Description:

Please join the Comparative Historical Social Sciences workshop as they host Marie Berry, Associate Professor at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies.

In the aftermath of war, scholars and activists have understood justice and repair to be central for ensuring sustainable transitions to peace (Bassiouni 2003; Sikkink and Booth Walling 2007). Yet, new rights and remedies – including post-war compensation, criminal prosecutions, and truth and reconciliation commissions – can also create divisions between different groups of victims (Kreft and Agerberg 2024; Krystalli 2020; 2024; Schwarz, Baum and Cohen 2020). With some exceptions, the literature on postwar accountability efforts has tended to treat those who suffered violence as a homogenous group, differentiated only by the type of violence they experience. Yet, in fact, various hierarchies emerge among forms of suffering considered worthy of repair. In this article we leverage micro-level data from a nationally representative sample, a conjoint survey experiment, and qualitative interview data in Colombia and Nepal, to unpack two overarching questions. First, we ask how hierarchies of deservingness shape attitudes towards reparations after war by assessing how ordinary people privilege different attributes of victimization. Second, we examine how respondents’ own conflict positionalities shape those attitudes. We find that respondents differentiate victims in deeply gendered ways when considering their entitlement to reparations. The strong persistence of gendered hierarchies (with women and younger victims considered more deserving than men regardless of the type of violence), combined with the emergence of sexual violence as a crime that demands redress, reveals the continued salience of what we term gendered constructions of innocence. Cutting sharply against expectations generated from existing work, we found no evidence among a nationally representative sample of the population that respondents’ own conflict positionalities shape attitudes towards deservingness.

Dr. Marie Berry is the Director of the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security and Diplomacy and an Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School at the University of Denver. She is also the co-founder and convener of the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative (IGLI), an effort to elevate and amplify the work that women activists are doing at the grassroots to advance peace, justice, and human rights across the world. Her award-winning book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press 2018), examined the impact of mass violence on women’s political mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia. Together with Dr. Milli Lake (LSE), she runs the Women’s Rights After War Project. Dr. Berry’s work has been published in places like the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Gender & Society, Democratization, Signs, New Political Economy, Mobilization, Politics & Gender, Foreign Policy, Boston Review, The Monkey Cage, and Political Violence @ A Glance. She is a 2021 recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award.