Master Thesis Lab
Draft Research Proposal
Draft Thesis Title
Explaining Wartime Rape In Armed Conflict: The Great Lakes (Sub-) Region
Draft Research Statement
Sexual violence in armed conflict and wartime rape has been part of the spoils of war from time immemorial. A long dismissed inevitable consequence of the conflict is now widely recognized as an important problem of international security. Its ruinous effects on victims, perpetrators and local communities include forced displacement, the spread of disease, the burden of unwanted children, and deeply traumatized populations. Wartime rape can have devastating repercussions for international security, and it threatens prospects for peace and post conflict reconstruction. Given the challenges of working in this setting, wartime rape has not been well studied.
No part of the world has been unaffected by wartime rape. However, there have been few efforts to gather comprehensive data, and there is little agreement why it occurs. The Great Lakes (sub-) region of Africa is no exception. Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda have been plagued by decades of political instability, porous borders and humanitarian crises, along with by internal conflicts and widespread violence. Within these conflicts, SVAC have emerged as a prominent modus operandi. Although there is an agreement about the use of strategic and systemic rape, there are many unanswered questions regarding its occurrence. I propose to test existing explanations for wartime rape using a dataset of all active armed conflicts in the period 1989-2009 and subsequently conducting explanatory case studies focusing on the selected region. The main objective is to shed light on the frequency of occu...
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...ata for other countries in the region. Additionally, these cases were selected based on RSC theory.
ii. In the second stage of this research, I set out to explain the results obtained in the statistical analysis, focusing on selected cases.
iii. E.g. if genocide/politicide proves to be statistically significant, the explanation for statistical significance will be formulated and vice versa.
c. Sources
i. Together with Wood’s articles explaining variety in wartime rape and Cohen’s articles and dataset focusing on the explanation of rape during civil war between years 1980 – 2009, Leatherman’s book Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict (2011) now serve as the cornerstone for my research.
ii. Cohen’s original dataset, APSR article + supplementary material
iii. recommended datasets, codebooks
iv. reports
v. peer review articles, books
vi. internet sources
Stiglmayer, Alexandra. 1994. Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-herzegovina. Lincoln: university of Nebrask Press.
Ode, Kim. "Sexual Trauma: Women Vets' Secret War." ProQuest, 18 Dec. 2010. Web. 20 Mar. 2012.
Rape is devastating to its victims. I feel as if this statement should stand alone, underlined and in bold typeface. It is crucial that we, as a society, come to a deep understanding and awareness of this message. For that reason, I will state it again:
In the 20th century, perceptions of rape in war have moved from something that is
Crimes of a sexual nature – i.e. gender-based, sex-based or sexual crimes – amounting to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are almost always physically violent and/or gravely denigrating. By nature crimes involving sexual violence are serious – otherwise they would not constitute or amount to atrocity crimes. For the purposes of this paper, atrocity crimes of a sexual nature, sex-based atrocity crimes and gender-based atrocity crimes are generally referred to as “sexual violence”.
While some children and adults are able to escape the wrath of the LRA, many are hurt, persecuted and forgotten about every year, by the group’s tactics. Children are taken during raids in villages near the borders of Uganda, Sudan, Congo, and the Central African Republic. The men are usually killed and the women flee, are killed, or trafficked. These raids are usually carried out by “child soldiers much younger than their victims,” where they are forced to kill possible relatives and kidnap other children. The male children that are taken are usually forc...
The effects of human trafficking, child labor, and rape as a weapon are mainly women and children dying as well as little done to change the ways. In chapter 8, Johnson states that several million are trafficked yearly (385). This leads to many women being shipped around without choice most of the time and leaving families broken in the aftermath. In the Global Hotspot: Democratic Republic of Congo it is written that “1,152 women are raped everyday” (395). Lastly, Ensler writes that in the Congo, “Almost 6 million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped [in the 12 year period]
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
Though the use of child soldiers is a global concern, the highest numbers have been reported mainly in Africa and Asi...
This book gives a great overview of what rape is and how it affects women. It mentions how rape is a crime of violence and not a crime of passion. It also talks about how women deal with rape and how to help them. It also goes through the politic...
Zurbriggen, E. (). Rape, War, And The Socialization of Masculinity: Why Our Refusal To Give Up Was Ensures That Rape Cannot Be Eradicated. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 34, 538-539
“The sweetly sickening odor of decomposing bodies hung over many parts of Rwanda in July 1994: . . . at Nyarubuye in eastern Rwanda, where the cadaver of a little girl, otherwise intact, had been flattened by passing vehicles to the thinness of cardboard in front of the church steps,” (Deforges 6). The normalcy of horrible images like this one had cast a depressing gloom over Rwanda during the genocide, a time when an extreme divide caused mass killings of Tutsi by the Hutu. Many tactics such as physical assault or hate propaganda are well known and often used during times of war. Sexual assault and rape, however, during times of war is an unspoken secret – it is well known that rape occurs within combat zones and occupied territories, but people tend to ignore, or even worse, not speak of the act. There have been recorded cases of rape and sexual assault in almost every war in human history. Genocidal rape was used as a gendered war tactic in the Rwandan genocide in order to accomplish the Hutu goal of elimination of the Tutsi people in whole, or part.
The people of the Congo faced physical, psychological damage due to the violation of their human rights and the rape and other sexual violence, which contributes to the spread of HIV/AIDS. The health care, education and legal systems are in shambles due to the ongoing violence of the war and are still a factor today. The UN still aid in trying to end the ongoing war that’s now in its thirteenth year it is the largest and longest lasting war to date with the uncontrollable attacks from the rebels. The rebels continue to kill and plunder the natural resources with impunity. The international and political support continues but their efforts have proven futile.
The society we live in is rape-conducive, rape-friendly, if you will. Despite the anger I feel joining those two words together, I know the sad paradox holds within it a great deal of truth. We are a violent society that has shrouded rape in mystery and shame. To stop this nightmare’s venomous crusades, all people must wage a private war to eradicate their own acceptance of the savage crime. While it is only a minority of men that actually commit rape, it is everyone’s silence that tells them it’s ok.
... The Balkan war fought from 1991 to 1999 on the land of former Yugoslav, led many foreign soldiers to this territory. These men were away from their wives, and secluded with only men for 9 years straight. The increase in brothels by the soldiers in this region was a very big cause for thousands of women and children to be exploited in commercial sex. When the war in former Yugoslav was over, many soldiers extended their military base time and remained in this region for sex. Once the military bases were gone, the issue of human trafficking in the Balkans did not disappear, but remained. “The report of the International Organization of Migration (IOM), for example, shows that several years after the end of the war in former Yugoslavia, trafficking in the Balkans is still a significant problem affecting growing numbers of women and children” (Vesna Nikolic-Ristanovic).