Looting and Rape in Wartime examines the causes of the hundred-year gap between the prohibition against wartime looting and that against rape, theorizing the conditions necessary for the emergence of a global prohibition regime in which a particular practice is not tolerated.

'Rape Loot Pillage' offers a new framework for understanding conflict-related sexual violence based on feminist international political economy. By looking at patterns of contemporary conflict this book proposes a new typology of wartime sexual violence that ties the 'value' of this violence to the politico-economic objectives of the perpetrators in different conflict contexts.

Women were historically treated in wartime as property. Yet in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, prohibitions against pillaging property did not extend to the female body. There is a gap of nearly a hundred years between those early prohibitions of pillage and the prohibition of rape finally enacted in the Rome Statute of 1998. In Looting and Rape in Wartime, Tuba Inal addresses the development of these two separate "prohibition regimes," exploring why states make and agree to laws that determine the way war is conducted, and what role gender plays in this process. Inal argues that three conditions are necessary for the emergence of a global prohibition regime: first, a state must believe that it is necessary to comply with the prohibition and that to do otherwise would be costly; second, the idea that a particular practice is undesirable must become the norm; finally, a prohibition regime emerges with state and nonstate actors supporting it all along the way. These conditions are met by the prohibition against pillage, which developed from a confluence of material circumstances and an ideological context: the nineteenth century fostered ideas about the sanctity of private property, which made the act of looting seem more abhorrent. Meanwhile, the existence of conscripted and regulated armies meant that militaries could take measures to prevent it. In that period, however, rape was still considered a crime of passion or a symptom of behavioral disorder—in other words, a distortion of male sexuality and outside of state control—and it would take many decades to erode the grip of those ideas. Only toward the end of the twentieth century did transformations in gender ideology and the increased participation of women in politics bring about broad cultural shifts in the way we perceive sexual violence, women, and women's roles in policy and lawmaking. In examining the historical and ideological context of how these two regimes evolved, Looting and Rape in Wartime provides vital perspective on the forces that block or bring about change in international relations.

The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies - American, French and British - as by the members of the Red Army, and they occurred not only in Berlin but throughout Germany. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

The New York Times bestselling account of one of history's most brutal—and forgotten—massacres, when the Japanese army destroyed China's capital city on the eve of World War II, "piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror". (Adam Hochschild, Salon) In December 1937, one of the most horrific atrocities in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking (what was then the capital of China), and within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered. In this seminal work, Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, tells this history from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers, that of the Chinese, and that of a group of Westerners who refused to abandon the city and created a safety zone, which saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Drawing on extensive interviews with survivors and documents brought to light for the first time, Iris Chang's classic book is the definitive history of this horrifying episode.

This collection offers a new reflection on rape in war time through 15 case studies, ranging from Greece to Nigeria. It questions the specificity of rape as a universal transgression, its place in memories of war, its legacies, including children born from rape, and the challenge of writing about intimate violence as both a scientist and a human.

In this ambitious follow-up to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on the road back to civilian life. Seamlessly combining important psychological work and brilliant literary interpretation with an impassioned plea to renovate American military institutions, Shay deepens our understanding of both the combat veteran's experience and one of the world's greatest classics.