Assessing the Impact of Gender Sensitive Truth Commissions : Comparative analysis of South Africa and Sierra Leone

Much has been studied about the impact of transitional justice mechanisms as well as gendered impactof armed conflict. However, less is known about the gendered impact of transitional justice, includingtruth commissions. This thesis aims to fill this research gap by exploring the long-term consequencesof gender sensitive and gender-blind truth commissions for women’s security in post-conflict societies.Combining and building upon feminist critiques on transitional justice and discourses on thetransformative potential of truth commissions, I argue that truly gender sensitive truth commissionscan facilitate improvement of women’s security, as the reparations and institutional reformsrecommended by such commissions are also gender sensitive and help address root causes of violenceagainst women (VAW). The argument is tested through a structured focused comparison of two cases– South Africa and Sierra Leone. The results provided meager support for the theorized relationship.South Africa, which was characterized by low gender sensitivity of its truth commission, shows nochange in terms of the prevalence of VAW; whereas Sierra Leone with a highly gender sensitive truthcommission demonstrated improvement in some areas of women’s security. However, the evidencebase is thin while the poor implementation of the recommendations obscures the observable impactof the Sierra Leone truth commission, which compels further research with a larger number of casesand robust data collection strategy