Recognising Diffuse and Cumulative Harm in Post-Conflict Settings

The most pronounced critique directed at the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) Women, Peace and Security agenda (WPS) over its 25-year trajectory has been directed at its singling out of sexual violence for specific attention. Through five distinctive resolutions that focus specifically on sexual violence, gender has been placed at a distance from how the UNSC understands and addresses this issue. The ensuing critique has drawn attention to many of the resulting consequences: in resolutions that were meant to advance women’s interests, the agenda has instead advanced a normative occlusion of  the multiplicity of gendered harm that many women may experience across and within armed conflicts.

The UNSC’s need to conform women’s experiences of conflict to its own securitisation agenda has been pointed to. That its focus on gendered harm has been primarily on the conflict moment i.e collective actions of armed actors within periods of warfare, with much less focus on what happens afterwards, has received less attention. While there remains need to advance women’s leadership, critiques of the post-conflict focus of the WPS agenda over the past 25-years has shown that it has moved little past advancing the idea of peacebuilding as a performative role for women.

Recognition however, that inequalities and discrimination, including VAW as not just a feature of post-conflict contexts but as constitutive of peacebuilding, has been largely absent. Learning from Northern Ireland is instructive in this regard. In a context that is 27-years post its peace agreement, the continued existence of paramilitarism in Northern Ireland is estimated to represent a clear and present danger in communities where they are located. Research during and since the conflict’s end has, significantly, evidenced the sustained connections between paramilitarism and women’s experiences of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). That work and the Independent Reporting Commission for Northern Ireland have pointed to the ways that these groups ‘coercively control’ communities they are present in.

Coercive control has been increasingly acknowledged as a distinctive form of IPV, as well as a dynamic that underpins and enables abuse and control. Coercive control is generally shown to be a cumulative rather than an incident-specific harm, and therefore materially and conceptually hard to recognise, because it is often a dynamic that is invisible in plain sight.

Research on paramilitary-related coercive control undertaken with the Foyle Family Justice Centre between 2020-2023 evidences that in environments where paramilitarism is present, the broader dynamic of social control by paramilitary groups at community and societal levels constitutes invisible layers in women’s experiences of harm.

A woman interviewed for the research described how there is harm to be found simply in the ‘knowing’ of ‘what he was capable of doing’, and in how his paramilitary membership meant that it was ‘not one individual who is trying to coerce you’.  Another woman for example, was introduced by her partner to his group of men who were given roles that included surveillance of her movements, as well as enactment of punishment when she stepped out of line with his demands.

A woman who was in a relationship with a man whom she later learned had feigned his membership of a local paramilitary group, shared how he deliberately used paramilitarism in the abuse: ‘He raped me and he physically abused me. And because he did that, he said “now you can see what we are capable of”.

For those living in communities affected by paramilitarism, a shared and common knowledge of past and present paramilitary capabilities informs day-to-day choices. Wider research has shown the significant and enduring degree of paramilitarism that now includes ‘punishment’ attacks and shootings, forced drug dealing and debt controls, commercial exploitation and extortion, loan sharking, protection rackets and sexual exploitation and abuse that characterises the ways these groups socially control communities.

‘Knowing what they are capable of’ is significant thereby in the efficacy of the micro-regulation of women’s day-to-day and personhood, which are shown in coercive control literatures to have significant injurious and controlling effect. In this case, it informs how women experience harm and importantly, how they respond to it.

The research evidenced that paramilitary-related coercive control operates on a dualistic and layered basis: the chronic presence of paramilitarism at community levels relies on conventions of threats, intimidation and punishment to generate a coercive environment of implicit control. This is drawn on by women’s partners as the basis for explicit control in the relationship, such as threats of involving the group if she does not comply with demands.

There is an entire ecology of not-so-observationally evident harm that, because it is daily experience, remains invisible to much of the global debates on conflict-related violence against women. International policy instruments like the WPS agenda are failing to grasp phenomenon such as this, and therefore, to grasp the fullest extent of gendered harm in conflict.

It is important to note that it has been incredibly challenging for feminists to gain recognition of specific incidents or acts of gendered violence, including sexual violence, that occur during conflict. Continued research and adequate political response to that violence remains a significant need, illuminating the emptiness of pronouncements against sexual violence made by the UNSC.

In contexts where peace is pronounced, for some women such as one in this research ‘…the fear of what he could do to me with regards to the paramilitary links was worse than all the beatings, all the sexual violence’. The ways that gendered harm may be ‘chronic rather than episodic’ and that intimidation, isolation, coercion and control of women underpin emerging social ordering in post conflict environments requires much more attention.

Aisling Swaine, Professor of Peace, Security and International Law, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin