Sian Jones
War's Offensive on Women catalogues the failure of the international humanitarian community to address the needs - and rights - of women in war, and provides that community with concrete recommendations for respecting women's human rights in war.
Mertus makes a useful addition to the debate on gender-sensitive approaches to both the protection of refugees and internally displaced persons, and the administration of humanitarian and development assistance.
Identifying…
While international attention is focused on prisoners transferred by US from Afghanistan to Camp X-Ray, elsewhere in the world the US government is using peace-keeping forces to arrest, unlawfully detain, and in some cases effectively kidnap, people.
After encouraging states such as Bosnia-Herzegovina to adopt international human rights standards, there is a certain irony in the US acting in such clear violation of both domestic legal systems and of those same international human…
As states increasingly contravene or discard international treaties in the name of the war against terror, the task that Trident Ploughshares (TP) 2000 set itself in 1998 seems more challenging, but at the same time increasingly more necessary.
Through attempts at the practical disarmament of Britain's Trident nuclear submarines, and subsequent appearances in British courts, TP aims to challenge to the legality of Trident, and so ensure that the British government respects the body…
In a volume that ranges the whole spectrum of violence against women – from the state to the domestic – States of Conflict presents a snapshot of recent feminist research on gender and violence.
But though the global view presented and the varied perspectives they employed was refreshing, my overall feeling was that the diverse approach ultimately combined to give the general reader little more than an introduction to, rather than an overall analysis of, women's responses to and…
Here's the short review – read this book! And just in case you need more persuasion, here are some reasons why.
Cynthia Enloe has probably been the most consistent analyst of gender and militarism over the past decade; the scope of her analysis is wide-ranging, yet her argument is focused and powerful; and unlike many other writers, she really does address gender, rather than merely documenting women's experience.
Though the subjects of each chapter – the mothers buying a can…
When I was finally sold here in Brcko I was sold for DM 4,000. I heard that when you are sold once you are going to be sold many times again and you will never be able to earn the money to pay the original price. I thought that I would never be able to return home and never be able to pay the money to get me home.1
Since at least the 19th century, the military has sought to regulate the lives of prostitutes and other women working around military bases, and in so doing recreated…
Alice Ackerman's case for the Republic of Macedonia, as a rare - if not unique - example of conflict prevention by preventative diplomacy, makes a welcome addition to a relatively small body of literature which looks at how we can prevent war.
By way of introduction, she includes a brief survey of preventative diplomacy - and its critics - from cold-war attempts by the UN to keep the superpowers out of local conflicts, to the Boutros Ghali doctrine of preconflict prevention and early…
