Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War?: Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems in the Congo and Beyond

Product Description

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.

Review

“In the last decade have we all crafted and wielded a too-cohesive, thus oddly too-comforting, story about wartime strategic rape? Weighing their rare interviews with Congolese male soldiers, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern push us all not to sympathize with perpetrators, but to think seriously about the messiness of both war waging and storytelling.” ―Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War

“Wartime rape has always been an under- recognized facet of conflicts and human insecurity, and serious policy responses have been long over-due. Simplistic presentations and lack of analysis establish a universalizing narrative that can marginalize individual's experiences and agency, ultimately limiting our analyses of sexual violence. Drawing on evidence largely related to the conflict(s) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - "the rape capital of the world" - Baaz and Stern interrogate simplistic notions of rape as a "weapon of war" and provide readers with deeper, alternative understandings of sexual violence. The authors provide a thoughtful and troubling engagement with one of the most brutal aspects of modern conflicts. Deconstructing the dominant narratives, they produce a post-colonial feminist reading that is succinct and powerful. This is a much-needed intervention and an excellent contribution to understanding conflict, in the Congo and beyond.” ―Kevin Dunn, Department of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

“This is a theoretically rich and entirely unique book that will force scholars and practitioners to rethink the way they study, talk about, and respond to wartime sexual violence. The authors break new ground as they move past depictions of the inherent nature of men and women, tired victim/perpetrator dichotomies, and simplistic, racialised and neo-colonial depictions of rape within war. This book will challenge feminist scholars in particular to untangle themselves from dominant - often paternalistic, racist, and essentializing - narratives associated with wartime sexual violence. Eriksson Baaz and Stern put their finger precisely on the problems with, and limitations of, existing analyses of sexual violence as a tool war; in doing so, they open up space for novel thinking about the intersections of race, neo-colonial politics, gender, militarization, and violence.” ―Megan MacKenzie, The University of Sydney

“It is no cliché to say that this book is groundbreaking in both its aims to unsettle mainstream understandings of rape in war, as well as to provide compelling insights into the social and contingent dimensions of militarised and sexualised violence. While many will find this book politically uncomfortable reading, it represents a paradigm shift in how we comprehend the sexual violence/war nexus, and as such poses a major challenge to policy makers, practitioners and scholars working in