Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice.

• Author: Yousuf, Ambreen

By Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko Darden

California: Stanford University Press, 2020, 180 pages, $14, ISBN: 9781503613430

Women are perennially considered as the symbol of peace and innocence, and this assumption has concealed their capability for inflicting ferociousness. Steflja and Trisko Darden's book, Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice, finds that justice is not blind to gender and that women are equally capable of perpetrating war crimes as men. However, few women utilize their feminine strategies to conceal their ferociousness. This work initiates a debate of war criminals between men and women, through examples that were prosecuted for similar crimes, unlike the rest of the literature of gender studies. In this work, the authors shed light on four female war criminals and their roles in times of war. Depicting women war criminals as 'Mother, Monster and Whore,' the authors draw a clear sketch helping to analyze their legal cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and wartime abuses.

This book is divided into four chapters. The introduction provides a comprehensive summary of female war criminals and examines how gendered assumptions took center stage during their trials. Each chapter provides a detailed account of a female war criminal-Biljana Plavsic (president), Pauline Nyira-masuhuko (minister), Lynndie England (soldier), and Huda Muthana (student-prosecuted under international tribunals, domestic courts, and military courts.

The first chapter presents the case of Biljana Plavsic, a war criminal from Bosnia and Herzegovina's (BiH) Re-publika Srpska (RS) province. The authors highlight how Plavsic was involved during her tenure in many serious crimes and was charged on nine counts, including complicity to commit genocide; persecution on political, racial, and religious grounds; extermination and deportation; willful killing, and murder as a violation of the laws of war. Furthermore, the authors evaluate Plavsic's dual character (mother and monster) and explain how she used the emotional card of being a 'mother' to the entire Serb nation which safeguarded her from severe punishments compared to her male counterparts and concealed her monstrous image. She also won mass support from the Serbs through her memoirs, dissembling to the international communities. In this way, as the authors demonstrate, Plavsic categorically applied gender strategies to dilute her agency in war crimes.

The authors...