sandoval, and Catalina Díaz; 6. Tort theory, microfinance, and gender equity convergent in pecuniary reparations Anita Bernstein; 7. Gender, memorialization, and symbolic reparations Brandon Hamber and Ingrid Palmary; 8. Gender and collective reparations in the aftermath of conflict and political repression Ruth Rubio-Marín.

Editorial Reviews

This book makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the gendered implications of transition for women. It sets out to map and expose the gendered terrain of reparations, and exceeds its own ambitions in the process. It cogently demonstrates the varied dimensions of reparations and how the giving or exclusion of remedies for women is an integral part of their integration into societies experiencing change. Reparations are revealed as multifaceted and underutilised with detrimental effects for women. In exploring not only the limits of current conceptual and policy thinking but also different ways for conceiving repair the book demonstrates that without regard to reparation, transition is not transformation for women. The editing is outstanding and draws the essays together in a cohesive and well-knit whole. In telling us about reparation the book succeeds in doing far more, namely it re-conceives the notion of transition itself and the benefits it brings for women.”
—Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Dorsey and Whitney Chair in Law, University of Minnesota Law School and Director Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster.


“This book is a “must have” for anyone interested in women’s human rights or in reparation and justice issues. It looks at reparations and gender with a multidisciplinary approach and pulls together experts from several fields to consider gender based violence and ways to redress it, exploring past and innovative ways to provide reparations to the millions of victims of gender crimes worldwide. Rubio-Marin’s book is a very important and useful complement to her volume of case studies on the same topic, What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (SSRC 2006).”
—Kelly Askin, Senior Legal Officer, International Justice, Open Society Justice Initiative

From the Publisher