The politics of sexual violence in the Kachin conflict in Myanmar

Jenny Hedström,Elisabeth Olivius

doi:10.1080/14616742.2020.1862690

Jenny Hedström, Elisabeth Olivius

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2020.1862690

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Abstract

ABSTRACT Conflict-related sexual violence has been the focus of significant international activism and policy attention. International legal norms and frameworks have evolved to recognize it as a war crime, and a representation of sexual violence as a “weapon of war” is now widely endorsed. This article examines how international norms about conflict-related sexual violence are adopted and utilized in multiple ways in the armed conflict in Kachin state in northern Myanmar. Throughout decades of civil war, international norms on sexual violence have constituted key resources for international advocacy and awareness raising by local women’s rights activists. Further, activists have drawn on international norms to effect changes in gendered relations of power within their own communities. However, international norms on sexual violence in conflict have also been effectively used as tools for ethno-nationalist identity politics, rallying support behind the armed insurgency and mobilizing women’s unpaid labor in the service of war. Thus, international norms on conflict-related sexual violence have simultaneously opened up space for women’s empowerment and political agency and reproduced gendered forms of insecurity and marginalization. Exploring these contradictions and complexities, this analysis generates novel insights into the politics of international norms in contexts of armed conflict.

Highlights

Sexual violence in armed conflict has in recent decades been the focus of significant activism and policy attention
This article examines the political use of international norms on conflict-related sexual violence in the context of the armed conflict in Kachin state in northern Myanmar, and analyzes its local effects on gendered relations of power as well as on the dynamics of the armed conflict
Women’s norm-translation activism is making global norms – such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) – relevant and useful as instruments of social transformation in a variety of contexts (Zwingel 2016). This perspective is key to understanding how Kachin women’s rights activists have actively worked to translate and make use of international norms on conflict-related sexual violence, and to examining the forms of change they have been able to achieve as a result

Summary

Introduction

Women’s norm-translation activism is making global norms – such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security (WPS) – relevant and useful as instruments of social transformation in a variety of contexts (Zwingel 2016) This perspective is key to understanding how Kachin women’s rights activists have actively worked to translate and make use of international norms on conflict-related sexual violence, and to examining the forms of change they have been able to achieve as a result.. These analytical perspectives help us to explore how international norms provide opportunities for challenging women’s inequality and insecurity and constitute key resources for political projects with very different goals and effects

Methods and material

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Notes on contributors