Mémoire
| Résumé : | This research attempts to understand how the United Nations (UN) both de-politicises gender- related issues and reinforces intersectional and structural injustices faced by South Sudanese women through its neoliberal feminist discourse. Indeed, the UN has a neoliberal feminist vision reducing South Sudanese women to economic subjects disregarding their specific discriminations and how they intersect. The organisation performs feminism by capturing feminist discourses of empowerment but glosses over any criticism of patriarchal structures. This reveals to be problematic when the United Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) assists women, victims of oppression: the UN’ s neoliberal discourse reinforces the idea that women’s labour is both undervalued and intensified. South Sudanese women are also discriminated against mainly based on their ethnicity and religion, which sometimes intersect. The UN is limited by its neoliberal feminist narrative and bureaucratic structure, creating a technical solution for non-technical gendered issues and frames women in terms of needs. When South Sudanese women need money to survive, the UNMISS provides a short-term Car Wash project only for the UN vehicles, not tackling women’s issues radically. Contrarily, the South Sudan Women Empowerment Network (SSWEN) focuses on women’s rights and politicisation. SSWEN is composed of both diasporic and grassroots women. Even though the neoliberal feminist culture has influenced members of the US diaspora, they recognise that women are vulnerable to patriarchal capitalist injustices. Indeed, SSWEN exposes the facts that most quotas are unmet, female ministers are co-opted into the government, South Sudan is ‘repatriarchalized’ through gender-based violence, and women’s bodies are economic objects exchanged for cattle dowry. It is difficult to assess whether the network changed its discourse since diasporic women have been influenced by neoliberal feminism before the arrival of the UNMISS. However, the network seems to adapt to the neoliberal discourse. SSWEN received financial help from the UNMISS Gender Unit and accepted the unsustainable Car Wash project for lack of a better option. Now other UN agencies have taken over. The United Nations uses its bureaucratic nature to impose its resources, capacity, and knowledge on the local women perceived as ‘lacking something’. In this case, the UN dispossesses South Sudanese women from their freedom of action by choosing how to tackle their issues and acts as an anti-political machine using its financial assistance to keep working with SSWEN in South Sudan indefinitely, reinforcing neo-colonial structures. Similarly, the patriarchal capitalist structures are strengthened by the UN profiting from women’s intensification of labour. The UN de- politicises gender-related issues and reinforces patriarchal capitalist and neo-colonialist injustices faced by South Sudanese women through its neoliberal feminist discourses. |
