This book provides a conceptual framework for understanding war rape and its impact, through empirical examination of the case of Bosnia. Providing a contextual understanding of sexual violence in war, and situating Bosnian war rape in relation to subsequent conflicts, the book offers a methodological outline of how sexual violence in war can be studied from a political-psychological perspective. It presents empirical findings from the field that show what war rape can entail in the aftermath of armed conflict for victims and their communities. Through its comprehensive approach to Bosnian experiences, the volume expands the conceptualization of victimhood and challenges the assumption that sexual violence is a particularly difficult theme to study because of victim silence. Rather, the author demonstrates there are many voices that can provide insight and understandings of war rape and its impact without having to compromise the safety and privacy of individual victims. Finally, the book shows the ways in which individual experiences of war rape are shaped by national and international discourses on gender, sexuality and politics. This book will be of interest to students of political psychology, war and conflict studies, European politics, ethnic conflict, politics and IR in general.

It is estimated that 20,000 people were subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. Today, these men and women have been largely forgotten. Where are they now? To what extent do their experiences continue to affect and influence their lives, and the lives of those around them? What are the principal problems that these individuals face? Such questions remain largely unanswered. More broadly, the long-term consequences of conflict-related rape and sexual violence are often overlooked. Based on extensive interviews with male and female survivors from all ethnic groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), this interdisciplinary book addresses a critical gap in the current literature on rape and sexual violence in conflict situations. In so doing, it uniquely situates and explores the legacy of these crimes within a transitional justice framework. Demonstrating that transitional justice processes in BiH have neglected the long-term effects of rape and sexual violence, it develops and operationalizes a new holistic approach to transitional justice that is based on an expanded conception of ‘legacy’ and has a wider application beyond BiH.

This book examines what happens to women and gender relations in times of upheaval. The experience of Norway during World War II, with some visits to other parts of the world as well, is used to demonstrate general, gendered issues that are actualized in wars both past and present. The authors explore whether gendered cultural conceptions influence the way war is remembered and represented, both collectively and individually. The collection discusses the various roles of women during the war from resistance fighter to `German tart’ and how they were dealt with and treated in the aftermath. The chapters examine the position of Jewish victims of persecution, foreign female labourers and gay men, as well as the gendered response exhibited by the courts in post-war trials of female state police employees. The book concludes by following the struggle to bring women’s role in war and peacebuilding onto the international agenda. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of criminology, as well as peace and conflict studies, political science, sociology of law, history, social work, social pedagogy, psychology and gender studies.

This interdisciplinary book constitutes the first major and comparative study of resilience focused on victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). Locating resilience in the relationships and interactions between individuals and their social ecologies (including family, community, non-governmental organisations and the natural environment), the book develops its own conceptual framework based on the idea of connectivity. It applies the framework to its analysis of rich empirical data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda, and it tells a set of stories about resilience through the contextual, dynamic and storied connectivities between individuals and their social ecologies. Ultimately, it utilises the three elements of the framework – namely, broken and ruptured connectivities, supportive and sustaining connectivities and new connectivities – to argue the case for developing the field of transitional justice in new social-ecological directions, and to explore what this might conceptually and practically entail. The book will particularly appeal to anyone with an interest in, or curiosity about, resilience, and to scholars, researchers and policy makers working on CRSV and/or transitional justice. The fact that resilience has received surprisingly little attention within existing literature on either CRSV or transitional justice accentuates the significance of this research and the originality of its conceptual and empirical contributions. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This timely book focuses on the history, application and significance of human rights in the West and in China.

All too often in situations of armed conflicts, rape and other acts of sexual violence are used as military tactics. The use of sexual violence as a strategy of war is distinctively destructive and not only leaves victims with significant psychological scars but also tears apart the fabric of families and affected communities. Sexual Violence and Effective Redress for Victims in Post-Conflict Situations: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research that analyzes these crimes and their implications for the needs of victims in post-conflict justice processes and how these needs can be effectively addressed in order to support the affected community. To conduct this analysis, it explores the distinct aspects of these crimes to understand the nature and extent of the social challenges and damage facing the victim, and examines the challenges and limitations of international criminal justice in dealing with a wide range of victim needs. While highlighting topics including judicial accountability, victims’ rights, and criminal justice, this book is ideally designed for psychologists, therapists, government officials, academicians, policymakers, and researchers.

The condemnation of wartime sexual violence as a gross violation of human rights has received widespread support. While rape and other forms of sexual violence have attracted considerable local and international attention, this often excludes wartime sexual violence among women belonging to so-called ‘perpetrator’ war-torn nations. This book explores the silence surrounding women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence within academic, legal and public discourses. Olivera Simić argues that the international criminal law and feminist legal discourse on wartime sexual violence can construct a problematic victim hierarchy that excludes and misrecognises certain women’s experiences of sexual violence during and after armed conflict. The book focuses on the experiences of Bosnian Serb women, where the collapse of the former Yugoslavia led to brutal war and gross human rights violations throughout the 1990s. Two decades after the war, women in Bosnia and Herzegovina are still facing the legacies of the violence in the 1990s. Through this case Simić argues that while all women survivors of rape face problems of stigma, shame and lack of political visibility, their legal and symbolic status differ according to their ethno-national identity. Drawing on interviews with Bosnian Serb women survivors of rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, feminist activists, local media, documentary and archival sources, the book examines ‘post-conflict justice’ as it is seen, lived and interpreted by women who belong to ‘perpetrator’ nations and will be of great interest and use to researchers, students and practitioners within post-conflict law and justice, international criminal law, security studies and gender studies.

Using the Peruvian internal armed conflict as a case study, this book examines wartime rape and how it reproduces and reinforces existing hierarchies. Jelke Boesten argues that effective responses to sexual violence in wartime are conditional upon profound changes in legal frameworks and practices, institutions, and society at large.

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.

This edited collection addresses intimate partner violence, risk and security as global issues. Although intimate partner violence, risk and security are intimately connected they are rarely considered in tandem in the context of global security. Yet, intimate partner violence causes widespread physical, sexual and/or psychological harm. It is the most common type of violence against women internationally and is estimated to affect 30 per cent of women worldwide. Intimate partner violence has received significant attention in recent years, animating political debate, policy and law reform as well as scholarly attention. In bringing together a range of international experts, this edited collection challenges status quo understandings of risk and questions how we can reposition the risk of IPV, and particularly the risk of IPH, as a critical site of global and national security. It brings together contributions from a range of disciplines and international jurisdictions, including from Australia and New Zealand, United Kingdom, Europe, United States, North America, Brazil and South Africa. The contributions here urge us to think about perpetrators in more nuanced and sophisticated ways with chapters pointing to the structural and social factors that facilitate and sustain violence against women and IPV. Contributors point out that states not only exacerbate the structural conditions producing the risks of violence, but directly coerce and control women as both citizens and non-citizens. States too should be understood as collaborators and facilitators of intimate partner violence. Effective action against intimate partner violence requires sustained responses at the global, state and local levels to end gender inequality. Critical to this end are environmental issues, poverty and the divisions, often along ‘race’ and ethnic lines, underpinning other dimensions of social and economic inequality.