First Mayan Women's Congress

In October 1997, over 200 participants attended the First Mayan Women's Congress in Mexico and called for financial assistance, capacity building, and training to help Mayan women escape poverty. The Congress was initiated by the UN Development Fund for Women in collaboration with the Small Grants Program of the UN Development Program. Traditionally, Mayan women and men have played distinct roles in society, and efforts are underway to increase gender sensitivity and achieve a new balance of power. Mayan women attending the Congress reported that they face daily challenges in gaining their husbands' approval for participation in income-generating activities outside of the home. Eventually, however, some husbands also start working in these enterprises and are learning to assume their share of domestic responsibilities. Mayan women have been forced to reevaluation their role in society by a prevailing agricultural and environmental crisis as well as a high unemployment rate. Crafts that were once produced only for household consumption are now considered for export. Because the women need funds to initiate income-generating activities, the Conference linked women's groups with development practitioners, policy-makers, and donors. The women requested financial aid for more than 30 specific projects, and Congress participants agreed to pursue innovate strategies to support the enterprises with funds, training, and technical assistance. The Congress also encouraged environmental nongovernmental organizations to include Mayan women in mainstream development activities. This successful Congress will be duplicated in other Mexican states.     

After Beijing: emphasis on poverty eradication

In March 1996, during its first meeting since the Fourth World Conference on Women, the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), called for a gender perspective to be integrated into policies and programs dealing with poverty, child and dependent care, and the media. Three expert panels examined each of these areas through a format which encouraged dialogue and led to the adoption of 17 resolutions, decisions, and agreed conclusions as well as a recommendation that the UN adopt a multi-year work program for the CSW to allow it to review progress in elimination of the 12 main obstacles to women's advancement identified at Beijing. Among the resolutions adopted by the CSW were calls to 1) take a broad and integrated approach to poverty eradication, 2) enhance women's empowerment and autonomy, 3) promote equity and equality in the public domain, 4) promote women's employment, 5) give women social and economic protection when they are unable to work, 6) counteract negative images of women and sex-stereotyping in the media, 7) reduce the representation of violence against women in the media, 8) strengthen the role of women in global communications, 9) encourage the participation of men in child and dependent care, and 10) recognize women's double burden of work. The CSW also agreed to pursue further discussions about drafting an optional protocol to the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Among its other actions, the CSW called for mechanisms to protect the rights of women migrant workers, to protect women and children during armed conflicts, to include gender-based human rights violations in UN activities, and to address the root factors which lead to social ills such as trafficking in women and girls. In addition, the CSW submitted a draft resolution demanding that Israel protect the rights of Palestinian women and their families.     

Obstacles to women's progress to be addressed in Beijing

Speakers at the Third Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee Assembly held in December 1994 maintained that power sharing between women and men is still intolerably low and that economic hardship, abuse, and discrimination remain. One speaker announced that society needs to do more to challenge obstacles to women's advancement: poverty, violence, access to resources, women's rights, education, and health. She asserted that, for this reason, the Fourth World Conference on Women scheduled for September 1995 in Beijing must succeed. Discussions and action at the December assembly will constitute a major part of the groundwork for the Beijing Conference. The Committee debate centered on the advancement of women as a cause and effect of development. The 1994 World Survey on the Role of Women in Development shows that economic development may be complexly connected with advancement of women. In societies where women have progressed, the economy tends to grow steadily, while, in societies where women cannot fully participate in development, the economy is stagnant. The Assembly called on the Commission on the Status of Women to ensure that the Platform for Action recognize and incorporate older women's concerns and contributions to development into its strategies, programs, and policies. It also called for countries to protect women migrant workers from violence and corrupt recruitment practices. It condemned the illegal trafficking of women and girls across borders for sexual or economic oppressive and exploitative purposes and for other illegal activities (forced domestic labor, false marriages, clandestine employment, and false adoption).     

Ending sexual violence in conflict: the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and its critics

During the past year, the UK Government has become the lead advocate for a perhaps surprising foreign policy goal: ending sexual violence in conflict. The participation of government representatives from more than 120 countries in a London Summit in June 2014 was the clearest manifestation of this project. This article offers an early assessment of the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI) and situates it within the history of global action against sexual and gender‐based violence from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 onwards, with a particular focus on three key developments. First, the PSVI has embraced the already common understanding of rape as a ‘weapon of war’, and has stressed the importance of military training and accountability. This has exposed the tensions within global policy between a focus on all forms of sexual violence (including intimate partner violence in and out of conflict situations) on the one hand, and war zone activities on the other. Second, the Initiative has placed great emphasis on ending impunity, which implicates it in ongoing debates about the role of international and local justice as an effective response to atrocity. Third, men and boys have been foregrounded as ignored victims of sexual and gender‐based violence. The PSVI has been crucial to that recognition, but faces significant challenges in operationalizing its commitment and in avoiding damage to existing programmes to end violence against women and girls. The success of the Initiative will depend on its ability to navigate these challenges in multiple arenas of global politics.     

Gender and poverty: what we know,don’t know,and need to know for Agenda 2030

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.     

Gains by women reversed in economic downturn

The impact of globalization on women was discussed by the Women in Development Section of the Social Development Division of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Feminization of work in much of the Asian region occurred in the context of overall economic growth in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. However, the recent economic crisis has led to a downturn in the positive aspects of this change in women's position, although gender gaps will be reduced through the worsening conditions of male workers. The current deflationary adjustment policies of reducing government expenditures will adversely affect women in the workplace and the household. Since women have been forced to earn additional income outside the home, the girl-children are expected to perform household and child care duties that would otherwise be performed by their mothers. Incidence of child labor and dropout rates among girls has increased. Many social and cultural norms also allow cuts in the food supply for women and girl-children when household per-capita access to food declines. These circumstances invite domestic violence against women. Hence, institutions such as ESCAP should assume a more active advocacy role with the governments as they confront the economic crisis and its repercussions.     

Thousands gather in Beijing for fourth women's conference

The Fourth World Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing in September 1995, is expected to issue a Platform for Action to advance the status of women, identify priority actions to be taken by the international community, and mobilize those at both the policy making and grass-roots levels to implement these goals. The draft Platform for Action addresses the following critical areas: poverty, women's education, reproductive health and sexuality, violence and armed conflict, economic disparity, power-sharing, institutions, human rights, mass media, environmental degradation, and female children. Parallel to the UN conference, a Nongovernmental Forum on Women will meet, with an emphasis on the concept of sustainable human development.     

"To change the world." Cairo conference reaches consensus on plan to stabilize world growth by 2015

After 6 days of debate and 200 speakers during September 5-13, 1994, participants from 180 countries at the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) agreed on a strategy for curbing global population growth over the next 20 years. The objective was sustained economic growth and sustainable development. In his opening remarks, UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said that the objective was to balance humanity and the environment with the means to sustain life, and that the efficacy of the world economic order depended to some extent on the ICPD. Participants were urged to use rigor, tolerance, and conscience in conference deliberations. Men and women should have the right and the means to choose their families' futures. The preamble stated that the ICPD would probably be the last opportunity in the twentieth century to address globally the issues relating to population and development. UN Population Fund Executive Director Nafis Sadik remarked that the ICPD had the potential to change the world. Egyptian President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak was elected president of the ICPD. Mubarak stated that solutions to population problems must go beyond demographic accounting and incorporate change in social, economic, and cultural conditions. Norway's Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland stated that development in many countries never reached many women. She called it a hypocritical morality that allowed women to suffer and die from unwanted pregnancies, illegal abortions, and miserable living conditions. US Vice President Albert Gore called for comprehensive and holistic solutions. The essential features of social change would involve democracy, economic reform, low rates of inflation, low levels of corruption, sound environmental management, free and open markets, and access to developed country markets. Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir urged the empowerment of women. Many expressed the concern about unsustainable consumption in industrialized countries. Prior world population conferences had been held in Rome (1954), Belgrade (1965), Bucharest (1974), and Mexico City (1984). The first World Plan of Action was adopted in 1974 and changed at the 1984 conference.     

Queering women,peace and security

The aim of the eight Women, Peace and Security (WPS) United Nations Security Council resolutions, beginning with UNSCR 1325 in 2000, is to involve women in peacebuilding, reconstruction and gender mainstreaming efforts for gendered equality in international peace and security work. However, the resolutions make no mention of masculinity, femininity or the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) population. Throughout the WPS architecture the terms ‘gender’ and ‘women’ are often used interchangeably. As a result, sexual and gender‐based violence (SGBV) tracking and monitoring fail to account for individuals who fall outside a heteronormative construction of who qualifies as ‘women’. Those vulnerable to insecurity and violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity remain largely neglected by the international peace and security community. Feminist security studies and emerging queer theory in international relations provide a framework to incorporate a gender perspective in WPS work that moves beyond a narrow, binary understanding of gender to begin to capture violence targeted at the LGBTQ population, particularly in efforts to address SGBV in conflict‐related environments. The article also explores the ways in which a queer security analysis reveals the part heteronormativity and cisprivilege play in sustaining the current gap in analysis of gendered violence.     

Escaping Violence,Seeking Freedom: Why Children in Bangladesh Migrate to the Street

In Bangladesh, as in many developing countries, there is a widespread belief amongst the public, policy makers and social workers that children ‘abandon’ their families and migrate to the street because of economic poverty. Ignoring and avoiding mounting evidence to the contrary, this dominant narrative posits that children whose basic material needs cannot be met within the household move to the street. This article explores this narrative through the analysis of detailed empirical research with children in Bangladesh. It finds that social factors lie behind most street migration and, in particular, that moves to the street are closely associated with violence towards and abuse of children within the household and local community. These findings are consistent with the wider literature on street migration from other countries. In Bangladesh, those who seek to reduce the flow of children to the streets need to focus on social policy, especially on how to reduce the excessive control and emotional, physical and sexual violence that occur in some households. Economic growth and reductions in income poverty will be helpful, but they will not be sufficient to reduce street migration by children.     

The health dimension

Recognizing the adverse health consequences of violence against women, the World Health Organization (WHO) has emphasized the need for a public health approach to prevention as well as the need for the delivery of care to victims of abuse. The WHO is also aware of the need for intersectoral collaboration to address this complex problem. Domestic violence affects all aspects of women's lives and undermines the basis for sustainable human development while violating women's human rights. The WHO included a section on violence against women in its position paper presented to the Fourth World Conference on Women and has accelerated its activities in this area since the Conference. WHO's work on violence has included a 1996 expert consultation that focused on domestic violence and resulted in recommendations that formed the basis of the WHO's Plan of Action on Violence Against Women. The WHO's work on violence also includes efforts to eliminate female genital mutilation and violence visited upon women during situations of armed conflict. The WHO is developing population-based data, innovative research methods, an inventory and assessment of interventions, policy guidelines, and information and advocacy materials to combat domestic violence. Existing data remain scattered and anecdotal but indicate that domestic violence is a major problem.     

Supporting women's empowerment in Djibouti

This article reports on the work carried out by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in the small island of Djibouti, Africa. The republic's population has been plagued with problems of high levels of unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, an almost non-existent family reproductive health care service, 100% prevalence rate of female genital mutilation and low literacy rate, especially for women. In addition, refugees from Ethiopia and Eritrea have settled in the country increasing the risks of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV/AIDS, prostitution, and other social ills. In 1983, UNFPA started funding family planning and later reproductive health projects aimed at assuring access to services for a majority of Djiboutan women. The first country population program of assistance was started in 1992. This would help the government with health care for its population and to conduct a population census. In addition, the Fund has paid for training of doctors, midwives, and traditional birth assistants in the country and for rehabilitating maternity clinics and information centers. Moreover, it has supported agencies concerned with educating people on STDs, HIV/AIDS, safe motherhood and reproductive health for men and women, and other important issues.     

The ‘woman‐in‐conflict’ at the UN Security Council: a subject of practice

Since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, the woman‐in‐conflict has emerged as a central figure in the discourse of the UNSC Women, Peace and Security policy community. She is an ever‐present referent in discussions, the person in whose name critique is launched or action demanded. This figure is a representation of the needs and interests of the uncountable, faceless and nameless women affected by and living through war; a representation that takes place through imbuing her with particular meaning or characteristics. These meanings shape how the figure is understood in Women, Peace and Security discourse, which, in turn, constructs the horizons of possibility for both current and future policy and its implementation. This article explores how this figure is produced as a subject through layers of representation and is deeply embedded in the practices and relationships of power in the policy community. It suggests that accounting for these will offer an opportunity for feminist advocates to engage in this institutional space in more considered and effective ways.     

Negotiating male gatekeeper violence in team-based research on Bangladeshi migrant women in Malaysia

While the field of migration studies is expanding to understand the nuanced experiences of women across Asia, there has been little discussion of how these studies were conducted. This article draws on the reflective accounts of three researchers on a team project investigating the lived experiences of female Bangladeshi migrant workers in Malaysia. While the research aims centred on understanding the lives of the Bangladeshi migrant women, the team spent a significant amount of time negotiating male gatekeeper violence in the field. The article further describes the researchers’ experiences of sexual harassment and intimidation, and explores these through the complex locations of the migrant workers and the female researchers in the field site. In addition, the article deals with the way in which the team’s feminist research sensibilities were challenged in the context of negotiating that violence. The ethical dilemma of continuing the research in the face of persistent violence was dealt with by discussing approaches employed in managing the violence. Analysing male gatekeeper violence in the field, allowed for conversations around the intersection of migration and masculinities. This auto-ethnography reveals methodological concerns for female researchers and exposes the negotiated nature of the front line of migration research.     

Eco‐urbanism and the Eco‐city,or, Denying the Right to the City?

This paper critically analyses the construction of eco‐cities as technological fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the transition towards “green capitalism”. It argues for a critical engagement with new‐build eco‐city projects, first by highlighting the inequalities which mean that eco‐cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world's least wealthy states. Second, the paper investigates the foundation of eco‐city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity. Third, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms through which new eco‐cities are built, including the land market, reclamation, dispossession and “green grabbing”. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these “emerald cities”, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project to another.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

Intimate bordering: Intimacy,anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border

This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.     

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of former de facto Guatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them.     

'I must get out': the geographies of domestic violence

The geographies of domestic violence are envisaged in this paper as a series of enlarging, though restricted spaces. Although the social construction of home is as a place of safety and support, in reality it can be a place of violence, where women are spatially restricted either to the home itself, or to its immediate environs. Women who break free and seek safety in a women's refuge, or who move to a new home in a different place, continue to live spatially restricted lives, in the fear that their former partner may trace them.