‘The Everyday Work of Repair’: Exploring the Resilience of Victims-/Survivors of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
| Author | Janine Natalya Clark |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298211054879 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298211054879
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2022, Vol. 50(2) 456 –493
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/03058298211054879
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‘The Everyday Work of Repair’:
Exploring the Resilience of
Victims-/Survivors of Conflict-
Related Sexual Violence
Janine Natalya Clark
University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
This interdisciplinary article uses what Das has termed ‘the everyday work of repair’ as a
framework for thinking about resilience. It is not the first to discuss resilience and the everyday.
What is novel is the context in which it does so. Extant scholarship on conflict-related sexual
violence has largely overlooked the concept of resilience. Addressing this gap, the article draws
on semi-structured interviews with victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia
and Herzegovina (BiH), Colombia and Uganda to examine what everyday resilience ‘looks’ like
and how it is expressed within and across highly diverse social ecologies. In so doing, it reflects
on what everyday resilience means for transitional justice, through a particular focus on hybridity.
It introduces the term ‘facilitative hybridity’, to underscore the need for transitional justice
processes to give greater attention to the social ecologies that can crucially support and enable
the everyday work of repair and everyday resilience.
Keywords
'the everyday work of repair', resilience, conflict-related sexual violence
Le « travail de réparation au quotidien » : étude de la résilience des
victimes/survivants des violences sexuelles en temps de conflit
Cet article interdisciplinaire étudie la résilience en prenant comme cadre théorique ce que Das
a appelé le « travail de réparation au quotidien ». Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’un article
s’intéresse à la résilience et au quotidien. Ce qui est nouveau ici, c’est le contexte dans lequel
nous le faisons. Les précédentes études sur les violences sexuelles en temps de conflit ont
largement négligé le concept de résilience. Pour combler cette lacune, l’article s’appuie sur des
Corresponding author:
Janine Natalya Clark, Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT,
UK.
Email: j.n.clark@bham.ac.uk
1054879MIL0010.1177/03058298211054879Millennium – Journal of International StudiesClark
research-article2021
Original Article
Clark 457
entretiens semi-directifs réalisés auprès de victimes/survivants de violences sexuelles en temps de
conflit en Bosnie-Herzégovine, en Colombie et en Ouganda, afin d’examiner à quoi « ressemble
» la résilience au quotidien et comment elle s’exprime au sein et au travers d’écologies sociales
très diverses. Ce faisant, l’article s’interroge sur ce que signifie la résilience au quotidien pour la
justice transitionnelle, en s’intéressant tout particulièrement à l’hybridité. Il introduit l’expression
d’« hybridité facilitatrice » pour montrer que les processus de justice transitionnelle doivent
accorder une plus grande attention aux écologies sociales, ces dernières pouvant jouer un rôle
crucial pour permettre et soutenir le travail de réparation et de résilience au quotidien.
Mots-clés
« travail de réparation au quotidien », résilience, violences sexuelles en temps de conflit
El «trabajo cotidiano de la reparación»: Explorar la resiliencia de las
víctimas/sobrevivientes de la violencia sexual relacionada con el conflicto
Este artículo interdisciplinario recurre a lo que Veena Das ha denominado «el trabajo cotidiano
de la reparación», entendido como un marco para reflexionar sobre la resiliencia. Ella no es la
primera en abordar la resiliencia en el día a día. Lo que es novedoso es el contexto en el que lo
hace. Los estudios existentes sobre violencia sexual en relación con los conflictos han dejado
excesivamente de lado el concepto de resiliencia. Teniendo en cuenta esta carencia, el artículo
se basa en entrevistas semiestructuradas con víctimas/sobrevivientes de la violencia sexual
relacionada con los conflictos de Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia y Uganda para examinar en qué
consiste la resiliencia diaria y cómo se expresa a través y dentro de ecologías sociales altamente
diversas. Al hacerlo, reflexiona sobre qué significa la resiliencia desde el punto de vista de la
justicia transicional, poniendo especial atención en la hibridez. Introduce el término «hibridez
facilitadora» para enfatizar la necesidad de que los procesos de justicia transicional concedan
mayor atención a las ecologías sociales que pueden reforzar y habilitar de manera crucial el
trabajo cotidiano de reparación, en la resiliencia del día a día.
Palabras clave
«trabajo cotidiano de la reparación», resiliencia, violencia sexual relacionada con el conflicto
‘The everyday. . .is a vast, variegated and porous realm, whose ragged edges are subject to
constant rending and mending’.1
Introduction
Discussing ongoing conflict in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, an official from the United
Nations (UN) recently declared: ‘There is no doubt that sexual violence is being used in
this conflict as a weapon of war’.2 Many scholars, however – and in particular feminist
1. Audra Mitchell, ‘Quality/Control: International Peace Interventions and the Everyday’,
Review of International Studies 37, no. 4 (2011): 1623–45, 1630.
2. Cited in Michelle Nichols, ‘“Sexual Violence Being Used as Weapon of War in Ethiopia’s
Tigray”, U.N. Says’ (16 April 2021). Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/sex-
ual-violence-being-used-weapon-war-ethiopias-tigray-un-says-2021-04-15/. Last accessed
November 10, 2021.
458 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 50(2)
3. Pertinent in this regard is Enloe’s observation that ‘Wars don’t simply end, and wars don’t end
simply’. Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 193.
4. Jelke Boesten, ‘Of Exceptions and Continuities: Theory and Methodology in Research on
Conflict-Related Sexual Violence’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 19, no. 4
(2017): 506–19, 511–12.
5. Harriet Gray, ‘The “War”/“Not-War” Divide: Domestic Violence in the Preventing Sexual
Violence Initiative’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21, no. 1 (2019):
189–206, 191.
6. Rebecca Walker, ‘Violence, the Everyday and the Question of the Ordinary’, Contemporary
South Asia 18, no. 1 (2010): 9–24, 11.
7. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into Ordinary (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 62.
8. The article uses the terminology of ‘victims-/survivors’, based on the fact that some of the
men and women who participated in the underpinning research primarily (or only) identified
with one term, and some viewed themselves as both victims and survivors.
9. This is similar to what Gilmore and Moffett refer to as ‘self-repair’. Sunneva Gilmore and
Luke Moffett, ‘Finding a Way to Live with the Past: “Self-Repair”, “Informal Repair” and
Reparations in Transitional Justice’, Journal of Law and Society 48, 3. (2021): 455–80.
However, the term ‘self-repair’ itself is problematic because it does not sufficiently reflect the
fact that repair is a process that involves and affects the wider environments with which the
‘self’ is inextricably interwoven.
10. See e.g. Julia Zulver, ‘High-Risk Feminism in El Salvador: Women’s Mobilisation in Violent
Times’, Gender & Development 24, no. 2 (2016): 171–85; Marie E. Berry, Women, War and
Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018); Anne-Kathrin Kreft, ‘Responding to Sexual Violence:
Women’s Mobilization in War’, Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 2 (2019): 220–33; Heleen
scholars – are highly critical of such portrayals of conflict-related sexual violence, argu-
ing that they detract from everyday forms of gendered violence and continuities of vio-
lence across war and ‘peace’.3 According to Boesten, ‘The exceptionalization of sexual
violence in conflict as something divorced from the gendered dynamics of both war and
peace. . .stands in stark contrast to feminist analysis of gender-based violence, which has
long emphasized that such violence is part of a continuum’.4 More broadly, Gray under-
lines that ‘From a policy perspective, a definition of war which assumes that it is onto-
logically distinct from “everyday” or private sphere experiences will only grasp a limited
slice of the social spaces in which war is enacted’.5
While feminist scholars have underscored the everyday as a site of complex, struc-
tural and intersecting forms of violence, this article adopts a different focus. Exploring
how ‘the vitality of the everyday allows people to live around, through, and beyond
violence’,6 it examines some of the ways that women and men who have suffered con-
flict-related sexual violence, as well as other co-occurring forms of violence, engage in
what Das has called ‘the everyday work of repair’.7 To be clear, it is not suggesting that
lives ripped and torn apart by violence and conflict can simply be ‘mended’ and ‘fixed’,
as though nothing ever happened. Rather, it uses the concept of repair to refer to some of
the diverse ways that victims-/survivors8 of conflict-related sexual violence actively seek
to get on with their lives and move forward,9 making small ‘stitches’ as they do so. It thus
broadly contributes to an expanding body of research10 exploring the social and political
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