Gendered Harm, Legal Remedies and Women's Reintegration: A Case Study of Kenyan Women Returnees from Al Shabaab
This research offers an original, granular account of the gendered harms faced by Kenyan women returnees in the prescriptive and programmatic operationalisation of reintegration norms in DDR-P/CVE processes. To do so, this research answers following question: ‘What gendered harms arise in operationalising reintegration norms in international policy frameworks for women returnees from terrorist groups and how can these be remedied?’ This thesis focuses on Kenyan women returnees from Al Shabaab and draws on doctrinal analysis of policy documents, including, Women, Peace and Security Agenda and empirical data collated from key informant interviews, including, Kenyan Anti-Terror Police Unit and civil society organisations. From these, I found that women returnees face specific gendered harms as part of their reintegration processes. These harms originate from the marginalised social location these women are situated which invisiblises their experiences, leading to their exclusion from P/CVE policy and programming. This overall finding encompasses the three main contributions of this thesis as follows. First, I generated an analytical gendered harm framework which drew from existing literature on feminist theory on law, peace and security. While a variety of previous studies have applied the term ‘gendered harm’ as illustrative of different ways in which women experience harm, my framework extends these illustrations into an analytical framing by developing three broad considerations as follows. These are, first, subjects of gendered harm, which focuses on the male body politic and women-as-victims framing; objects, which looks into the character and typology of gendered harm, including, ways in which this harm is social, relational and hierarchical; and, third, the importance of provision of remedy. In its second main contribution, this thesis deploys the developed gendered harm framework to identify the exclusions that women returnees experience in the prescriptive and programmatic operationalisation of WPS and DDR-CVE Policies in Kenya. Selection of these two ambits of inquiry ensures a holistic account of women returnees’ lived experiences in both policy and implementation. As documented in the research findings, present DDR-CVE framework in Kenya, chiefly represented by NSCVE and KNAP II, aligns with liberal feminist principles, adopting an 'add women and stir' approach without offering substantial guidance on instigating a paradigm shift in gender prescriptions within existing policies. Consequently, women returnees are subjected to hermeneutical and structural violence, wherein their experiences and needs remain inadequately addressed within policy landscape. On programmatic operationalisation, this thesis reveals the importance of transcending securitized approaches and adopting a gender-responsive perspective when devising and implementing reintegration programs. The third main contribution of this thesis is to propose legal remedies that can be used to address gendered harms experienced by Kenyan women returnees during their reintegration process. While conventional legal discourse on WPS and DDR-CVE uses Public International Law (PIL), in this thesis, I instead found a focus on International Human Rights Law, particularly the concept of due diligence, as a better benchmark for measuring state responsibilities towards individuals. This thesis proposes a focus on the due diligence to legislate and puts forward specific ways this mandate remedies existing gendered harms for women returnees. In this contribution, I also propose specific methods for overcoming justiciable hurdles and normative gaps that are present in standards of due diligence.
Al Shabaab, gendered harm, Kenya, Keywords: gendered harm, women returnees, countering violent extremism, reintegration, reintegration, women returnees
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