Sexual violence as a weapon of war? Perceptions, prescriptions, problems in the Congo and beyond
Female soldiers in Sierra Leone: Sex, security, and post-conflict development

Extract

A wave of research from Africa has heralded, as well as followed, a dramatic increase in attention to war-time sexual violence over the past two decades. Where there was once invisibility in war, women's bodies are now understood as sites of exceptional victimization and violent contestation. The emergent consensus understands rape as a weapon in countries such as Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Addressing these cases, the two books under review represent the state of the art in gender and security research, while deconstructing its policy-advocacy-research nexus.

In their useful introduction to Sexual violence as a weapon of war? the authors note that the DRC, once maligned as the ‘heart of darkness’, has been reframed as ‘the rape capital of the world’. Unsettled by this discursive continuity, Eriksson Baaz and Stern deliver a highly reflexive critical discourse analysis that aims to name and re-frame the ‘global frenzy’ surrounding wartime sexual violence. They pull no punches, deliberately destabilizing the post-colonial feminist agenda. Rarely does a book sign off with a penultimate line that reads, ‘Here, we (the authors of this book) have surely also failed’ (p. 114).