Juhood Magazine: Volume 2, Issue 1

68 nomic, and cultural resource allocation.15 Moghadam uses a feminist lens to describe the patriarchal violence and heightened insecurity during times of instability during the U.S. occupation.

This concept is explored further in Fionnuala Ní Aoláin’s analysis of the patriarchy is upheld as international concepts of transitional justice acculturate.

Insofar as the structural exclusion of women exists in peacetime, it is only exacerbated during methods of transition that incorporate a Western patriarchal approach: there is a “lack of naming” of harms against women, and on the “hierarchy of harms,” gender violence ranks low.16 Methods for amplifying women’s experiences are disregarded in the framework of human rights.17

Aoláin argues that “women have an expansive notion of what and where transformation is required.”18 Their understandings are based on lived experiences which are often ignored. However, it is these understandings that should be informing the policy changes of a transitional government, especially regarding the institutional gender transformations needed in order for women to live in safety. Aoláin critiques transitional justice processes as narrow minded- failing to encourage broad social-structural change, and inaccurately measuring the impact of reforms.19 It is imperative that transitional justice representatives directly converse with Iraqi women about the difference between goals and tangible outcomes. Primary source interviews are the first method of testimony that will be analyzed, and from these, special attention is drawn to the themes of distrust of legal systems, gender violence, and patriarchal systems.

The second form of testimony under analysis is photography. Pablo Hernández Hernández writes about the importance of visual testimony in the discussion of justice; photography can be used as evidence in legal settings as well as for historiography records.20 Applying his conceptual perspectives to the context of Latin American countries post-guerilla warfare of the twentieth century, Hernández Hernández connects photography, testimony, and transitional justice: …Taking the picture, disassembling, assembling and reassembling it, signing it and creating an adequation between what is shown, what is lived and what is understood, is an act, an action which, in certain social and cultural planes… can produce dis15 Moghadam, “Peacebuilding and Reconstruction…,” 70.

16 Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, “Women, Security, and the Patriarchy of Internationalized Transitional Justice,” (Human Rights Quarterly, 2009) 1057.

17 Ibid, 1056.

18 Ibid, 1084.

19 Aoláin, “Women, Security, and the Patriarchy…,” 1057.

20 Ibid.