Just War Theory and Global Gender Justice
BY DEBRA BERGOFFEN
Just war theory, developed to deal with anarchy, insists that the breakdown of international order be addressed by appealing to the principles of justice rather than those of tyranny. However, the theory questions the relationship between peace and justice, and invites discussions of the ways in which injustice threatens the possibilities of peace. These discussions note that the pursuit of justice sometimes justifies war, and they establish limits to the objectives and conduct of war so that violence might be contained by the demands of justice. Moving from theory to practice, just war discussions produce international war crimes and crimes against humanity laws. They establish international criminal tribunals so that those who violate just war standards are held responsible and punished.
Most recently, the just war thesis that securing a just peace is an essential antidote to the evils of war has emerged as a crucial ingredient of the global human rights movement. Human rights advocates have argued that establishing and enforcing human rights are essential conditions of a just peace and therefore, are essential defenses against the anti-human violence of war.
Women’s groups have also taken up this argument, insisting that human rights discussions take account of the ways in which certain crimes against humanity, such as rape, are gendered, and certain human rights abuses are disproportionately inflicted on women, such as the right to participate in public life. By insisting that women’s rights are human rights, these groups are saying two things: Men and women share a common humanity that entitles them to be treated with equal dignity; and men and women live their common humanity through their embodied sexed and gendered differences, and that these differences matter when it comes to specifying the ways in which human rights violations constitute a threat to domestic and international peace.
These feminist voices have not been marginalized. Instead, they have been a powerful force in the emergence of an international human rights movement that either explicitly or implicitly exposes the injustices of patriarchy. I read this most recent human rights development as a welcome, but unintended, consequence of the just war tradition.
A conservative reading of just war theory does not threaten the patriarchal status quo because just war theory does not address the ways in which the gender structures of patriarchy are invitations to war making. In providing for the ways in which war must be regulated by principles of justice, just war theory does not critique the ways in which waging war is an expression of the cross-cultural patriarchal idea that killing, under certain circumstances, is appropriate, legitimate, and valorizing for men; and that supporting men warriors is appropriate, legitimate and valorizing for women. Further, the just war distinction between soldier and civilian, given that the vast majority of wartime civilians are women and children, also reflects the patriarchal norm that allows men, under certain conditions, to kill each other, but not women and children. This patriarchal bias also accounts for the fact that though raping enemy women is officially a war crime, until very recently the prohibition had been breached with relative impunity.
Despite this patriarchal lining, however, just war theory contains radical, feminist possibilities that emerge if we examine the ways in which just war theory refuses to endorse the logic of the friend and the enemy. This serves as the justification for war and adopts the logic of the many in their differences and otherness, insofar as the heterogeneous many are taken to be members of a common human community. In its recognition of the pervasiveness of war and its insistence that war is limited both in its objectives and the ways in which it is waged, just war theory recognizes that the logic of the friend and the enemy is a recipe for the annihilation of the other. It identifies the destructive power of this logic, and seeks to curtail it with appeals to the desire for peace, happiness, security, and justice.
The question concerns the logic that transforms our differences into the opposition of the friend and the enemy. Can it be thwarted by a logic that accepts the inherent heterogeneity of humanity, or must it fuel a drive for homogeneity that requires either the annihilation or domination of the other? The feminist pursuit of women’s rights as human rights takes up this question. Though feminists do not suggest that patriarchy positions women as the enemy, it does argue that patriarchy refuses the heterogeneity of the sexual difference by justifying men’s domination of women. In this, feminists ask us to see the ways in which the logic of patriarchal subordination mirrors the friend enemy logic of war, and alerts us to the ways in which patriarchal societies, because they violate the basic principles of heterogeneous justice, are themselves threats to the peace.
During recent U.N. criminal tribunals, Bosnian-Serb soldiers and Hutu militias who raped Muslim and Tutsi civilian women, respectively, were convicted not merely of war crimes, but of crimes against humanity. These judgments help us discern the link among just war theory, war crimes, crimes against humanity, human rights, and women’s rights. The judgments are important for the ways in which they insist on marking the sexual difference; that is, for the ways in which they note the gendered reality of wartime rape, and for the way in which they inscribe the heterogeneity of the sexual difference within the homogeneity of the human. By refusing to equate genocidal rape with other forms of torture, and by criminalizing an abuse grounded in the sexual difference as a crime against humanity, these courts align the difference of our embodied sexuality with the one of the human. They lead us to tie awareness of our common humanity to our shared experience of embodied vulnerability, and show us the different ways this vulnerability is written on the sexed body.
Interpreted through questions posed by the just war tradition, these judgments may be read as finding that living the heterogeneity of the sexual difference through a logic that refuses to recognize the legitimacy of our differences constitutes a crime against our shared humanity.
What may be seen as implied in these court decisions is made explicit in the recent U.N. report Women, Peace and Security. In attending to the ways in which the sexual difference has been exploited by war and peacetime patriarchies, the report identifies this exploitation as an affront to human dignity and a threat to peace. Rather than relegating it to a minor issue, or allowing the indignities suffered by women to be understood as a matter of legitimate cultural expression, the report makes it clear that sexual dignity is central to any possibility of peace and all strategies of justice.
Women, Peace and Security was written in response to Security Council Resolution 1325 of October 2000. This resolution begins by recalling previous resolutions and commitments of the U.N. to women. It continues by finding that implementing these resolutions and commitments is essential for the maintenance of international peace and security, and concludes by inviting the secretary general to conduct a study on the impact of armed conflict on women and girls and to assess the role of women in peace building.
The report rejects the Enlightenment’s sex-neutral concept of humanity, which conceals the ways in which the violence of the logic of the friend and the enemy operates within patriarchy as the logic of male supremacy. In rejecting this logic, this report contributes to the feminist project of transforming the concept of the human. According to this report and the resolutions it cites, our understanding of the human must include an understanding of the gender codes through which our sexed bodies live their humanity.
The report is neither an isolated document nor a marginal event. It is part of an ongoing global dialogue that, in its re-symbolizations of the meanings and lived realities of the human, creates strategies for translating the ethics of human dignity articulated in human rights discourse into embodied and gendered political practices where women’s rights are recognized as essential to the just war project of securing peace with justice.
The gap between rhetoric and reality remains. The U.N. resolutions and reports are not yet matched by institutional enforcement powers, and the logic of the just war tradition lives in the tragic space between the utopian imagination’s visions of peace and the cynical politics of “might makes right.” Recognizing the enduring realities of these tensions should not, however, be seen as an invitation to an historical cynicism that ignores the momentum of the global women’s rights human rights conversation. Thinking in the tragic space between the utopian and the cynical, this history and tradition has given us a language for representing the claims of justice, and opens us to unexpected horizons. It offers us resilient resources for the feminist pursuit of global gender justice.
Debra Bergoffen (dbergoff@gmu.edu) is professor of philosophy (http://philosophy.gmu.edu) and women’s studies (http://jcweb.gmu.edu/communities/wrc), and an affiliate of the Center for Global Studies. She is the author of The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, and the editor of several anthologies.
