Kimberly Theidon – författare

Governments, international organizations, and international laws and courts increasingly pay attention to conflict-related sexual violence. The core of the UN Women Peace and Security Agenda is stopping conflict-related sexual violence against women. Yet, with over two decades of grappling with conflict-related sexual violence and its legacies, there is only passing mention of the potential and obvious outcomes of sexual violence: pregnancy, abortion, forced maternity. What do we know about children conceived through acts of sexual abuse? What are their life chances? How do they exist with their mothers and within their families? In this collection we hear from the leading researchers and practitioners from around the globe, each of whom has spent decades working with women who survived wartime rape and with their children who were the result of that violence. This ground-breaking collection explores the life cycles of children born of wartime rape across time and space. It shines light on why young people born of rape are or are not able rejoin their families and society in the post-conflict. It explores the different ways these children learn about their origins and how they, their families and societies react to that understanding. It reveals the local, national, and international actions of how children born of wartime rape and their families are positioned in society and how they strive to transcend this and position themselves as they move from abuse, marginalization and pain into belonging and justice.

In the aftermath of a civil war, former enemies are left living side by side-and often the enemy is a son-in-law, a godfather, an old schoolmate, or the community that lies just across the valley. Though the internal conflict in Peru at the end of the twentieth century was incited and organized by insurgent Senderistas, the violence and destruction were carried out not only by Peruvian armed forces but also by civilians. In the wake of war, any given Peruvian community may consist of ex-Senderistas, current sympathizers, widows, orphans, army veterans-a volatile social landscape. These survivors, though fully aware of the potential danger posed by their neighbors, must nonetheless endeavor to live and labor alongside their intimate enemies.Drawing on years of research with communities in the highlands of Ayacucho, Kimberly Theidon explores how Peruvians are rebuilding both individual lives and collective existence following twenty years of armed conflict. Intimate Enemies recounts the stories and dialogues of Peruvian peasants and Theidon's own experiences to encompass the broad and varied range of conciliatory practices: customary law before and after the war, the practice of arrepentimiento (publicly confessing one's actions and requesting pardon from one's peers), a differentiation between forgiveness and reconciliation, and the importance of storytelling to make sense of the past and recreate moral order. The micropolitics of reconciliation in these communities present an example of postwar coexistence that deeply complicates the way we understand transitional justice, moral sensibilities, and social life in the aftermath of war. Any effort to understand postconflict reconstruction must be attuned to devastation as well as to human tenacity for life.

In Legacies of War Kimberly Theidon examines the lives of children born of wartime rape and the experiences of their mothers and communities to offer a gendered theory of harm and repair. Drawing on ethnographic research in postconflict Peru and Colombia, Theidon considers the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold. She reimagines harm by taking into account the impact of violence on individual people as well as on more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies, showing how wartime violence reveals the interdependency of all life. She also critiques policy makers, governments, and humanitarian organizations for their efforts at postconflict justice, which frequently take an anthropocentric rights-based approach that is steeped in liberal legalism. Rethinking the intergenerational reach of war while questioning what counts as sexual and reproductive violence, Theidon calls for an explicitly feminist peace-building and postconflict agenda that includes a full range of sexual and reproductive rights, including access to safe and affordable abortions.