QUESTIONS
ANSWERED AND
UNANSWERED
In the final session of the symposium, Eleanor du
Plooy, Project Leader for the Ashley Kriel Youth
Desk and Project Leader for Gender Justice and
Reconciliation at the Institute for Justice and
Reconciliation, facilitated a challenging and critical
discussion with all the symposium’s participants.
The objective of the discussion was to distil the
key lessons, encounter ourselves and the gaps in
our various approaches, think through what was
working and what was not, and consider what
gains, successes, exclusions, and forms of violence
and power were being engendered in our varying
approaches and perspectives.
The questions below emerge from both the
discussion sessions after each panel and the final
session. They find some answers in the above
reports on the presentations, but, of course, in
light of the complexity of the issues discussed,
the prospect of singular, unambiguous answers
is necessarily unlikley. The questions form an
interrogative recap of the discussions at the
symposium on one hand, but also represent the
symposium organisers’ belief that the symposium
is part of ongoing collaborative conversation and
activism towards justice for sexual and genderbased violence. The questions are organised under
broad headings, but there is, of course, substantial
overlap between the different sections. While
some of the questions lay out the trajectory of our
discussions, they do not seek to synthesise, but
rather to share some reflections, disruptions and
question marks, in the hope that this contributes
to ongoing humble, reflexive activism in pursuit
of accountability for sexual and gender-based
violence.
Power, positionalities, and complicities
1. Who has the right to speak for victims? What
power relations are at play when those with
positions of power grant themselves the right
to represent and determine who is left out?
2. How do civil society actors, particularly
established civil society actors, contend
with the positions of power they occupy?
3. How do the interactions between transitional
justice practitioners or researchers and victims
or survivors reflect dynamics of power, class,
race and/or gender?
4. How do civil society actors influence donors
and resource allocation, and in whose name
is this power exercised?
5. How reflexive are civil society actors,
international justice practitioners, academics
and the ICC regarding their own complicities?
6. Are civil society actors too diplomatic with
decision-makers? Do civil society actors
‘play it safe’ at the expense of victims and
survivors of sexual and gender-based
violence?
7. How do the lenses of accountability for
sexual and gender-based violence in conflict,
or in the context of mass violence, address
the sexual violence committed by those
who are supposed to protect, including,
for example, civil society, ICC personnel
and UN peacekeepers?
24\ Accountability for conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence: Successes, challenges, narratives, and omissions
Select target paragraph3
Add to table of contents