Women in uprising and transitional processes: an introductory note

During uprisings, revolutions and times of conflict, women always walk a very thin tightrope between empowerment and disempowerment, they are forced into positions of responsibility that only the day before were unthinkable, they take up leading roles to guarantee social survival and the future, but this does not guarantee that once the ‘revolution’ is over, their new power will be acknowledged. Times of upheaval can be times of hope, but also of death, destruction and mourning, in which rights are suspended, old rules are broken. These times are in all senses ‘exceptional’ times. When they eventually come to an end and some sort of new ‘order’ is established, women’s participation in bringing about that newness tend to be overlooked, to be seen as ‘exceptional’ as the times that produced it, as extra-ordinary, anomalous. From there, the step to the restoration of old roles for women and to dis-empowerment is very short. And so women need to start re-negotiating again, to denounce the complicity between the post-conflict present and the status quo, re-organize a vindication of rights and status. The paper focuses on the meaning of this tightrope, this crucial empowerment/disempowerment dialectics in historical moments of political transition for women, during and after uprisings and wars, by referring to one historical experience: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the late 1990s.