Contemporary feminist advocacy in human rights, international criminal law, and peace and security is gripped by the issue of sexual violence in conflict. But it hasn't always been this way. Analyzing feminist international legal and political work over the past three decades, Karen Engle argues that it was not inevitable that sexual violence in conflict would become such a prominent issue. Engle reveals that as feminists from around the world began to pay an enormous amount of attention to sexual violence in conflict, they often did so at the cost of attention to other issues, including the anti-militarism of the women's peace movement; critiques of economic maldistribution, imperialism, and cultural essentialism by feminists from the global South; and the sex-positive positions of many feminists involved in debates about sex work and pornography. The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict offers a detailed examination of how these feminist commitments were not merely deprioritized, but undermined, by efforts to address the issue of sexual violence in conflict. Engle's analysis reinvigorates vital debates about feminist goals and priorities, and spurs readers to question much of today's common sense about the causes, effects, and proper responses to sexual violence in conflict.

Sexual violence in conflict is not simply a gross violation of human rights—it is also a security challenge.

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations—from courts to NGOs to the UN—have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence. Yet many millennia of conflict preceded these developments, and we know little about the longer-term history of conflict-based sexual violence. Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones helps to fill in the historical gaps. It provides insight into subjects that are of deep concern to the human rights community, such as the aftermath of conflict-based sexual violence, legal strategies for prosecuting it, the economic functions of sexual violence, and the ways perceived religious or racial difference can create or aggravate settings of sexual danger. Essays in the volume span a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic scope, touching on the ancient world, medieval Europe, the American Revolutionary War, precolonial and colonial Africa, Muslim Central Asia, the two world wars, and the Bangladeshi War of Independence. By considering a wide variety of cases, the contributors analyze the factors making sexual violence in conflict zones more or less likely and the resulting trauma more or less devastating. Topics covered range from the experiences of victims and the motivations of perpetrators, to the relationship between wartime and peacetime sexual violence, to the historical background of the contemporary feminist-inflected human rights moment. In bringing together historical and contemporary perspectives, this wide-ranging collection provides historians and human rights activists with tools for understanding long-term consequences of sexual violence as war-ravaged societies struggle to achieve postconflict stability.

All too often in conflict situations, rape is referred to as a 'weapon of war', a term presented as self-explanatory through its implied storyline of gender and warring. In this provocative but much-needed book, Eriksson Baaz and Stern challenge the dominant understandings of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. Reading with and against feminist analyses of the interconnections between gender, warring, violence and militarization, the authors address many of the thorny issues inherent in the arrival of sexual violence on the global security agenda. Based on original fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as research material from other conflict zones, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? challenges the recent prominence given to sexual violence, bravely highlighting various problems with isolating sexual violence from other violence in war. A much-anticipated book by two acknowledged experts in the field, on an issue that has become an increasingly important security, legal and gender topic.

In the mid 1970s, at the peak of the women’s movement, feminist activism and research opened the door to questions that are still pressing today. While sexual violence has gained public awareness and become a subject in academic debate, efforts to understand and strategies to prevent this form of violence remain inadequate. Who are the perpetrators? How is sexual violence tied to other forms of violence? What are the consequences for individual victims and societies? Compiled by the International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC), this volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding wartime sexual violence. Its enquiry employs four key relationships: War/Power, Violence/Sexuality, Gender/Engendering and Visibility/Invisibility. Through these, the authors identify gaps in existing knowledge to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the field. This volume is the result of long-standing cooperation. The International Research Group ‘Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict’ (SVAC) is a network of interdisciplinary scholars and NGO experts founded in October 2010. Sociologists, philosophers, historians, literary and legal scholars as well as NGO professionals from Europe, the US, Asia and Africa bring together empirical and theoretical studies focusing on sexual violence in different theatres of armed conflict. The group compares source material and promotes the systematic development of research questions and methods.

I. The Global Context

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, this book delves into visual and text-based materials to unpack gender-based violence(s) perpetrated and experienced by both sexes within and beyond the conflict zone.