Gender as a structural key to transitional justice: an Analysis of Rwanda and Guatemala

Abstract

This article examines the instrumentalization of women's bodies as a site of violence in contexts of armed conflict, particularly through practices such as sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, and systematic rape. These forms of violence, far from being isolated incidents, constitute structural strategies of domination that differentially affect women belonging to historically marginalized communities. The research question focuses on the use of the gender approach and perspective in transitional justice as empty formulas, reduced to formal compliance that fails to dismantle the structural inequalities that give rise to gender-based violence. The hypothesis guiding the analysis maintains that, in the selected cases—the Prosecutor v. Jean Paul Akayesu case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the national judgment in the Sepur Zarco case in Guatemala—the law has incorporated the gender approach and perspective in a partial and superficial manner, without substantive integration that allows for understanding and transforming the structural causes of the conflict. Methodologically, a qualitative approach is used, based on a documentary review strategy of primary sources (judgments and expert reports) and secondary sources (academic and regulatory literature). This strategy aims to explain the legal, social, and political rationales underlying the judicialization of sexual violence in these contexts.