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Sexual Violence Inside Rebellion: Policies and Perspectives of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone

Contemporary understandings of rape in wartime emphasise its strategic deployment as a weapon of war. One of the most prominent cases in the discourse has been the Sierra Leone Civil War and its Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group. This article complements the existing literature by examining war-related sexual violence from within the rebel group itself, exploring how sexual violence was used and understood by fighters. Counter-intuitive to received wisdom that the RUF instrumentalised rape systematically, extensive interview and archival material show that there were harshly inculcated, but ultimately ineffective policies aimed at preventing rape. These laws were central to the RUF's attempts to manage organisational control and cohesion. This calls for revisiting and revising the ‘rape as a weapon of war’ framework if it is to have explanatory power for the causes and mechanisms of gender violence in war.