In some excellent articles in the first issue of The International Journal of Transitional Justice, scholars have examined in very thoughtful ways the relationship of feminism and feminist theory to the field of transitional justice and post-conflict. This article examines some of this work and suggests ways that we might build on these insights by working more with feminist theories of the state, feminist critiques of international human rights law, and with a gendered historical consciousness of colonialism and the post-colonial state in Africa.
This chapter is a reprint of Chapter 7 of Pamela Scully’s book, Liberating the Family. Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa 1823-1853 (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann,1997). More than twenty years later, it remains a seminal piece that addresses the lives of women, newly freed from slavery through a foray into the nature of the legal discourse on marriage, death, family that was elaborated by colonial authorities to claim sovereignty over the body of women in Cape colony. Her study precedes the scholarly turn to the Indian Ocean of the recent decades and the growing importance of post-colonial approaches to slavery and slave memory encapsulated in the works of inter alia Paul Gilroy and Saidiya Hartman and other scholars of Atlantic slavery. Scully’s work builds on and draws from a rich body of literature on Cape slavery, especially the pioneering historical works of Ross and Worden, and gestures towards the more recent literary approaches to enslavement in Cape colony epitomized in the work of Meg Samuelson and Jessica Murray who see in literature a way of filling the gaps of the archive.ii Pamela Scully’s work speaks to approaches to Cape slavery that have foregrounded the making of memory and continuities of enslavement, colonialism, apartheid and post-apartheid.iii
This paper examines the notion of feminist strike in reference to women peacemakers in Liberia. It argues that women's actions to bring an end to the war both instantiates normative notions of the feminist strike and expands them. Drawing on literature which points to a long history of Liberian women organizing as women with special roles and responsibilities in society, the paper invites us to adopt a broad understanding of the feminist strike. It also suggests that women's mobilization around the concept of a sex strike to force the end of war in the early 2000s, was a powerful and savvy move which criticised sexual violence in wartime, leveraged international attention, and also highlighted, if implicitly, the issue of sexual rights in marriage.