Post-war Contexts Research Articles

Reconstruction versus transformation: Post-war education and the struggle for gender equity in Sierra Leone

Abstract In post-war contexts, education is widely regarded as essential not only for civic reconciliation, but also as a key force for gender equity. In Sierra Leone, however, despite enhanced educational opportunities for girls, much of the emphasis on post-war educational reconstruction is unlikely to rectify gender inequities that remain entrenched within mainstream schooling and in the broader social context. Yet the capacity of education to contribute to gender-based change has not been entirely muted. Several women's associations are supporting girls’ education as integral to economic and political actions aimed at challenging the hegemony of patriarchy and gendered violence. What remains to be seen is whether these discrete efforts can foster a women's movement capable of altering the structures of patriarchal power in Sierra Leone.

Editors' Note

Editors' Note Jean Allman and Antoinette Burton Along the Axis of the Nation: Some Twentieth-Century Histories Each of the essays in this issue uses the history of women to pivot the nation on a different axis—revolutionary, geopolitical, anticolonial, associational, and philanthropic—in order to register both the enduring power of national identity and those moments when collective identities emerge to challenge if not to trump it. We begin with Choi Chatterjee’s essay on American women who covered the Russian Revolution: journalists and travelers who bore witness to one of the most cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. The dispatches they sent home offered different perspectives on the nationalizing effects of the revolutionary upheaval than their more famous male counterparts. Rather than taking a panoptical approach, they most often recorded the view from the margins, producing narrative accounts that emphasized the dispossessed, the hungry, the everyday disruptions—offering in the process an explicit critique of the nationalizing narratives produced by revolutionaries and the emergent Bolshevik state. Such totalizing impulses were, Chatterjee implies, not merely nationalist but highly gendered, as John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World amply illustrates. American women who witnessed 1917 and its aftermath offered counterpoints to his accounts as well, often addressing a middle-brow public in venues such as the Saturday Evening Post and impressing on men and women readers both the difference that women’s reportage meant to assessments of the successes and failures of the revolution. Helen Laville and Jacqueline Castledine propel us into the post-1945 period with essays that track American women’s role in the establishment of the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the convergence of African American and black South African women’s activism in the Cold War period, respectively. Laville anatomizes the halting process whereby the U.S. government and some U.S. women came to terms with the power of internationalism—which was at once an inheritance of the prewar landscape but was also subject to radically new pressures in the context of decolonization, and a very freighted public struggle over what exactly the role of U.S. women should be in a newly postcolonial world. Castledine, in turn, takes up one particular strand of this larger story by focusing on the short-lived linkages between Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an African American women’s group, and the African National Congress Women’s League in South Africa. The linchpins here were Eslanda Goode Robeson and Bertha Mkhize. Mkhize was by far the more militant. Rooted as she was in trade union organizing, she viewed labor law protest as the vehicle for anti-Apartheid politics. Robeson’s career was largely shaped by the celebrity [End Page 7] of her famous husband, though she was instrumental in the founding of the Council on African Affairs, which forwarded the anti-Apartheid cause and was one vehicle for feminist anticolonial solidarity. Both the Sojourners and the CAA were objects of FBI surveillance and McCarthyist attacks precisely because of the threat to national sovereignty that their collaborations represented. The last two essays in our issue extend into the 1960s and beyond, highlighting the struggle for political and social reform in two different postwar contexts. Wendy Pojmann analyzes the associational work of Italian women in the Unione del Donne Italiane and the Centro Italiano Femminile. Though they did not always agree, they exerted significant pressure on Italian party politics—a domain where national/ist concerns were paramount in the Cold War world. The UDI and the CIF endeavored to keep women’s issues—labor, education, pensions, prostitution—to the fore, a task made somewhat easier by the fact that established political parties needed women’s votes. Jennifer Mittelstadt follows a rather different story in the postwar U.S., where she demonstrates how the Field Foundation spent several decades supporting efforts of southern African American women to address civil and women’s rights issues through what she calls “Left-liberal” philanthropy. In many respects the history of Field in this period (1960s—1980s) is a microcosm of the national story of liberal reform in the years between Brown v. Board of Education and the rise of Reaganomics...

Management of spatially extensive natural resources in postwar contexts: working with the peace process

While extensively occurring natural resources play a fundamental role in the survival and recovery of postwar populations, their management is not presently part of the operational priorities in a peace process. Dependence on naturally occurring food, fuel, water, secure locations, and products that can be obtained and sold quickly for dislocated, war-weary populations is a primary approach to postwar livelihoods. The peace process, however, focuses on the logistical and institutional aspects of security, demobilization, reintegration and humanitarian efforts. The result is profound degradation of the spatially extensive resources necessary for longer-term recovery. The primary reason for the inattention to resource degradation in a peace process is that conventional conservation approaches do not fit with the priorities of a peace process or attend to the immediate needs of a postwar population; designed as they are for stable, peaceful settings. This article focuses on the need to derive postwar natural resource management approaches which can work with the in-place priorities of a peace process. Four such approaches are suggested, with successful examples from specific countries.

Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (review)

Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland, by Diane Wolf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 391 pp. $21.95. The Holocaust units I created for middle school students always included stories of survivors. From time to time we were fortunate enough to have a survivor visit the school for a personal talk. This was in the 90s, when more and more survivor stories were being collected, published, and made available to public school teachers. From these stories, a paradigmatic survivor emerged, one who had been liberated from one of the many camps, one who had somehow managed to defy death only to find that most if not all of her/his family members had been exterminated. As Holocaust scholarship continues into the 21st century, scholars are examining more closely kinds of survivor stories - stories that challenge traditional notions of survival. In Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland, sociologist Diane Wolf takes the reader on a disturbing journey into the world of hidden children. The book is based on over seventy interviews conducted between 1998 and 2001 with adults who were hidden as children in Holland. Wolf contends that only by examining both wartime and postwar contexts will we begin to understand the full effects of the Shoah. She uses a sociological lens to study these other survivors and their childhood memories, with the emphasis on what occurred in the days and years after the war as they dealt with their own war experiences as well as those of their parents and caregivers. While liberation meant one thing to those who survived the horrors of the camps, for hidden children liberation often ushered in yet another ordeal. As Wolf's title suggests, the now ubiquitous story of Anne Frank, however powerful and enlightening, does not represent the experiences of most child survivors from the Netherlands. Beyond Anne Frank begins with a critical history of the ways in which survivor stories, and in particular the role of child survivor stories, contribute to our present understanding of the Holocaust. Wolf points out that most of the scholarly work examining the experiences of hidden children in the Netherlands focuses on Jewish orphans, bringing to light the activities of the Dutch Guardian Commission for War Foster Children (OPK) which made decisions about where and with whom Jewish orphans would be housed. Wolf offers a concise look into the relationship between the Dutch government and its Jews during the period 1940-45; unlike the popular image of the Dutch tolerance suggested by Anne Frank's story, the most recent literature suggests that Dutch citizens were far more apathetic, even to the point of allowing the Nazis to deport and murder their own citizens. Only recently has the Dutch government, which for many years perpetuated the myth that the government acted in the best interests of its Jewish citizens, finally acknowledged its negligence. The chapters that present the actual stories of hidden children form the heart and soul of Beyond Anne Frank. Although Wolf documents their experiences in hiding, she found that the most common refrain from hidden children was my war began after the war. The interviews are a powerful demonstration of how the Holocaust continued - and continues - to affect the lives and families of survivors. …

When the War Was Over, Little Changed

This article explores the psychosocial effects of women's prolonged exposure to civil war in the center of Mozambique. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, 91 women were assessed for posttraumatic stress symptoms and psychosocial indicators of ill health. The results indicate that for the majority of the women in this study, traumatic experiences are sequential processes. Their ill health ranges from symptoms of posttraumatic stress to episodes of spirit possession (gamba), affecting women's capacities to conceive and raise children, and marginalizing their social position. A careful analysis of the specific problems and needs of women in postwar contexts is recommended, along with a systematic examination of the effectiveness of the available resources that may play a role in boosting trauma recovery in this group of women.

Attributing Value: evaluating success and failure in post-war reconstruction

External analysts are already trying to evaluate the impact of the reconstruction strategies of the occupying powers in Iraq. However, those with long experience in this field caution against a rush to judgement and emphasise that it will be the Iraqis themselves who will eventually make a value judgement on how the occupation has affected their nation. The paper seeks to define a possible approach to facilitating such an evaluation at the appropriate time. Study of current evaluation theory and practice leads to the conclusion that aid evaluation, particularly in post-war contexts, tends to be almost exclusively geared to the purposes of project accountability and performance. Thus it largely fails to question the culturally and ideologically determined assumptions of value which underpin post-war reconstruction interventions. As a result a satisfactory methodology for the evaluation of the long-term impact has not been developed. Concluding that a participatory approach is the key to developing such a methodology, the methodological challenges to participatory evaluation are defined, paying particular attention to approaches, attitudes and indicators. These challenges are then practically demonstrated through case studies of project evaluation in Burundi, sector evaluation in Mozambique and an interim country evaluation in Iraq. This evidence suggests that participatory methods enable understanding of both the visible effects of war and reconstruction and the invisible, emotional and attitudinal changes which are the determining factors in developing a harmonious nation.

UN peace operations, INGOs, NGOs, and promoting the rule of law: exploring the intersection of international and local norms in different postwar contexts

The challenge for UN peace missions promoting the rule of law is not only to adapt international norms to changing contexts or local laws which are not consistent with international human rights standards. It is also to understand, first, that, in many contexts, the local law is no more than on paper somewhere – which has nothing to due with the reality and the informal rules which have been developed. This is usually associated with a certain number of collective representations regarding the figure of the state, the judicial apparatus and the police. Second, the basis for the establishment of the rule of law is the result of an encounter, an outcome rather than a given. The rule of law cannot be constructed without integrating local actors’ different frames of reference and organization, with all their historical baggage, including their relation to the universal. The essay evaluates the interaction between global and local NGO actors to evaluate how norms are formed and implemented.

‘The Time of Vishniac’: Photographs of Pre-War East European Jewry in Post-War Contexts

‘The Time of Vishniac’: Photographs of Pre-War East European Jewry in Post-War Contexts

War and Peace in the Strategy of the Communist Party of Greece, 1945–1949

Using archival sources that only recently have become available, this article fo-cuses on the interplay between the concepts of war and peace in the strategy of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) during the Greek Civil War of the late 1940s. The article demonstrates that the choices facing the KKE and its opponents changed quite dramatically in the period from 1945 to 1949. The active role of Great Britain in Greek domestic affairs and the relatively limited role of the Soviet nion meant that the KKE was increasingly ostracized in the international community. The unwillingness of the Greek Liberal Party to forge a political alliance with the KKE prompted the Communists to resume their armed struggle for power. This article presents the alternatives facing the KKE in light of the postwar domestic and international contexts.

Entre Nous, Female Eroticism, and the Narrative of Jewish Erasure

ABSTRACT Although grounded in wartime and immediate postwar contexts, Entre Nous has been critiqued primarily for its portrayal of ambiguous female eroticism to the exclusion of how such eroticism is linked via the film's narrative structure to the Jewish Holocaust, the French collaboration, and U.S. transnationalist hegemony. This paper takes up an examination and explication of this narratological linkage as well as theorizes the determinants of its persistent critical ignoring.