Abstract
Never have I been so moved by any book on the embedding of sexual violence in social structures as I have by Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War?: Perceptions, Prescriptions, Problems, in the Congo and Beyond. I admit, when I first opened the cover, I expected sexual violence to be presented as a force within itself or as a shadowy backyard ghost that lingered around but was not an ever-present part of the military, war, or the structure of society. After reviewing the table of contents and the detailed index, I saw that the authors considered regional and state manifestations of sexual violence within a global framework. Sexual violence was analyzed as an integral part of contemporary global institutions and mechanisms of inequality as it was defined as an integral and fundamental part of war that reflects the interconnectedness of gender, racial, ethnic, colonial, and global violence, particularly as it has been expressed in comparative and historical processes of genocide.
In the first chapter, ‘Sex/Gender Violence,’ the authors depart from their experiences of researching rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and argue that the dominant and seemingly progressive perspective of seeing, listening to, and understanding wartime rape, when probed, reveals a host of unexamined effects. They set the stage for subsequent analysis by offering a reading of the dominant narratives that frame possible understanding of sexual violence, i.e. the ‘sexed story’ of wartime rape, followed by the ‘gendered story’ that produces sexual violence as both normal and ‘abnormal’ and fundamentally different from and outside of other forms of violence that are presumed to be gendered. Both of these moves (simultaneously rendering sexual violence normal and abnormal) ultimately contribute to dehumanizing those who rape as well as those who are raped. The authors, therefore, briefly explore some uncomfortable subjects, which do not neatly fit into the dominant framework. In light of these uncomfortable subjects, they reflect on the ethno-political implications of writing about those who rape in the DRC, instead of about their victims. And they also explore the complexity in researching violence and those who commit violence and the thorny questions of the ethics, dilemmas, and fears that arise when attempting to understand how rape becomes possible from the perspectives of those who commit these acts. The chapter on ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’ also offers a critical reading of the discourse in order to make it visible. In so doing, the authors identify four nodal points that are central to producing meaning and coherence: strategicness, gender, guilt/culpability, and avoidability. What assumptions are needed to make the claim that rape is a weapon or strategy of war? And why is this conceptualizing of sexual violence so seductive and so prominent? The authors ask these questions to better understand its appeal (i.e. the study of wartime rape) in the face of the violence of widespread and brutal conflict-related rape. This appeal, they suggest, resides in its inchoate promise that the bestial violent sex evoked in the ‘sexed story’ and reproduced in the ‘gendered story’ can be hampered; criminals will come to justice; wartime rape can be eradicated, or at least largely prevented or avoided; and sexual violence can be controlled, managed, and depoliticized.
Chapter two, on ‘Rape as a Weapon of War’, is of a slightly different character than the preceding one. Here, Eriksson Baaz and Stern attend more specifically to the nodal point of strategicness in the story of ‘rape as a weapon of war’. Drawing on insights collected from the sociology of violence and the military, as well as others’ research in the DRC, they explore the notion of rape as inherently strategic in warring. The aim of this chapter is to highlight some aspects of military organizations and warring that tend to be rendered invisible in the story of the strategicness of rape. They address three aspects in particular. First, they attend to the discursive nature of strategy and demonstrate the ways in which notions of military strategicness, including the strategicness of sexual violence, vary depending on military contexts. Second, military instructions rarely embody their ideals of discipline, hierarchy, and control. Rather than reflecting strategic action, sexual violence in war can also reflect the fragility of military structures and hierarchies. Third, the authors analyzed the discourse of rape as a weapon of war, through critically exploring how strategicness and the attendant notions of culpability, gender and avoidability together produce a seemingly cohesive, credible and politically appealing narrative.
Next, chapter four, ‘Post-Coloniality, Victimcy and Humanitarian Engagement: Being a Good Global Feminist’, shifts our focus to the politics and ethics of engagement for redressing the harms of wartime sexual violence. It does so by providing a postcolonial reading of the global battle to alleviate the suffering of the raped women in the DRC. Specifically, they argue that the massive engagement in the plight of Congolese rape survivors offers an illuminating example of the reenacting of the white woman’s burden to save brown women from brown men. They also discuss some of the unintended consequences of the interventions designed to combat the so-called rape epidemic and attend to its victims. They explore how a singular focus on sexual violence within a very wide repertoire of human rights abuses occasions selective listening and blinded views as well as, more concretely, a ‘commercialization of rape’. However, as the interventions themselves are problematic, so also is the critique of these interventions – in whose interest is this critique really articulated? What are the potential consequences, possibilities, or risks of such critical interventions? How is the dominant story of wartime rape manifested in practical interventions aimed at redressing sexual violence?
In sum, the authors find that there is indeed ample cause for hope beyond the rape as a weapon of war discourse. In the concluding chapter, Eriksson Baaz and Stern further reflect on the ethno-politics of research and humanitarian engagement on rape in armed conflict settings. Importantly, they also address their own complicity in relation to the discourses and practices they have queried and criticized in this book and discuss the pitfalls and responsibilities of critique. The authors are specialists in the subject area and, therefore, particularly qualified to talk about the subject. The book clearly has a number of strengths: It is endowed with high scholarship and analytical description and, consequently, it is extensively researched. Finally, the book is a valuable addition to the literature because it discusses a topical issue, and it refracts it through the international and local prisms. Notwithstanding the above positives, the book could do with fewer in-text references because they tend to distract from the narrative.