Forging Ahead without an Affirmative Action Policy: Female Politicians in Sierra Leone's Post‐War Electoral Process
In contemporary post‐conflict Sierra Leone, women have managed to secure 13.5 per cent of seats in parliament – without affirmative action in place, thanks to women's groups' and coalitions' mobilisation and activism. While the political resistance to Sierra Leone having a quota was high, the women's movement has succeeded in forcing the political parties and the government to recognise that it is no longer politically viable to sidestep women's rights, should they wish to capitalise on women's voting power. As women's organisations, in particular the 50/50 group, continue the struggle to introduce a quota, the challenge for Sierra Leonean women is how to ensure that the quota project is not hijacked by the male‐dominated political establishment. To this aim, this article examines the ongoing efforts to politically consciencise women parliamentarians, society and political parties.
'They Call Me Warrior': The Legacy of Conflict and the Struggle to End Sexual and Gender-based Violence in Sierra Leone
A relatively small country with just over 6 million people Sierra Leone has been the focus of considerable public and policy attention because of the recent Ebola epidemic and before that the decade-long civil war. Given the concern with finding ways to ‘build Sierra Leone differently’ in the post-Ebola context (IDS 2015) this paper considers some of the legacies of the country’s history. It focuses on gender and the emergence of a dynamic network of actors that reveal not only the country’s history of violence but also its capacity for ‘rebuilding differently’ to foster resilience and create long-term social transformation. During the war from 1991 to 2002 an estimated 50000 people were killed and more than 500000 were forced to flee their homes to escape violence. Statistics can never sufficiently capture the horror of the war but they can indicate the extent to which multiple forms of violence permeated people’s lives. The legacy of violence is equally difficult to quantify but as we found in our fieldwork in Sierra Leone from 2014 to 2015 it is woven into people’s everyday lives and particularly in their sense of trust in each other and in formal and informal institutions. This report focuses on one particularly pernicious form of violence – sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) – as it is and was experienced by men and women. The impact of the war and the country’s transition to democracy surfaces in lesser known ways too; in this paper we describe how networks of actors emerged in refugee camps and coalesced around a shared struggle to transform harmful gender relations and end violence. Based on fieldwork with these actors we outline some of the social economic and infrastructural challenges they face in their work to collectively foster gender equality and end SGBV. According to the activists we engaged with in Sierra Leone the challenge of addressing SGBV has sometimes been exacerbated by a limited conception of development which too often assumes that models for social and economic ‘progress’ can be imported and implanted into highly complex contexts. Far greater attention therefore needs to be paid to local specificity to the effects of sexual and gender violence on all genders and to the recommendations made by those people and organisations working to create sustained and positive change in these complex contexts. The findings of this study speak to this complexity and are organised first around the factors that underpin SGBV and second around the key actors working to transform harmful gender dynamics through collective action. (excerpt)
Nature, culture and gender
List of plates Preface 1. Nature, culture and gender: a critique Carol P. MacCormack 2. Women and the dialectics of nature in eighteenth-century French thought Maurice Bloch and Jean H. Bloch 3. Natural facts: a historical perspective on science and sexuality L. J. Jordanova 4. The power of signs: gender, culture and the wild in the Bolivian Andes Olivia Harris 5. Proto-social to adult: a Sherbro transformation Carol P. MacCormack 6. Gender, sexuality and marriage: a Kaulong model of nature and culture Jane C. Goodale 7. Images of nature in Gimi thought Gillian Gillison 8. No nature, no culture: the Hagen case Marilyn Strathern Index.