18 Albrecht Schnabel and Anara Tabyshalieva
post-conflict reconstruction, as they know little about women’s history of resistance and tend to prefer to work primarily with men.50
Justice and the legal status of women In traditional societies with predominantly oral customary law, the status of women changes during and then again after war. While women take on new responsibilities in times of war, the rapid restoration of “traditional” norms after the war (which, as observed above, may have more to do with controlling women than with restoring tradition!) often leads to renewed discrimination against and marginalization of women. In postconflict reconstruction, women usually receive less support than many men: while a man wounded by the enemy is seen as a hero, a woman wounded by an enemy who used rape as a tool of war is perceived as a disgrace for the whole community.51 There is no post-war monument of a raped woman, whereas monuments for dead or wounded men are common. History as a rule does not recognize names of female warriors or women who helped men in a war; if women are recognized, their exact roles may be distorted to reflect gender ideologies rather than what they really did.52 In post-conflict societies, men and women return to their traditions of gender discrimination, which often become even more intolerant of women’s rights than before the war. As Meredeth Turshen observes in the African context, while war erodes some traditional values, it does not erode sexist beliefs, which (not coincidentally) serve the interests of the male-dominated state – whether colonial, apartheid or postcolonial.53 The legal and social status of women in post-conflict societies often changes quite drastically as a consequence of the war. This happens for instance through the loss of male relatives, legal documents, land and property; the restoration of local ethnic and religious traditions that discriminate against gender; or with the commencement of “state-building” processes which ignore women as citizens with a voice in shaping the institutions that will run their country. In Muslim countries and those with a sizeable Muslim population, justification of polygamy is becoming a common feature of post-conflict societies. Women tend to marry into the husband’s family, leaving behind their own family to live with the in-laws. After the death of the husband, they also, in a sense, become internally displaced persons. Unofficial polygamy in such post-conflict societies is spreading more rapidly as widows have to become second wives to survive and protect themselves and their children. In this context, for example, the National Parliament of Tajikistan has debated the introduction of polygamy and the problem of protecting second wives’ rights. As Svetlana Sharipova and Hermine De Soto report in Chapter 7, women in post-war Tajikistan are by no means