Going Beyond Accountability and Untangling the Politics of Conflict-Related Rape

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My dissertation takes up and departs from existing work on wartime sexual violence by rethinking what it means for an act of rape to be “conflict-related,” and in this specific sense, political. In the first part of the project, I show how existing analyses of wartime rape tend to limit their focus to perpetrator intentions and organizational strategy. Rape is deemed “conflict-related”, when it is perpetrated and sanctioned by armed groups. This focus on actors’ goals, as well as the post hoc interpretation of the effects of violence as actors’ goals, I argue, distorts and narrows our understanding of conflict-related rape, because it aims to understand why actors use rape, i.e. what actors intend to accomplish by using rape, rather than understand why rape is used during war.

In the second part of the project, I use case studies to examine how the context of violence changes the meanings and effects of, as well as responses to rape. Drawing on data from nearly two years of fieldwork in Sub-Saharan Africa—interviews, ethnography, and original archival research—I argue that it is not actors’ goals that render rape efficacious during war, rather it is the context in which rape is perpetrated that determines whether its use is illicit or permissible, prohibited or accepted, politically consequential or not. While these categories are not mutually exclusive, I find that rape is efficacious during war when it violates norms regarding where, who, and how rape should be used, regardless of whether the actor violates these norms intentionally. This research forms the basis of my book manuscript, which will be useful for peace and conflict scholars, gender and sexuality scholars, and those interested in violence and meaning making.

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Coercive consumption: Armed conflict and sex trafficking in Central and East Africa

In my next project, I move from opening our definitions of what counts as conflicted-related rape to examining how those previously excluded forms of rape have been systematized and regularized in areas of protracted conflict and insecurity. The coercive and sometimes violent consumption of sex is not a feature unique to armed conflict or to sex trafficking, but little is know about how insecurity, displacement, and migration created by armed conflict intersect with sex trafficking, forced prostitution, and sex work. As such, I am interested in how armed conflict and protracted insecurity across Central and East Africa have contributed to the development of sexual economies and sex trafficking networks.

Preliminary observations during my fieldwork suggest that armed conflicts in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan have contributed to localized and transnational sexual economies and sex trafficking networks. For example, during the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency in northern Uganda, girls as young as seven were forced into prostitution by family members, or engaged in sex work as an economic necessity to survive. Similar trends have been documented in Goma in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Juba, South Sudan. Some of the same girls I interviewed in northern Uganda, also reported that they regularly travel to work in Juba in South Sudan. When asked why they would work in a warzone, they reported that combatants and international humanitarian workers pay more in active armed conflict zones than in the post-conflict communities in which they live. Additionally, Ugandan girls who have been trafficked under the guise of “domestic” work, work in Juba. Similar to my dissertation research, this new project challenges our assumptions about what types of violence and force are considered to be part of an armed conflict. Moreover, this work contributes to our understandings of the relationship between armed conflict and post-conflict security and development, such that it traces how processes of violence during armed conflict become entrenched in post-conflict communities

To examine the intersections between armed conflict and sex trafficking, I plan to continue my interviews with sex workers and expand the project to include interviews with men who solicit—or have solicited—sexual services, and managers and owners of businesses that facilitate these transactions. The field sites for this project include Goma and Juba (depending on the security situation), as well as Gulu, Uganda. These cities have been or are the epicenters for international humanitarian efforts for the surrounding conflicts. I also plan to interview sex workers at heavily trafficked border points between Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan. An extension of this project examines localized sexual economies. Examining the sexual economy over time and in the context of a broad conception of actors allows for a comprehensive analysis of how the insurgency affected sexual exchange, intimacy, and reproduction.