Skirts as Flags: Transitional Justice, Gender and Everyday Nationalism in Kosovo

Wartime rape is ubiquitous in contemporary conflicts. Its commission is deeply implicated in the gendered notions of a nation: a woman's body is constructed as a target in a conflict that involves different identity groups and as an object of protection within a nation. Addressing past wrongs in view of repairing relationships after human rights violations across the identity divide is an integral part of post‐conflict recovery (Murphy, 2017, pp. 22–23). The practice of transitional justice also has a “constitutive” effect on the building of the new democratic order and peace (Teitel, 2000). Post‐conflict justice provides an opportunity for reordering gender relations within post‐conflict nation building. This process requires the recognition of both a victim‐ and a gender‐specific harm, such as wartime rape. However, the practice of transitional justice often perpetuates “transitional in justice” (Loyle & Davenport, 2016), of which gender injustice is a part. In this article, we bring the perspective of everyday nationalism to the feminist theorizing in the field of transitional justice and investigate gendered dimensions of post‐conflict nation building. Our aim is to understand possibilities for achieving gender‐just peace characterized by the transformation of gender relations, as well as their obstacles. Feminist scholarship has captured complex, contested, and ambiguous dynamics of shifting gender relations in conflict and post‐conflict settings in the everyday domain. Despite increasing understanding of women's agency and its limits, the entrenchment of dominant hierarchical norms at the intersection of gender and the nation