While the problem of wartime sexual violence is now at the forefront of major policy agendas at the U.S. State Department, the UK Foreign Office, and the United Nations Security Council, this was not always the case. How did this issue move from obscurity to a focus of intensive attention? In Wartime Sexual Violence, Kerry Crawford sets out to explain the remarkable changes in how this problem has been viewed by policymakers—from the aftermath of World War II, when sexual violence was seen as commonplace but also taboo, to an era of activism in the 1990s inspired by the horrors of mass rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, to today’s “costly efforts” (p. 2) by powerful actors to prevent and respond to contemporary atrocities. These changes are due in no small part to a number of savvy activists who successfully reframed (or “sold,” as Crawford puts it) the problem of wartime sexual violence as a “weapon of war” in order to appeal to the strongest states and the most powerful security-focused international organizations. Although several scholars have recently critiqued the “weapon of war” frame (e.g., see Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? 2013) and more broadly have asked how a given issue becomes an international priority (Charli Carpenter, “Lost” Causes, 2014), Crawford carefully traces the development and the persistence of the frame, while also highlighting its various costs and benefits to a range of actors.
In Chapter 1, Crawford develops an idealized five-stage process of the ways in which international actors might respond to incidents of wartime sexual violence; this ranges from ignoring the problem at stage 0 to treating sexual violence as impermissible and punishable in stage 5 (p. 38). The selection of a frame, which makes complex ideas “relatable, understandable and generalizable” (p. 27), occurs in the earlier stages, when activists must make crucial decisions about which violations to condemn and which to publicize.
The book focuses on the past two decades, using process tracing to analyze a host of documents, including speeches, press releases, and meeting transcripts. Crawford supplements this analysis with interviews of experts, such as government officials and staffs of nongovernmental organizations, as well as participant observation in meetings, symposia, and hearings. She examines three distinct cases, each in a separate chapter: the U.S. response to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (Chapter 2), the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1820 in 2008 (Chapter 3), and finally, the British efforts to create the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI), led by then-foreign secretary William Hague (Chapter 4). In every case, Crawford traces what, if anything, happened at each of the five stages of response. Finally, the book addresses the impacts of the weapon-of-war frame (Chapter 5), especially on marginalizing certain types of victims, perpetrators, and forms of sexual violence.
One of the central arguments of the book is that the development of the weapon-of-war frame was the result of a process of trial and error. Women’s rights and human rights groups had previously framed wartime sexual violence as a women’s rights issue and human rights problem, but these frames failed to capture international audiences at the highest levels of politics. Crawford details the value of the weapon-of-war frame—which suggests that sexual violence is “criminal, punishable and preventable” (p. 103)—for key actors. She argues that for activists, this frame countered the prevailing notion that sexual violence is inevitable, as well as the idea that it is a marginal women’s issue. For the most powerful state actors, she maintains that the-weapon-of war framing is appealing because it does not threaten their core interests or credibility. Instead, the frame allows states to separate sexual violence as an atrocity for nefarious war-making purposes from sexual violence that is committed for other more common, banal, and opportunistic reasons (such as sex work around military bases, and sexual exploitation during peacekeeping operations).
In tracing why the weapon-of-war frame became dominant (p. 50), Crawford delineates four central reasons: a resonance with international humanitarian law (in particular, by focusing on a limited period of time (conflict) for a small set of acts defined as sexual violence); collective shock at sexual violence being used as a tool of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda; the rise of nonstate actors in international politics; and the role of powerful individuals who adopted the issue as a pet cause. One related issue that is not addressed at length by Crawford is that Bosnia-Herzegovina is a European country; the relative proximity of the mass rape likely played an essential role in forcing American and British policymakers to confront the fact that sexual violence is not a problem confined to sub-Saharan Africa.
By providing a behind-the-scenes view of how the weapon-of-war narrative came to be, Wartime Sexual Violence is a significant contribution to the growing literature on conflict-related rape and other forms of sexual violence. Nonetheless, there are a few points that are raised—and left largely unanswered—by the book.
First, a theory exploring the conditions required for international recognition and acceptance of wartime sexual violence within the weapon-of-war frame is never explicitly articulated. What are the conditions under which a case of wartime sexual violence becomes internationally recognized and eventually called a weapon? The book hints at an answer in its brief discussion of the First and Second Chechen Wars (pp. 167–68): Crawford argues that sexual violence in Chechnya has been ignored due to the lack of firsthand accounts and to being overshadowed by other cases of sexual violence, and because the perpetrator (Russia) is a strong state with a Security Council veto. But a more comprehensive theory is mostly absent from the book.
On a related note, some of the details about the sources and methods are left too vague. The number and types of interviews, as well as the particular meetings and symposia that the author attended as a participant observer, are not specified. For example, it is not clear if the author herself was in attendance at one of the key events in the book, the 2014 Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London. In terms of the case studies, why these three actors (the United States, the UN, and the UK) are essential subjects for analysis is briefly addressed (p. 19), but why the particular cases were selected is never discussed. As a result, it is hard to know what to conclude from the cases. For example, the DRC is a unique case in many ways—the scale of the sexual violence was immense and its brutality was extreme. It also would have been illuminating to include a detailed “negative” case study, in which activists attempted to employ the weapon-of-war frame but failed. More broadly, the reader is left wondering about generalizability. How systematic is nonresponse (stage 0) to incidents of wartime sexual violence? Given that there now exist cross-national data on wartime rape and sexual violence (e.g., the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict [SVAC] data set), future research could use Crawford’s scale of responses to determine how frequently severe cases of wartime sexual violence are ignored or only barely acknowledged by international actors.
While the author understandably focuses on strong states and the UN, she does not address what impact the weapon-of-war frame has on other types of actors. It is not only high-level politics but also grassroots advocates and local people whose incentives are altered by the hyper-focus on sexual violence (see, e.g., Severine Autesserre, Peaceland, 2014). Does the weapon-of-war frame have any impact on the use of rape, and if so, how? It is notable that the perpetrators themselves are only observed in stage 5 of Crawford’s scale of recognition, at the point where behavioral change happens (it is also notable that this stage of norm internalization has yet to occur). From the perspective of armed groups, when is the weapon-of-war frame a deterrent, as Crawford’s scale of response suggests, and when does it become a perverse incentive to commit sexual violence, as Autesserre has argued in the case of the DRC?
Finally, the book raises important (depressing) questions about the irrelevance of social science for the politics of advocacy on wartime sexual violence. The final text of UNSCR 1820 makes statements—based on activists’ claims—about the impact of sexual violence in “exacerbat[ing] situations of armed conflict and . . . imped[ing] restoration of peace and security” (p. 96). But these are empirical questions about the long-term consequences of wartime sexual violence that are still unsettled—and largely unexplored—in the social science literature. In addition, the PSVI is focused on increasing prosecutions as a deterrent for future perpetrators. But here again is a failure of social science to penetrate the policy discussion: There are persuasive arguments from within the academic community that accountability for sexual violence, at least in the form of international criminal trials, is not an effective deterrent (see, e.g., Kate Cronin-Furman, “Managing Expectations: International Criminal Trials and the Prospects for Deterrence of Mass Atrocity,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7[3], 2013.) Why have academics, and particularly social scientists, been left out of the policy discourse about sexual violence as a weapon of war? And if, as seems to be the case, social scientists are increasingly rejecting the accuracy of the frame, will academic research be even further marginalized in the future?
Wartime Sexual Violence is a thought-provoking and accessible assessment of the meteoric rise of a once-ignored policy issue. Crawford’s analysis—along with rich detail from three recent cases—provides a valuable framework that can serve as the foundation for future scholarship.
