The Securitization of Rape

Women, War and Sexual Violence

S. Hirschauer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137410825
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política militar

This book uniquely applies securitization theory to the mass sexual violence atrocities committed during the Bosnia war and the Rwandan genocide. Examining the inherent links between rape, war and global security, Hirschauer analyses the complexities of conflict related sexual violence.

1

Introduction

All is fair in war

When it comes to the failure of humanity, there are many stories to be told. Most of them are shameful, dire, gruesome and ghastly accounts of the darkest corners of our collective souls as an international community.

Bosnia, spring 1992: hotels, barracks and abandoned sheds turned into rape camps. Screams and wails lingering in the air, coming from a police station. Mothers and sisters, daughters and children systematically raped. Bosnian Muslim women chanting Serbian war songs, gone mad, after being beaten and raped for days.

Rwanda, spring 1994: street blockades reutilized as makeshift detention areas. Human holding cells on the crossroads between life and death. Women weighed to determine how valuable they are. How a woman could pay for her life (Des Forges, 1999, p. 163). Then ‘the guards as a group or the leader among them decided whether the person was to be killed on the spot, raped, kept for service or future execution, or perhaps released’ (Des Forges, 1999, p. 163). A nun ‘battered to death with a hammer’ (Des Forges, 1999, p. 190). Women forced to bury their husbands after a massacre, then ordered to ‘walk naked like a group of cattle some ten miles to Kabgayi’ (Des Forges, 1999, p. 164).

All is fair in war.

When it comes to the failure of humanity, there are many stories to be told. Most of them are of the deepest disregard for human life, the complete abandonment of a moral compass, testimonies of the most barbaric atrocities committed by people – to people. Tales of the end of all human dignity. And only on occasion do these stories involve nuances of hope.

Such cautious hopefulness came at the end of the 20th century. It came infamously with the return of genocide to Europe; the arrival of 100 days of mass slaughter to a tiny central African country; and the systematic rape of women during both. And it came from an unlikely and, since its inception, heavily politicized and relentlessly manipulated place: the United Nations (UN), with the legal mechanisms of a timidly evolving concept, called international law and global justice, at hand.

When it comes to the failure of humanity, there are many stories to be told. Usually, these stories include obscure shades of gray: a mixed bag of international reluctance, diplomatic complicity and disparaging decision-making. These stories brim of good intentions, falling victim to global complacency, state-centrism and national agenda setting. They probe at a collective moral urgency of the human potential, yet portray a defiantly opportunistic absence of political will. Most recently, however, these stories have seen flickers of a global maturity; the redemptive power of the collective memory of failures, looming large over our many human tragedies as the international community.

This is one of those stories.

Mass rape and securitization

Through and after Bosnia and Rwanda as initial vectors or critical points of departure, this book argues sexual violence for the first time has been elevated to a global security concern. Wartime rape has become for the first time an acknowledged, legitimate threat component within the new 21st century global security environment. In the wake of the sexual atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda, the international community witnessed a gradual rise of new legal norms, facilitated through international institutions such the United Nations and its legal structures. The U.N. Security Council – the U.N.’s sole security authority tasked according to the UN Charter with determining threats to peace – through the establishment of the international tribunals of Bosnia and Rwanda acknowledged for the first time the expansive security implications of wartime rape. It recognized for mass rape to represent ‘a threat to national and international peace and security.’ Bosnia and Rwanda set unique legal precedents within international case law. Bosnia accounted for the first convictions of rape as a war crime and crime against humanity – wartime rape systematically implemented for specific political goals. Judges of the Tribunal of Rwanda advanced these international legal parameters even further. They issued the first conviction of rape as a distinct feature and mechanism of genocide. The tribunals’ unprecedented judgments underscored rape’s capacity as a threat to peace and security. In a fragile and imperfect way, international law and global justice finally started to live up to their intended function that ‘a rule is one of law not because it has been laid down with clarity in a treaty or a textbook, but because there is at least a slim prospect that someday, someone will be arrested for its breach’ (Robertson, 2000, p. xviii).

The empirical application of Securitization Theory to wartime rape – the analysis of the securitization of rape – through the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda as initial points of departure – has emerged as imperatively critical in identifying the sexual violence and security intersection. This book tries to forge out how sexual violence during war can be understood through the lens of Securitization Theory. Through the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda as anchors of departure or first signifiers of securitization, the silence of wartime rape was suddenly interrupted. Its face – the centuries-old practice and accepted instrumentality of sexual violence during war (Card, 1996; Allen, 1996; Coomaraswamy, 1998; Hansen, 2001; MacKenzie, 2010) – became contested. A collective global outrage disrupted the traditional security orthodoxy. This outrage at the onset of a new post-Cold War security environment fueled an urgency; a deepening interaction of and interplay between a multitude of global actors such as the United Nations, non-governmental organizations and an increasingly globalized media forced a normative re-positioning. This collective and reiterated urgency would eventually securitize rape.

Global security studies, including strategy and development studies, still today mostly ignore, for example, the deeply disruptive and damaging security effect of wartime rape to communal societies (MacKenzie, 2010, p. 203). Through the modality of Securitization Theory applied to the Bosnia and Rwanda case studies, the rape and security nexus is being identified, and its structurally damaging security effect made visible. It is also being interrogated and its complexities laid bare. It will cast through the analysis of the imperfection of the securitization of rape, a new and unique analytical light onto the intersection of sexual violence and security.

As this intersection is being brought to the fore, its imperfection and drawbacks reveal a twofold set of questions: what does such securitization of wartime rape then exactly mean? and what does it do (can and need to do) to be meaningful? As this book aims to explore and interrogate precisely these questions, it will make its case for the permanency of the securitization of rape. As such, the analysis of acts of securitization not only, for the first time, identified the rape–security nexus and made it initially visible through the application of Securitization Theory, but as such it contributes and participates in a newly wedged-open rape-security discourse. The empirical application of securitization through the conflicts of Bosnia and Rwanda allowed for an original examination of a peculiar volatility of the securitization of sexual violence. While the ensuing debate cannot resolve these myriad securitization imperfections, as elaborated in detail in this book’s conclusion, the case for permanent securitization, for example, can assist in dislodging wartime rape from the ‘rape as a weapon’ analogy/box and assist in deconstructing, what I call the ‘perennial othering’ of women, which places itself so central to the tragedy of wartime rape.

The history of wartime rape: A matter of silence

The rape narrative

Not all horror in war is created equal. Systematic mass rape has always carried itself well as a silent collaborator and casual bystander in times of conflict. Rape during war, its stories and clandestine silences, have haunted humanity for centuries. The Rape of the Sabine women, so ancient legend has led the world to believe, populated Rome and founded at last the Roman Empire. The need for propagation in the context and name of nation-building has, historically, often conveniently justified – and glorified – mass rape. The Roman historian Titus Livius Patavinus, born in 59 BC, – known as Livy in English – wrote how ‘they [the Romans] spoke honeyed words and vowed that it was passionate love which had promoted their offence. No plea can better touch a woman’s heart’ (Saunders, 2001, p. 152). In a more contemporary context, the arc of history, however, began increasingly to tilt toward a less politically romanticized narrative of wartime rape. The Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking in 1937 during the second Sino-Japanese War, its horrific scale and scope only revealed to a wider public in the 1990s, has, ever since, heavily tainted international relations between China and Japan. It is, even today, emotionally charging the political discourse between both countries and continues to fuel public outrages, mainly predicated on Japan’s relentless denial of the atrocities.

Equally, after World War II, it has remained an open secret – conveniently silenced for more than five decades by the political grip of Cold War bi-polarity – that Soviet soldiers raped an estimated two million women during the fall of Berlin in May 1945 and later throughout Eastern Europe. Victors’ mass rape was utilized in the name of de-Nazification and later was part of Stalin’s push for greater Soviet expansionism. During the fierce independence struggles in South East Asia, hundreds of thousands of Bengali women were known to have been systematically raped in the early 1970s by Pakistani soldiers. For centuries and decades impunity for state-sponsored mass rapists was running rampant in the spirit of nation-building. Women’s suffering was quieted through political concessions, negotiated by complicit, political patriarchy – in the name of inter-state diplomacy.

Time and again, reports and allegations of sexual violence and mass rapes during conflicts have served governments well – as propaganda tools and effective lubricants of war machines and power ambitions. However, while sexual violence throughout history has often been utilized widely, its scale and scope, its structural impact and digressive and complex security implications have never been recognized – legally and politically – as such. Women remained often the spoils of war; rape the mechanism of terror; the facilitator of men ‘having a good time’ (Aranburu, 2010, p. 614). Mass sexual atrocities during war remained, for centuries, a matter of silence.

Reports about mass rapes during war were generally accepted or effectively constructed as a pesky yet unavoidable and understood offshoot of conflict. Rape during war was not able to convey its horror – and its structurally damaging capacity – to a wider global audience. ‘For a crime to be international, it was thought that it had to be more than a garden-variety domestic crime’ (May, 2005, p. 98). Wartime rape did not evoke the same degree and sense of terror on an internationally political scale than other war crimes and crimes against humanity were able to produce. Wartime rape was usually viewed as a purely domestic, social and private matter. Equally, states and their power agencies discounted the structural nature and effect of wartime rape. It was long argued as ‘unpredictable and unavoidable’, it did not ‘constitute a security problem’ and as such was rather an ‘individual, not a collective problem’ (Hansen, 2000, p. 57). Only recently – after the mass rapes of Bosnia and Rwanda – did the international community, within a new legal context, start to wrestle – yet often politically half-hearted and imperfectly so – with the wider implications of rape as ‘a clear strategy of war’ (May, 2005, p. 98). It increasingly deemed rape, irrespective of its intraor interstate-driven rationale, ‘as more a collective than an individual crime’ (MacKinnon, 2006, p. 2).

Securitizing rape

The term ‘securitized’, in elemental terms, is for an issue such as climate change or sexual violence – to adopt a distinctive security character, validated through a specific, existential threat component. Securitization is a deeply intersubjective process, meaning it is predicated upon an intense interplay between subjects. And this intersubjectivity dictates not only an operational adherence to specific steps and process sequences (Buzan & Weaver 1998, pp. 23–24), but a legitimation of a specific threat between subjects. Usually, securitization actors, for example, the state, international organizations, non-governmental groups and the media are (a) indicating the security qualification of a referent object: women during conflict (and by extension, the state, a region and global peace) are existentially threatened by wartime rape. Securitization at this point is then attaching a specific existential threat component (a critical, if not inevitably damaging or fatal destiny) to an issue (rape). As such a gradual threat logic (based on reasoning and evidential support) is established, which then (b) legitimizes the threat through its presentation to a credible and competent audience. Once the audience is actively persuaded and convinced of the severity and existential nature of the threat (wartime rape), the audience (e.g. international institutions; the tribunals of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda) then (c) embarks on deploying exceptional and extraordinary measures, aiming to address this threat.

As this book would argue, these steps have coherently performed during the securitization of rape, starting with and through the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda – and afterwards. Similar to the securitization of HIV/AIDS (Elbe, 2006), wartime rape of women has ‘matured’ from a long collectively understood ‘regular by-product of war’ or, at best, a perennial element of humanitarian crises, to an existential threat to women and, by extension, to the state and the collective: to regional and international peace. As HIV/AIDS has displayed ‘wider political, economic, and social ramifications around the globe’ (Elbe, 2006, p. 120) and ‘has become securitized’ (Elbe, 2006, p. 126), so has rape for the first time through the conflicts of Rwanda and Bosnia. Extraordinary and exceptional measures – exceptional in their break with ‘business as usual’; in their unique origins and extraordinary applications; in its presumed distinct effectiveness – have been deployed. These exceptional measures – responses to rape which go beyond altruistic and humanitarian objectives – reasoned and deemed wartime rape a threat to peace and security. Both conflicts, for the first time, shifted international norms and assumptions, which had predominantly surrounded sexual violence for centuries. Ad hoc tribunals, established during the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – the first such war tribunals since Nuremberg – surfaced as distinct products of this security construct. As such, they developed a new set of international case law, created new international legal practice and a new judicial understanding about sexual violence during war. The tribunals, for the first time, convicted mass rapists, including as facilitators of genocide. The mass rapes in Bosnia and Rwanda emerged as seismic, hence, exceptional security watershed moments. Bosnia and Rwanda ushered in new assumptions and norms surrounding wartime rape. It made its structural mechanisms and security impact visible, globally recognizable – and recognized.

However, as Stefan Elbe in 2006 similarly evidenced with the securitization of HIV/AIDS, with Bosnia and Rwanda serving as an analytical vector for the securitization of wartime rape, such successful securitization does not mask its complex imperfection, in particular in its practical application – and reality – to rape. Women were raped en masse during both conflicts and, therefore, obviously, the immediate threat – wartime rape to Bosnian and Rwandan women – was not, in its immediacy, curbed, or even ‘curb-able’. The tribunals of both conflicts, for example, proved initially sluggish, if not lackluster, in their commitment to the prosecution of mass wartime rape. But they have eventually produced – uniquely so – unprecedented judicial milestones. As the case studies will point out, securitization has coherently operated, according to Buzan and Weaver’s prescribed securitization processes. Securitization actors (states, institutions, non-governmental organizations and the media) indicated through the speech act that women during conflict (referent object) were existentially threatened. An audience was persuaded as such and deployed exceptional measures (the tribunal exceptional convictions; legal actions) and other resources. The mass rapes during both conflicts in themselves, however, displayed exceptional characteristics and carried such global weight for securitization to continue afterward. Both conflicts sparked, what Lene Hansen defines as ‘institutionalized securitization’, supra-forms of securitizations, which ‘no longer are in need of explicit articulations to justify their [securitized] status’ (Hansen, 2012, p. 532). Through a plethora of unique and exceptional UN Security Council resolutions, for example, 1325, 1820 and 2106 the securitization of rape and sexual violence was institutionalized and further cemented.

Yet, this is not to say that such ‘institutionalized securitization’ or, as this book argues later ‘permanent securitization’, is not complex, complicated, flawed – if not very fragile – at best. Similar to rape, the securitization of HIV/AIDS, for example, wedged open counter dilemmas and infractions, even further complicating the HIV/AIDS issue as an unfolding, new security terrain. The securitization of HIV/AIDS introduced, among other elements, various ethical impasses. While the security focus channeled more resources into curtailing the AIDS pandemic and gathered increased global attention and awareness (Elbe, 2006, pp. 120, 131–132), Elbe suggested it carried the potential to harm. It could, for example, infringe upon civil liberties in the guise of national security and national interests, as has been seen after the September 11 terrorist attacks. As such, the unleashed security apparatus is filtering resources away from society and toward the more security-distinct entities, for example, military forces and political elites (Elbe, 2006, p. 127). Equally, the depiction of HIV/AIDS as an existential threat – critically connected to national security – runs counter to activists’ efforts ‘to normalize social perceptions regarding persons living with HIV/AIDS’ (Elbe, 2006, p. 120). The securitization of rape (as will be elaborated in more detail in this book’s final chapter) after being for the first time established as such through the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda – and then brought to the fore as institutionalized securitization throughout the 2000s – struggles very similarly with these imperfection and infractions.

Securitization’s imperfection

Such imperfection finds itself rooted in a complex web, often spun of good intentions met by some action, which may or may not bear significance. As elaborated in the final chapter in more depth, these imperfections are most visible in: how the securitization of rape has triggered unprecedented judicial milestones and convictions, yet they remain disproportionately small compared to the occurred and still occurring mass rapes; the tribunals have for the first time convicted members...