What Place for Gender Mainstreaming in the EU’s Framework on Support to Transitional Justice?

Abstract

In 2015 the European Union (EU) Commission published the EU’s Framework on Support to Transitional Justice, its long-anticipated first policy document which exclusively discusses the EU’s conceptualization of and approach towards transitional justice. This article examines this document from a gender perspective situating the analysis within the emerging body of critical feminist literature on involvement of the international community in support for gendered transitional justice and peacebuilding within the framework of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda. It concludes that the EU’s explicit commitment to gender mainstreaming in its approach towards transitional justice without the subsequent development of a clear strategy to achieve the stated goals fits within a broader international tendency and that in order to advance feminist research in the field of EU, gender and transitional justice scholars should build on the emerging body of research regarding the instrumentalization of feminism for international security goals by infusing it with insights from critical (feminist) global political economy research, which inquires the relations between international interventions and the economic interests of dominant international actors.