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Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones (review)

Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (eds.) Sites of Violence: Gender and Conflict Zones. University of California Press, 2004. 373 pp. This edited book arose out of an international research association developed among scholars drawn from sociology, geography, gender studies, law, anthropology and advocacy: the Women in Conflict Zones Network (WICZNET), founded in 1996. I am an original member, but played no role in this volume. As its name suggests, members came together in response to what they felt to be an urgent need to further develop the interdisciplinary analysis of the interplay of gender and violence in "conflict zones." This felt need was very direct for some, as they were then living or doing research in active conflict zones such as the former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala; most of the rest had previous research experience in similar situations. For this review and as reflected in this volume, conflict zones may be taken as social contexts of high relative levels of violence: immediate militarized violence seen in war, insurgency, and government repression, and more indirectly, in displacement, forced migration, and local level social disruption. Sites of Violence contains fourteen chapters, a merged bibliography, and an index. The first two chapters are agenda setting, while all the rest save the last have topical foci. Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman introduce the volume with an overview that is "global" in several senses. They provide a wide range of domains and key connections between gender, violence, and conflict zones, with an emphasis on (chiefly destabilizing) international forces that affect them. They hope the volume's contributions "extend feminist methodology of transverse politics by focusing on their practice in conflict zones" (8). They also outline the process through which participants' research agendas evolved and briefly introduce the chapters that follow under themes recurring in this volume: "Nationalisms, Ethnic Nationalisms and Gender Relations," "Violence and Women's Rights," "Gender and Citizenship," "Feminist Empowerment Across a Continuum of Violence," and "The Global Political Economy of Culture." In this chapter, I see two stances maintained through most substantive chapters which pose significant explanatory challenges. One concerns the role of culture in explanation. While Giles and Hyndman do identify culture as a linking force between social levels and situations in conflict zones, they clearly wish to underplay it as a causal force. They and others in the volume often take a partially reductionist stance in which cultures are "infinitely malleable maps of meaning within a material economy of nationality, sexuality, class, caste, religion, and gender" (17). This appears in part reactive to those who still essentialize gendered violence as inherent in "the culture" of peoples or as the natural product of "ancient hatreds"; it is perhaps also a reflection of the priority given by volume participants to keeping "globalization" and large scale political and economic forces in the forefront of analysis. These are valuable cautions and goals to highlight for policy makers and lay readers, especially in light of the popularity of variants of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis, which as Giles and Hyndman point out, frame many world conflicts in the popular media today. However, social scientists (well, at least ? anthropologists) for a generation have largely avoided the dead end analysis of culture as an autonomous whole, and it is unarguable that some of the most powerful explanations of on-the-ground, microlevel gendered conflict come exactly from sensibly contextualized cultural analysis. As a linked position, Giles and Hyndman do not want to assign explanatory priority to any particular scale of social phenomena. Considering the diverse disciplinary interests of the participating WICZNET members this seems appropriate. However, one consequence is that many of the substantive chapters produce explanations that float between levels, sometimes leaving me uncertain as to what is explicandum and what is explicans. …