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Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict

The relationship between sexual violence and armed conflict is one of the most attentiongrabbing topics in academia and to the general public. This book, written with coherence, clarity, and force, could well appeal to a wider audience. In Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict, Janie Leatherman explores multifaceted factors related to sexual violence in situations of armed conflict. The author analyses and explains the relevance of a range of themes, such as gender relations in society – particularly gendered differences in power, freedom, autonomy, agency, and choice. Leatherman discusses theories of sexual violence in armed conflicts, to build a comprehensive analysis of the causes, which are external as well as internal. The inter-related issues that all link to sexual violence in armed conflicts are discussed within this theoretical approach, which takes in essentialism, structuralism, and social constructivism. These theoretical approaches add immense value to the text; first because it provides ways of understanding many contradictions and variations within this topic; second, because it leads the reader into thinking from different perspectives. For example, theories of constructivism are used to explore systematic factors like hegemonic masculinity and how it links up with situational factors in conflict to produce other masculinities that are subordinate and violence-laden. Leatherman’s approach is dynamic, and also covers macro and micro politics behind such violence. We can look at the nature of discourse which has been circulating and which gives rise to the common perceptions about where and how rape is used; say, for example, in Congo: war, rape as a weapon. Such discourse, and the accompanying reductionist assumptions, leads us to believe that sexual violence is confined to Africa. This misrepresentation is something that Leatherman successfully manages to correct in this book. Moreover, she breezily tracks the historical factors where such acts had taken place in the past, and in this way leads the reader to a different way of thinking when trying to reason out such violence. She touches on one of the most neglected, yet vital, factors directly and indirectly related to sexual violence – the global political economy and its impact on communities. She writes: