Troubling Kastom: Women, Violence, and Justice in Vanuatu

Abstract

In Vanuatu, efforts to expand the role of kastom [local knowledge, traditional culture] into key justice and governance spaces within the state are increasingly evident. At the same time, Vanuatu has continued to experience very high rates of violence against women and girls. In her 1987 poem, Colonised People, late Ni-Vanuatu poet and national leader Grace Molisa described the violence and oppression that women and girls experience at the hands of the 'Free men of Vanuatu' as a form of colonising violence. Yet these circumstances have persisted over the intervening three decades. Within this enduring context, this thesis asks: How does the upsurge in institutional mobilisations of kastom, particularly through the materialisation of 'the power of chiefs', affect women and girls and their experiences of violence in Vanuatu? Its findings illuminate how this trend is not simply about a neutral expansion of regulatory pluralism or decentralisation. Rather, these increasing assertions of normative kastom in Vanuatu, particularly as they are deployed in the space of justice by Vanuatu's predominantly male chiefs, ultimately act to compound the violence women and girls experience.

Through the use of theoretical guideposts offered by Judith Butler's conceptualisation of violence, this thesis demonstrates how the increasingly normative and patriarchal aspects of kastom that are mobilised in Vanuatu establish epistemic frames that effectively invisiblise - erase, remove from view - the violence women and girls experience. Methodologically, the chapters draw on embedded ethnographic fieldwork, documentary analysis, and formal interviews to corroborate, clarify, and supplement the analysis. Across the chapters, this thesis traces a shift in Vanuatu's early approach to women and gender equality, as well as to chiefs and kastom, and demonstrates how normative kastom is also about submission, discipline, and control for many women and girls. The findings illuminate how the kind of invisibilising or epistemic violence inherent in normative articulations of kastom and the power of chiefs in Vanuatu can be observed across various sites in the justice sector, from Vanuatu's domestic violence legislation to community policing and juvenile justice. Each of these sites illustrates that not only have 'chiefs' rights' been privileged over the rights and interests of women and girls who experience violence, but these efforts also have the potential to restrict women's access to justice in situations of violence and mitigate the consequences for violent men.

Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates that kastom in these increasingly patriarchal and hegemonic articulations institutionalises and instrumentalises the power of particular men in a way that allows and enables violence against women and girls - both symbolic and lived. Countering this layered, epistemic violence in the lives of women and girls requires active critique. This thesis employs the approach of 'troubling' to borrow from Sara Ahmed, who draws upon Butler's work. Troubling as an act of critical engagement offers a way to examine and denaturalise these epistemic frames of intelligibility, demonstrating the violence they enact and enable, and allowing other more effective ways to address these crucial issues of violence and justice in the lives of women and girls to emerge. Show more