THE GENDER OF REPARATIONS: UNSETTLING SEXUAL HIERARCHIES WHILE REDRESSING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS edited by Ruth Rubio-Marín

The new book, The Gender of Reparations: Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies While Redressing Human Rights Violations, edited by Ruth Rubio-Marín, is a powerful interdisciplinary exploration of gendered reparations in transitional countries. Through a gendered perspective, it not only dives deep into the human rights violations experienced by women, it also endeavors to present “engendered” reparations as a partial solution to the harms experienced during conflict. Taking countries such as South Africa, Ghana, and Chile as examples, The Gender of Reparations is a well-ordered collection divided into eight chapters with each author contributing a separate and distinct piece. Although it is clear that the authors in the collection begin where Rubio-Marín’s previous book, What Happened to the Women?, ended, the new book is fairly accessible to readers without much knowledge of reparations. While the reader will benefit from reading any chapter as a standalone piece, reading it from beginning to end is truly moving. A common thread throughout the book is that violence against women is perpetrated before, during, and after conflict. Before conflict, violence against women is normative, accepted, and ordered. During conflict, there is an abrupt discontinuity with that norm in the form of extreme and unimaginable violence. In the post-conflict period, war is often followed, unfortunately, by heightened violence against women as the new accepted norm. Rubio-Marín has structured the collection in a similar fashion, so that the reader who reads from start to finish has some glimpse into the tri-part terror. The beginning chapters spend considerable time laying out the normative cultural perspectives of gender in conflict countries. These chapters are followed by pieces that, in addition to addressing a particular