The International Journal of Human Rights

This article argues the relevance of using a critical perspective of masculinities in the development of transitional justice, particularly in truth commissions, and contributes to updating previous studies in this field. Drawing on content analysis on the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report as a case study, the article shows it is crucial to critically study masculinities in truth-seeking mechanisms to achieve desirable changes, not only in the transition but also in the long-term transformations of structural and cultural violence. These changes encompass the continuum of violence, and the values and beliefs that feed militarism and prevent the definitive achievement of peace. Although the Colombian Truth Commission is among the few commissions that address masculinities, its scope is limited, especially in terms of its recommendations. In these, the role of men and masculinities and their contributions to peace are critical. This article contributes to academic debates on gender studies, masculinities, and transitional justice, insisting on the need for their inclusion in peacebuilding from an intersectional approach.

The purpose of this article is to identify different concepts of fraternity in the form of specific legal perspectives worked in the Brazilian judiciary. The guidelines of the approach were the affirmation of a normative efficacy linked to citations by the constitutional decisions, obtained through the analysis of judgments and rulings of the Brazilian Supreme Court. From the analysis, three legal perspectives were perceived that materialised the idea of fraternity in the legal sphere, moving away from statements that still insist on approaching it as an illusion or unrealisable project of defence of human rights.

Mass rape and other forms of sexual violence in ethnic conflict, as their incidence in Bosnian and Kosovo wars in former Yugoslavia showed in the 1990s, cannot be relativised along some strategy of either ‘victimization’ or ‘everyone is guilty’ within an antiquated framework of ethnic-religious hatred. In this case as in others, the local notions of honour and blood cannot be taken uncritically to be binding cultural traits that ought to determine social behaviour. Incidentally, they cannot either account for a structured ideology of ‘men’s war against women’, or for a postmodern feminist ideology of gender and the moral panic of a ‘patriarchal dream-order’ restored. In this article, I offer a critical appraisal of the stereotyped and relativising accounts of feminist and human rights scholars, a critique very much needed for an anthropological approach attentive to cultural ideology and activism. To understand the effectiveness of mass rape in a military strategy of ethnic cleansing, I suggest local cultural concepts and moral relativist ideas are not culturally given, but instrumental resources deliberately mobilised.