Book Launch (online) by Sanne Weber 'Salir Adelante' Transitional Justice, Gender and Citizenship in Colombia

Sanne Weber launches her book during the IDD Seminar Series 60th Anniversary Special.

In recent decades, it is increasingly recognised that conflicts affect men and women in different ways. Widespread sexual violence sparked strong (media) attention for the gendered impacts of conflict, leading to important jurisprudence on sexual violence, and even to the development of a new field of law and policy, now known as the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.

Gender has also found a central place in the field of transitional justice (TJ) and related post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation mechanisms, including Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR). Given such intense ‘gendered’ attention, why do gender inequality and gender-based violence so often persist in post-conflict countries? What does this say about how gender perspectives and policies work out in practice, and especially in the daily lives of those affected by conflict? In her book, Sanne Weber aims to provide answers to those questions, contributing theoretical insights to the field of feminist transitional justice research. 

In this book talk, Sanne will describe what gender-sensitive peace and justice looks like for those supposed to benefit from these processes, based on in-depth and long-term ethnographic, participatory and visual fieldwork in two locations on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, with men and women, survivors and ex-combatants. Drawing on citizenship studies to make ideas of transformative gender justice more concrete and practical, she offers an innovative way of rethinking gender-sensitive TJ.

Applying a feminist and participatory visual methods and epistemology, Sanne will also engage with critical debates on the ethics of research on gender and conflict, and the moral dilemmas of research with survivors and perpetrators.

Sanne Weber is Assistant Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). Her research explores how conflict intersects with structural inequalities such as gender and age. She uses ethnographic, participatory and creative research methods to understand whether and how transitional justice mechanisms are capable of transforming gendered and other structural inequalities.

She has worked primarily in Latin America, particularly in Colombia and Guatemala. In the past, she has worked as researcher and team coordinator on gender programmes for human rights and development organisations in Guatemala. Her current project examines whether and how transitional justice could redress historical injustices such as colonialism and slavery in relation to Western Europe.

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