Wartime Sexual Violence

From Silence to Condemnation of a Weapon of War

Kerry F. Crawford

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781626164673
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Reports of sexual violence in armed conflict frequently appear in political discussions and news media, presenting a stark contrast to a long history of silence and nonrecognition. Conflict-related sexual violence has transitioned rapidly from a neglected human rights issue to an unambiguous security concern on the agendas of powerful states and the United Nations Security Council. Through interviews and primary-source evidence, Kerry F. Crawford investigates the reasons for this dramatic change and the implications of the securitization of sexual violence.

Views about wartime sexual violence began changing in the 1990s as a result of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and then accelerated in the 2000s. Three case studies—the United States' response to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1820 in 2008, and the development of the United Kingdom's Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative—illustrate that use of the weapon of war frame does not represent pure co-optation by the security sector. Rather, well-placed advocates have used this frame to advance the antisexual violence agenda while simultaneously working to move beyond the frame's constraints. This book is a groundbreaking account of the transformation of international efforts to end wartime sexual violence.

Chapter 1

Defining the Weapon

Sexual Violence as a Security Issue

Yugoslavia. That was the real opener.

—Roberta Cohen

The broad acceptance and diffusion of the “weapon of war” frame has created a paradox for advocates wishing to shed light on and end sexual and gender-based violence in its myriad forms: The frame gets states and international organizations to take sexual violence seriously as an issue of peace and security; but, by the same token, it limits the range of possible political, humanitarian, and legal responses by focusing on strategic sexual violence.

Sexual violence was not always viewed through the lens of a weapon or tactic. Frames do not simply appear in international political rhetoric and discourse; rather, they are carefully constructed and strategically employed. After advocates broke the silence shrouding survivors and victims, the security frame was neither the only nor the dominant understanding among advocacy networks, states, or international organizations (IOs). Even as the “weapon of war” frame became the commonly held understanding of sexual violence, advocates and—to a more limited extent—agents of states and IOs continued to work with a broader understanding of sexual violence in practice, despite their reliance on the “weapon of war” frame in external communications and efforts to compel others to act. The development of the security frame alongside broader frames for sexual violence, and the emergence of the “weapon of war” frame as the central narrative, underlines the deliberate nature of advocacy and the importance of understanding the relationship between the way in which an issue is represented and the resulting policy and programmatic changes. The “weapon of war” frame “sells” the issue convincingly; it gets attention and triggers condemnation. The frame provides an effective rallying cry, but how is the cry answered?

To understand the “weapon of war” narrative and its legacy, we must consider the central roles of ideas and interests, and the relationship between advocacy and context. The conceptual framework I present here places these concepts and their respective literatures in conversation before examining the development and impact of the security frame on the international anti–sexual violence agenda.

Central Concepts: Ideas, Interests, and Intersections

The account of the “weapon of war” frame’s impact is one of advocacy simultaneously enhanced and constrained by states’ interests. The dominant narrative portrays sexual violence as an element of strategy that armed groups use against vulnerable civilian victims/survivors to achieve political-military goals. Before discussing the ramifications of the “weapon of war” frame for sexual violence, it is worth understanding the theoretical roots of the concept of a security frame.

Ideas: External Advocates and Issue Framing

Words and ideas trigger action. An issue’s frame—how the issue is presented or defined by advocates—has a significant impact on its ability to resonate with existing norms and emerge onto the international political agenda (Price 1995). Ultimately, the goal of advocacy efforts is to create lasting change, principally through the adoption of new policies, laws, norms, or beliefs. The international community of states and organizations condemns certain actions that are proscribed by norms for or beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior. These norms and beliefs change over time through the work of advocates, or norm entrepreneurs, and adoption by and diffusion among states (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998).¹

How and why do some issues motivate action and normative change? Issues do not become priorities on their own; nor do problems and their solutions “simply exist out there” before someone endows them with meaning (Joachim 2007, 19). A frame provides the imagery needed to convey the urgency and severity of the issue and to persuade individuals and groups to join the advocacy effort (Tarrow 1998). Given the persuasive power—or lack thereof—of an issue’s frame, advocates devote considerable attention to promoting the right one. An effective frame makes an issue relatable, understandable, and generalizable. Michael Barnett’s (1999, 15) study of the Oslo process addresses the deliberate nature of issue framing: “Actors strategically deploy frames to situate events and to interpret problems, to fashion a shared understanding of the world, to galvanize sentiments as a way to mobilize and guide social action, and to suggest possible resolutions to current plights.”

Some rights violations, threats, and victims attract more attention and concern than others. Framers—the advocates who “pitch” the issue within a specific frame—work within the constraints imposed by an audience’s priorities. In their work on the strategies and effects of transnational advocacy networks (TANs), Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998, 203–6) find that advocacy efforts pertaining to the protection of bodily integrity or the prevention of bodily harm for vulnerable populations and the promotion of legal equality are most likely to generate substantial international support. In each of Keck and Sikkink’s cases, successful transnational advocacy efforts functioned as a boomerang: When domestic organizations’ attempts to seek justice or obtain rights were denied by the state, the domestic groups turned to external nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to take up their case; the external NGOs then solicited assistance from a state ally, and that state then pressured the rights-denying state directly or through an international organization to create policy—and eventually norm—change. The NGOs, states, and IOs working together to advocate for an issue or normative change form a TAN, and much of the pressure for change comes from outside the rights-denying state. The issue frame’s persuasiveness and the sense of urgency derived from it are key elements of success at each stage of the process.

Richard Price’s (1998, 619–23) work on the international prohibition of antipersonnel land mines, to take another example of successful transnational advocacy, suggests that the use of graphic images of bodily harm to vulnerable or “innocent” groups (namely, civilian children), effectively mobilized advocacy and secured state support for the prohibition of what was once considered an acceptable weapon. New issues must resemble or fit within well-established norms or issues that states and IOs already prioritize; the presence of existing prohibitions on specific weapons, such as the chemical weapons taboo, was an essential aspect of the international backdrop against which the land mine ban was adopted (Price 1998, 628–29). Price highlights the “combination of active, manipulative persuasion and the contingency of genealogical heritage,” or “grafting,” at work in the promotion and adoption of new norms. Advocates are strategic in their choice of frames (Price 1998, 617). When an issue’s frame enables advocates to persuade the audience of the connection between the issue at hand and past crises, threats, or violations of rights, the issue gains recognition and support. Once advocates and the leaders of states and organizations began to discuss sexual violence in terms of a weapon or tactic of war, they overcame two conceptual obstacles that had previously prevented recognition and action: the assumption that sexual violence is an inevitable by-product of war and the view that sexual violence is a women’s issue or complex human rights (and therefore domestic) issue rather than a security concern. Sexual violence used as a weapon of war can, in theory, be sanctioned and condemned like any other proscribed weapon.

Even when a frame is effective, and when the issue becomes accepted as a priority by states and international organizations, the resulting actions, policies, and perceptions of the problem may not be in line with advocates’ initial goals and may even have perverse consequences. The civilian immunity norm—which has evolved over time from the protection of all individuals employed in specific vocations to the protection of women, children, and the elderly—demonstrates the impact of the constraints imposed by dominant frames.² Charli Carpenter (2005) argues that international humanitarian agencies are restricted by the “innocent women and children” frame for civilians, which leads not only to inefficiencies in the services these organizations provide to vulnerable populations but also to the reproduction of destructive and dysfunctional gender stereotypes in war. The very strategy that enabled the frame’s success can lead to these constraints and unintended outcomes. Carpenter (2005, 297) observes that advocates for civilian protection “attempted to establish a ‘frame’ that ‘resonates’ with the moral language familiar to international donors, belligerents, and the media, and that is acceptable to political allies in the women’s network.” The persuasive frame, then, is not always the most comprehensive or realistic representation of the issue. Such is the case with the “weapon of war” frame. Sexual violence understood as a weapon of war is less a gender issue than it is a matter of wartime strategy and atrocities, and thus the issue becomes a matter of state and international security.

Interests: Embedded Voices and Shifting Security Priorities

It is through examination of the “weapon of war” frame’s legacy that the intersection of the literature on TANs, framing, and new norms with the security studies literature becomes apparent. Securitization theory, one of the Copenhagen School’s major contributions to security studies, shares with the literature on TANs, issue framing, and norm development the core premise that new interests and priorities emerge through persuasive framing efforts and—more broadly—social interaction.³ Just as problems and their solutions need to be constructed by advocates, security issues must be defined as such before they can be elevated to the priority status accorded to threats and crises.

Securitization theory demonstrates how certain problems are deemed security issues, broadening or widening the range of what can be considered “security” and complementing traditional realist (i.e., military and state-centered) views on national interests (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998; Hudson 2010; Donnelly 2013). Indeed, to “study securitization is to study the power politics of a concept” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 32). The process of securitization offers an explanation of how previously overlooked issues, like conflict-related sexual violence, might quickly emerge as state priorities through advocacy on the part of elites or policymakers embedded in government or international organizations. By “securitizing” an issue, advocates seek to place it above the fray of politics-as-usual and prioritize or expedite actions to address it (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 23). The process unfolds in several stages: A securitizing actor identifies an existential threat to a referent object (a collective group with a legitimate claim to survival); the audience—the domestic public, IOs, NGOs, or other government sectors—accepts this “securitizing move” (security speech or the framing of an issue as a security issue); emergency actions are taken to address the threat; and, eventually and as conditions allow, the issue may be desecuritized and returned to the realm of normal politics (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998; Balzacq 2005; Taureck 2006; Hirschauer 2014). Speaking “security,” portraying an issue or an act as a threat, does something (Austin 1962); this is the central assumption on which securitization theory is built and a key assumption in this project. Acceptance of the issue as a matter of security is a necessary component of the securitization process. Thierry Balzacq (2005, 192) expands on the interaction between the audience, context, and securitizing actor in his approach to securitization as strategic or pragmatic practice: The audience must have some frame of reference regarding the issue, be prepared to be convinced by the securitizing actor, and be able to approve or deny a mandate to that actor; the issue must impact the audience’s interpretation of the securitizing move; and the securitizing actor must have the capacity and willingness to use frames and language to win support. Because securitization is not complete until the audience accepts the securitizing move, but it is not always easy to determine when this acceptance has occurred, it is useful to identify which audience carries significant weight (Donnelly 2013, 64). In the case of conflict-related sexual violence, the “tough cases”—traditional security-focused agencies and states—are effective markers of the “weapon of war” frame’s success. Whereas insights from the literature on TANs, framing, and norm development highlight the role of external actors in pressuring the state to prioritize new issues and effect normative change, securitization theory examines how the concept of what constitutes security can shift from inside the state (Hudson 2010, 30).

The process of securitization widens the range of security matters through the advocacy of embedded elites or policymakers, who are in a position of authority to convincingly frame the issue as one of security. Three interrelated key observations follow: Securitization is not inherently positive or beneficial; securitization can be strategic and permit co-optation; and not everyone is in a position to speak of security. Because securitization moves issues out of the participatory political process and into an emergency mode, it represents a failure of normal political functions to solve the problem at hand (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998; Donnelly 2013, 45). By endowing the securitizing actor with the mandate to enact emergency measures, the usual constraints imposed by the democratic system are lost and opposition is effectively silenced; desecuritization, the return of the issue to politics as usual after a short period, thus may be the ideal outcome (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998, 29; Wæver 1995). Beyond the issue of formal rules and political processes, it is also worth noting that the traditional, state-centered approaches to security threats—intervention, costly signaling, and sanctions—that are considered viable solutions to other weapons may not be appropriate responses to an issue like conflict-related sexual violence. Militarized responses often endanger the very civilians they aim to help, especially those civilians who are traditionally marginalized or vulnerable (Enloe 2010). This ties closely to the second point: that securitization is strategic, and securitizing actors may not be sincere.

In moving an issue outside the realm of everyday politics and into the realm of extraordinary measures, those who possess the mandate to make decisions will do so with far less accountability. Balzacq (2005, 176) notes that “political elites use discourse to win a target audience without necessarily attending to one of the basic rules of a successful speech act—sincerity.” Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde (1998, 29) warn that successful securitization is not “an innocent reflection of the issue being a security threat; it is always a political choice to securitize or to accept a securitization.” Problems must be constructed as such, and “security threats” can be inflated for political gain or ulterior motives. Issues deemed to pertain to security can be co-opted and fenced off from normal political processes for the sake o...