Troubling Testimonies

Breaking silence after war is rarely a single act. Annika Björkdahl, Kristine Höglund and Johanna Mannergren look at women who have come forward to speak about wartime atrocities, and ask what testifying does for the women themselves. Working through a feminist lens, they draw on testimonies from four post-war settings: wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Rwanda, the enslavement of young Yazidi women by ISIS in Iraq, and the trauma of secondary witnessing in Sri Lanka.

At its centre is a new framework for understanding narrative agency, showing how personal accounts produce knowledge about women's experiences of war and feed into transitional justice and peacebuilding. It is a serious, carefully argued study for scholars and practitioners in conflict, gender and human rights, and for anyone who believes survivors' voices should shape what comes after.