This essay will examine the phenomena of war rape by first examining its current prevalence, secondly, examining the normative grounds of the human rights claim protecting one from war rape and how attitudes might change, and thirdly exploring a possible public policy initiative that might lessen this horrific crime.

Research into war rape has shown that rape is not incidental to the general violence of war but is instead an integral part of war strategies. Such research makes it clear that in the context of war, rape serves to injure women on an individual level, but has the more strategic effect of fracturing communal bonds. Similarly, the growing body of research investigating the reasons for, and consequences of, the rape of lesbian women, indicates that these (...) rapes have far-reaching consequences for lesbian communities and serves to reinforce patriarchal heteronormativity. While there is much research around both war and lesbo-phobic rape, the aim of this paper is to bring this research together in order examine lesbo-phobic rape through the lens of war rape theory. This paper aims to show how both “forms” of rape appear to hinge on the meanings assigned to women during peacetime and how both lead to the destruction of individual victims and their communities, while bolstering the subjectivities of the perpetrators and increasing the bonds of those complicit in such violence. The use of the theoretical understandings of war rape thus enriches the understandings of lesbo-phobic rape and shows that there are many continuities between the two. (shrink)

Recent decades have witnessed rape and sexual violence used on such a massive scale and often in a widespread and systematic program that the international community has had to recognize that rape and sexual violence are not just war crimes but might be crimes against humanity or even genocide. I suggest that just war theory, while limited in its applicability to mass rape, might nevertheless offer some framework for making the determination of when sexual violence and (...) class='Hi'>rape constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. In addition, just war theory can provide the normative justification individual soldiers need to resist orders and actions that demonstrate egregious moral breakdown as found in instances of mass rape and systematic use of sexual violence, and just war criteria demonstrate that the use of rape and sexual violence in war time can never be legitimated, especially in the case of prisoner interrogation. (shrink)

One of the most significant shifts in current thinking on war and gender is the recognition that rape in wartime is not a simple by-product of war, but often a planned and targeted policy. For many feminists ‘rape as a weapon of war’ provides a way to articulate the systematic, pervasive, and orchestrated nature of wartime sexual violence that marks it as integral rather than incidental to war. This recognition of rape as a weapon of war has (...) taken on legal significance at the Rwandan and Yugoslav Tribunals where rape has been prosecuted as a crime against humanity and genocide. In this paper, I examine how the Rwanda Tribunal’s record of judgments conceives of rape enacted as an instrument of the genocide. I consider in particular how the Tribunal’s conception of ‘rape as a weapon of war’ shapes what can be known about sexual violence and gender in the Rwandan genocide and what cannot, the categories of victims legally recognised and those that are not, and the questions pursued, and those foreclosed, about the patterns of violence before and during the genocide. (shrink)

This essay examines how rape of women and girls by male soldiers works as a martial weapon. Continuities with other torture and terrorism and with civilian rape are suggested. The inadequacy of past philosophical treatments of the enslavement of war captives is briefly discussed. Social strategies are suggested for responding and a concluding fantasy offered, not entirely social, of a strategy to change the meanings of rape to undermine its use as a martial weapon.

When rape by an armed organization occurs frequently, it is often said to be a strategy of war. But some cases of conflict-related rape are better understood as a practice, violence that has not been explicitly adopted as organization policy but is nonetheless tolerated by commanders. The typology of conflict-related rape in this article emphasizes not only vertical relationships between commanders and combatants but also the horizontal social interactions among combatants. It analyzes when rape is likely (...) to be prevalent as a practice, emphasizing not only gendered norms and beliefs of the society from which combatants come but also how those might be transformed by the organization’s socialization processes. In the conclusion, I suggest that the typology is relevant for analysts of all forms of of political violence and also for prosecutors, policy advocates, and policymakers concerned with conflict-related rape. (shrink)

This essay offers a case study in jus in bello in the American Revolutionary War by focusing on responses to sexual violence committed against American women by soldiers in the occupying British army and their Loyalist auxiliaries. Two main bodies of sources are juxtaposed in order to explore the contexts and manner in which jus in bello was adjudicated: British courts-martial and American Congressional investigations documenting British and Loyalist breaches of the codes of war. By putting the fragmentary evidence of (...) instances of rape in the context of contemporary legal and sociocultural practices of sexual violence in peacetime, as well as of the British army's disciplinary regime, we can elucidate the horizon of experiences and expectations against which survivors, assailants and prosecutors acted. The British army disciplined some soldiers for sexual offenses that violated military law and the codes of war, and it executed a few of them at a time when even their home society featured very low prosecu.. (shrink)

Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic (...) cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded. (shrink)

Sex crimes in war can be racist as well as misogynist, insofar as they have or are meant to have the consequence of hindering the reproductive continuation of a people. Both castration and forced impregnation can have this consequence. Historically, martial castration has been not only of men but also predominantly by men. The idea that rape symbolizes domination is, of course, compatible with the idea that castration symbolizes domination. Reports of forced castration also raise questions about the idea (...) that integrating women into the military might effectively eliminate, or substantially reduce, rape as a weapon of war. Previous postwar courts had treated rape as "secondary, tolerated as part of soldiers' abusive behavior". This indictment described the ordeal of fourteen Muslim women and girls, some only twelve years old, most detained in a camp, where they were subjected to "almost constant rape and sexual assaults, torture and other abuses". (shrink)

Learning about martial sex crimes against men has made me rethink some of my ideas about rape as a weapon of war and how to respond to it. Such crimes can be as racist as they are sexist and, in the case of male victims, may be quite simply racist.

Feminist and queer theorists influenced by Michel Foucault have given analyses of sexual violence and of sexually violent pornography that are generally taken to be in striking opposition to those defended by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon. In this commentary on Linda Martín Alcoff’s Rape and resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation, I suggest that these seemingly divergent analyses of sexual violence are more similar than they have appeared to be and I ask: Might this book help (...) to bring an end to the so-called ‘sex wars’ between the Foucauldians and the MacKinnonites that have been raging since the mid-1980s? (shrink)

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted the Bosnian Serb soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war of violating the human right to sexual self determination and of crimes against humanity, it transformed vulnerability from a mark of feminine weakness to a shared human condition. The court's judgment directs us to note the ways in which the exploitation of our bodied vulnerability is an assault on our dignity. It alerts us to the ways in (...) which the body of human rights law is a law of bodies; to the ways in which our desire for intimacy creates communal ties that ground our personal and social identities; to the ways in which the symbolic meanings of our bodies are integral to our sense of integrity and worth; and to the ways in which gender structures which position men as protectors of women make it possible for rape to be used as an effective and criminal weapon of war. (shrink)

This paper looks at some prominent discussions of rape in war as a violation of human rights within Radical Feminism. I begin with a brief overview of United Nations declarations and actions on the subject of rape in war. I then look at some radical feminist accounts of rape in war as a violation of human rights with particular emphasis on the discussions of Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon. I conclude the paper with a critical analysis of (...) these radical feminist accounts and show how our human rights talk must distinguish between types of rape in war situations or risk silencing the individual victims. (shrink)

In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the (...) threshold. Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links between the private and public in a number of ways; among others, the echoes or traces of the everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’? And 3) What is the relationship between the ‘unspeakable’ in the traumatic memories of the survivors and the ‘speakable’ collective memories of traumatic humanmade events? How does the collective desire ‘not to know’ or ‘to forget’ impact on the individual survivor’s ability to reconstitute their post-trauma identity in a personal as well as a social context? The aim of the analysis is to show that the multifaceted nature of the traumatic reality demands a multifaceted approach that resists binary constructions relating to self/other, private/public, individual/collective. (shrink)

Statues also die -- Open letter to the enemy : Jean Genet, war, and the exact measure of man -- Mayhem : symbolic violence and the culture of the death drive -- War, word, worst : reading Samuel Beckett's worstward ho -- Translation of a system in deconstruction : Derrida and the war of language against itself.

This article engages with the vogue for predicting the effects of the Human Rights Act 1998 by focusing on the rape prosecution and trial. The specific interest is feminist scrutiny of the right to a fair trial, particularly the concept of ‘fairness’, in light of the increasing use of disclosure rules (in Canada and England) to gain access to medical and counseling records. Transcending the two contemporary narratives of ‘victims’/women’s rights and defendants’ rights in the criminal justice system, the (...) authors argue for the infusion of the legal debate on disclosure with feminist understandings of wider cultural debates. They suggest that an increased reflexivity about intimacy, publicity and power, leading perhaps to the development of a concept of ‘democratic publicity’ (Fraser, 1997, p. 100), might help to revision the meaning of ‘relevant’ evidence in the rape trial. They also suggest that the wide-ranging cultural debate about memory, truth and history, and the emerging commitment to experimentation in responding to massive, institutionalised human rights violations (including apartheid, war crimes and child abuse) might be of use in deepening current thinking about the rape trial and listening to the ‘voice’ of the complainant. (shrink)

Increasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a group (...) harm—with religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm. (shrink)

International criminal tribunals established by the UN Security Council in the 1990s have been widely acclaimed as active participants in the modern system of dynamic criminal justice. One of their best known achievements is the prosecution of rape and sexual assaults. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) set an example for other tribunals to follow. By interpreting a variety of international laws, the community of international legal professionals has (...) been able to shift the prevailing understanding of rape and sexual violence away from that of an “unfortunate byproducts of war.” Not only has the epistemic community of legal professionals been able to end impunity for these crimes, but case-law of international tribunals has become a basis for subsequent trials at quasi-international tribunals. Decisions of the tribunals have been instrumental in drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court and can be regarded as an example of the formation of new international norms by means of judicial decisions. (shrink)

Examining the continuities and differences between war and war-like violence, focusing on the war like violence of racism and rape through the lens of Sartre’s ontology of “The Look”, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of a body schema, and Beauvoir’s analysis of women as “the sex”, I argue that war-like violence deploys the affect perceptions of shame, degrada-tion, humiliation and disgust to violate the ontological contract of intersubjectivity and mutual vulnerability.

For decades the papal tradition has renounced the term ‘war’ as something around which to build an ethical approach. One can sympathize with this: resort to war seems the consequence of ethical failure and brings in its train a host of brutalities including rape, torture, and murder that harm both victims and perpetrators. But that view of ‘war’ is an incomplete representation of the possibilities of the uses of force to secure legitimate political goods. Thus the popes have struggled (...) to maintain a clear voice in the face of abject tragedies like the Russian invasion of Ukraine: on the one hand, Pope Francis condemns war in an almost absolute manner; on the other, he recognizes the legitimacy of Ukrainian defensive uses of force. In so doing, of course, he merely abides the so-called ‘just war theory’ he seems to have discarded. My contribution will focus on the current state of the just war in Catholic teaching. I will maintain the state remains where it has been since at least the middle of the twentieth century: skeptical about the capacity of states to judge in terms of international law, but cognizant of their right to defend themselves against ongoing aggression. (shrink)

The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal convictedthree men for their role in the mass rape ofMuslim women during the conflict inBosnia-Hercegovina. That decision is a landmarkin many respects, but primarily for itsdetermination that the rape of Muslim womenamounted to a crime against humanity. Thiscomment provides an overview of the decision,exploring the significance of recognising rapeas a crime against humanity within the contextof other developments in the area of wartimerape and sexual violence. The comment alsoprovides a brief review of the (...) decision inlight of the author's previous scepticism aboutthe capacity for the Tribunal meaningfully toaddress violence against women. The commentconcludes that while many aspects of thedecision are promising, the war crimes trialitself may offer a limiting arena within whichto address wartime rape. (shrink)

Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women’s right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women’s vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of (...) the trial, guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women’s epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors. (shrink)

The civilian death toll during the Second World War Battle of Okinawa was very high. This was the result of sheer brutality resulting from racism and hatred, but also from unethical strategic decisions. This article chronicles decisions made on both sides – and accompanying actions – that arguably amount to crimes against humanity. In addition to the strategic decisions that contributed to the high death toll, actions such as rape, killing of surrendering soldiers, looting and mutilating the dead, and (...) failures to protect one's own civilian population are recounted and discussed. (shrink)

There has been much academic work outlining the complex links between women and the nation. Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation in particular social and historical contexts. This article focuses on the gendered symbolization of the nation through the rhetoric of the ‘motherland’ and the manipulation of this rhetoric in the context of national struggle in Bangladesh. I show the ways in which the visual representation of this ‘motherland’ as fertile countryside, and its idealization primarily through (...) rural landscapes has enabled a crystallization of essentialist gender roles for women. This article is particularly interested in how these images had to be reconciled with the subjectivities of women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War (Muktijuddho) and the role of the aestheticizing sensibilities of Bangladesh's middle class in that process. (shrink)

Despite its commonality rape in war has long been an invisible war crime. Gender-based violence has escaped sanction because it has been shielded into the private sphere. Although rape in war is a form of public violence committed by soldiers representing a state it continues to be conceived as a private crime, committed by individual men. If women's human rights are to be respected in war and in peace the imaginary border between the public and the private has (...) to be abandoned. In this article rape in war is studied as a case of injustice for women in violent conflict. Arguments against feminist versions of ethics of care are formulated as these theories fail to challenge the public/ private distinction due to deep and constitutive gender norms. As an alternative, a narrative, feminist ethic of justice is presented based on women's narratives of experienced injustice in war. The theoretical model is developed through the integration of values derived from the ethics of care and thereby dismisses the distinction between public and private and between reason and emotion. The conclusion is that both substance and form of human rights must be based in concrete, situated gendered people's experiences of getting their human rights violated. (shrink)

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the torture scenes in Ian Fleming’s canon of Bond novels and short stories (1953–1966), despite the fact that they represent some of the most potent sites of the negotiations of masculinity, nationhood, violence and the body for which Fleming’s texts are critically renowned. This article is an intersectional feminist reading of Fleming’s canon, which stresses the interpenetrations of homophobia, anticommunism and misogyny that are present in Fleming’s representation of torture. Drawing on close readings (...) of Fleming’s novels and theoretical discussions of heteronormativity, homophobia and national identity, this article argues that Fleming’s representations of torture are sites of literary meaning in which the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity are policed and reinforced. This policing is achieved, this article argues, through the associations of the perpetration of torture with homosexuality and Communism, and the survival of torture with post-imperial British hegemonic masculinity. Fleming’s torture scenes frequently represent set pieces in which Bond must reject or endure the unsolicited intimacy of other men; he must resist their seductions and persuasions and remain ideologically undefiled. Bond’s survival of torture is a metonymy for Britain’s survival of post-Second World War social and political upheaval. Further, the horror of torture, for Fleming, is the horror of a hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity in disarray: Bond’s survival represents the regrounding of normative heterosexual masculinity through the rejection of homosexuality and Communism. (shrink)

The protection of noncombatants from deadly violence is the centrepiece of any account of ethical and legal constraints on war. It was a major achievement of moral progress from early modern times to World War I. Yet it has been under constant attrition since - perhaps never more so than in our time, with its 'new wars', the spectre of weapons of mass destruction, and the global terrorism alert. -/- Civilian Immunity in War, written in collaboration by eleven authors, provides (...) the first comprehensive analysis of all main aspects of this highly topical subject. It considers the arguments for rejection of civilian immunity and the main theories of the grounds and proper scope of this immunity, both deontological (just war theory) and consequentialist. Separate chapters examine the historical development of the idea of civilian immunity, its standing in current international law, and the problem of "collateral damage": of harming civilians without intent, as a side-effect of attacks on military targets. The volume also addresses a string of specific issues. Civilian immunity has undergone much attrition with the development of air warfare and the tendency of military conflict to degenerate into "total" war. On the other hand, modern military technology with its precision guidance missiles and "smart" bombs opens up the possibility of restricting deadly violence to its proper targets and staying clear of civilian life, limb, and property. Another pressing issue is the fate of women in war in light of mass rapes characteristic of some 'new wars'. (shrink)

This article explores a particular pattern of wartime violence, the relative absence of sexual violence on the part of many armed groups. This neglected fact has important policy implications: If some groups do not engage in sexual violence, then rape is not inevitable in war as is sometimes claimed, and there are stronger grounds for holding responsible those groups that do engage in sexual violence. After developing a theoretical framework for understanding the observed variation in wartime sexual violence, the (...) article analyzes the puzzling absence of sexual violence on the part of the secessionist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka. (shrink)

The protection of noncombatants from deadly violence is the centrepiece of any account of ethical and legal constraints on war. It was a major achievement of moral progress from early modern times to World War I. Yet it has been under constant attrition since - perhaps never more so than in our time, with its 'new wars', the spectre of weapons of mass destruction, and the global terrorism alert. Civilian Immunity in War, written in collaboration by eleven authors, provides the (...) first comprehensive analysis of all main aspects of this highly topical subject. It considers the arguments for rejection of civilian immunity and the main theories of the grounds and proper scope of this immunity, both deontological and consequentialist. Separate chapters examine the historical development of the idea of civilian immunity, its standing in current international law, and the problem of "collateral damage": of harming civilians without intent, as a side-effect of attacks on military targets. The volume also addresses a string of specific issues. Civilian immunity has undergone much attrition with the development of air warfare and the tendency of military conflict to degenerate into "total" war. On the other hand, modern military technology with its precision guidance missiles and "smart" bombs opens up the possibility of restricting deadly violence to its proper targets and staying clear of civilian life, limb, and property. Another pressing issue is the fate of women in war in light of mass rapes characteristic of some 'new wars'. (shrink)

This is a review of historical developments in international criminal law leading up to the inclusion of rape as a "crime against humanity" in the current war crimes tribunal for the ex-Yugoslavia. In addition to the need to understand the specificity of events and their impact on women, the laws of war must also be understood in their specificity and the ways in which even the humanitarian provisions of those laws privilege military needs.

The Flowers of War, based on the homonymous novel by Geling Yan, and City of Life and Death are recent Chinese films that deal with the so-called 'Nanking Massacre‘ or 'the Rape of Nanking‘. The events which inspired these stories in the context of the second Sino-Japanese War will be analysed through the study and comparison of both films, together with the reasons which led the directors to fictionalise a series of events so many years after they occurred in (...) 1937. This analysis will be carried out based on the testimonies of the foreigners who eyewitnessed the events at the time, and who left written testimony of the facts, and a comparison shall be made between the fictional and factual events. (shrink)

Hamas militants have raped and mutilated the bodies of dozens of men and women in Israel during their attack and captivity in Gaza. The exact extent of these atrocities, however, is unknown. For reasons of this sort and others, prosecuting sexual abusers during armed conflicts is notoriously difficult. In an attempt to make a legal case against Hamas militants, the Israeli authorities have recently ordered civilian hospitals to breach medical confidentiality and report unidentified data of patients who have suffered bodily (...) mutilation and sexual abuse during the Hamas attack or during captivity in Gaza. Patients were not informed about this policy. This article first establishes a case for why medical confidentiality is such an important existential and normative value. In this light, it then argues that the Israeli policy is morally unjustified. (shrink)

En juin 1959, Elena Spirgevičienė, de Kaunas (Lituanie), saisit le comité central du parti communiste d’Union soviétique d’une plainte contre l’attribution à titre posthume du titre de Héros de l’URSS au partisan Alfonsas Čeponis. En 1944, affirme-t-elle, cet homme faisait partie d’une bande qui a assassiné sa sœur, l’a violée elle-même, et a tenté de violer puis a tué sa fille. Fondé en particulier sur des documents d’archives originaux publiés dans ce même numéro de Clio, cet article retrace les différentes (...) étapes de l’affaire et les récits contradictoires qu’elle met en jeu. Il oppose la figure du héros soviétique Čeponis à sa déconstruction par la plaignante qui le dépeint comme un bandit. Il montre le retournement qui a lieu lors de l’examen de la plainte par le Comité central du parti communiste de Lituanie : non seulement le viol commis contre la plaignante est nié, mais c’est elle qui se retrouve en position d’accusée. Enfin, il retrace comment la tentative de viol de la fille, suivie de son assassinat, est utilisée par le discours lituanien dissident dans les années 1970, dominant aujourd’hui, pour construire une nouvelle figure de martyre. (shrink)

The challenge of teaching classic religious texts with flawed moral messages from a contemporary point of view is examined in the case of the Beautiful Captive of War (Deuteronomy 21:10–14). A moral dilemma is generated by contradictory ethical stands within the Jewish tradition, between which students have to choose. This dilemma is explored in the context of a kind of religious education which strives for critical commitment to sacred tradition. That kind of education is analysed for its roots in self‐persuasion, (...) moral agency in complex social settings and an educational philosophy based on norms and conscience. Other issues explored are sexual education, international human rights, the relationship of abstract moral vignettes to real‐life situations and behaviour and the relationship of religious to moral education. (shrink)

This paper addresses the representation of violence in the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, which was directed by Angelina Jolie (2011). Internationally hailed, awarded but also hugely criticized, the film purports to be about rape camps where Muslim women were held and assaulted by Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian war. However, the film merges the story of rape camps with a story about a (sexual) relationship between an incarcerated Muslim woman and a Serb camp (...) commander. Our paper analyzes the cinematic tools used to tell these two stories, focusing on what is referred to as borrowing, and suggests that Jolie borrowed liberally to tell her story. The article focuses on three types of borrowing, cinematic, literary and experiential, and looks at three visual cinematic tropes obtained from Holocaust movies, Cold War movies, and ex-Yugoslav cinematic productions. It is concluded that the film recycles an already largely discarded narrative of “a history of ethnic hatred” as prime cause of war in the former Yugoslavia. The film’s director thus misses an opportunity to challenge the ethnicization of the region – something many local film directors have already successfully achieved. (shrink)

Christians and Christian Feminists have to respond to a whole variety of circumstances. This article asks whether the liberation theology that arose from the political struggles and violence of Latin America can be read onto the situation in Sri Lanka. The reality of war challenges male-centred doctrines of a 'just war', which ignore the many injustices of any war. Women and men are raped both in conquest and in custody Children are dispersed, orphaned, and turn to begging or prostitution, or (...) take up arms. Christians tend to retreat to liturgical solutions, while secular women's organizations face the need to rebuild society. The article challenges the churches to join in the dual task of reflecting on the real traumas of war in the light of theology, and rebuilding the bloodstained, shattered community. (shrink)

What do certain military missions in Afghanistan, domestic spying in the United States, therapeutic interventions in Russia and Denmark, torture and rape in an Indonesian police station, and Stop a...

Starting from the notion of a structural relation between war and rape in patriarchal systems, this article aims at pointing out how this relation is reflected in the co-occurrence of war and marriage metaphors in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis is combined with cognitive metaphor theory to show how metaphors of marriage and romance ("MERGERS ARE MARRIAGES") tend to co-occur with war and various derived metaphors ("M&As ARE BATTLES FOR TERRITORY"). The significance of these co-occurrences is (...) illustrated through corpus data from genres such as newspaper reports and journal articles. Results of additional qualitative analysis are drawn upon to investigate whether the well-established marriage metaphor functions as an ideologically invested euphemism for rape metaphors. Because the latter are more often than not conspicuously absent, the notion of metaphor gaps is introduced and discussed briefly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil WarMark MastersonCharles McNelis. Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $90.In this well-focused study, Charles McNelis gives what is due both to the poetics of Statius’ epic and to what John Henderson has called its “political intelligence” (PCPS 37 [1991]: 52). Regarding the poem as a product of its time (...) both in terms of poetics and politics, McNelis shows that Statius uses the considerable arsenal of the Latin poets’ ability to be intertextual to create a work that addresses [End Page 436] the particular situation of post–civil wars Flavian Rome. McNelis finds that Statius proposes that the epic teleology of the Golden Age’s reestablishment under Augustus that Virgil presents (albeit with some ambiguity) “has been thwarted and/or challenged, thus suggesting the fragile nature of any claim—even claims that define a society—to have brought an end to civil war” (177). Instead, Statius suggests that while it is possible for a particular civil conflict to come to an end, the results of it are ever with us and, further, that resolution comes in the form of clementia which is available to all on an individual basis from an entity that takes no blood sacrifice and is aniconic (163; Theb. 12.487–88, 493–94). A multifaceted challenge to the Virgilian/Augustan narrative of communal imperium sine fine guaranteed by Jove is manifest here.In order to make the case that Augustan/Virgilian teleology does not fit Flavian Rome, Statius’ particular strategy is a resort to Callimachus whose criticism of the epic genre had already made frequent appearances in Latin poetry. McNelis sees Statius restaging over the course of the epic the conflict that Callimachus (in Aetia 1 and elsewhere) presents between finely worked poetry and overdone epic. This conflict then reflects the presence of civil war in the literary-generic contouring of the poem. The presence of this conflict also ensures, in McNelis’ estimation, that the Thebaid is most emphatically not the “one continuous song” (Aetia 1.1.3: ) that Callimachus presents as the undesirable goal of epic composition and instead “replicate[s]” civil war “in the very fibres of the poem” (1).After the introduction, McNelis presents in the first chapter (“Gods, Humans and the Literary Tradition”) a discussion of Thebaid 1 with special attention paid to the story of Coroebus and the particularly malevolent Apollo therein. McNelis underscores in this story (significantly an aetion) the essentially hostile nature of the gods in the poem and the blending of them with chthonic forces, exemplified by Apollo’s killing of Python and his revenge, via a baby-eating monster, for the death of a baby born to a young woman he had raped. This story promises—and it is a promise that the epic delivers—that humans can hardly expect a settled existence with Jove as beneficent ruler.The second chapter (“Beginning”) foregrounds discussion of the necklace made by Vulcan, the Cyclopes, and the Telchines for Harmonia. McNelis sees in the necklace a product from the god of the forge’s workshop that comments on this epic in as serious a manner as the shields of Achilles and Aeneas comment on their respective epics. It is here that McNelis makes a key connection to the Aetia, for it is the Telchines whom Callimachus takes to task at 1.1.1. While at times he overstates the power of the necklace to cause things to happen (e.g., 51), McNelis is right to emphasize its significance. The necklace promises communal dissolution from the hands of the gods just as surely as the shield of Aeneas promises reintegration, likewise overseen by divine forces. Too, it is fitting that the poet of the Silvae would focus on a luxurious item such as this.In the third chapter (“Nemea”), McNelis sees the Callimachean aspects of the plot derail the warlike plan of Vulcan and the Telchines in the famous [End Page 437] digression at Nemea. McNelis draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the great body of water that is epic has been reduced to but... (shrink)

1. At the beginning of 2014, when I was two years into my ethnographic research on sexuality among survivors of war-rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, my mental health deteriorated. I had spent a good am...

In this article I discuss Claudia Card's treatment of war rape in relation to her discussion of the victim's moral power of forgiveness. I argue that her analysis of the victim's power to withhold forgiveness overlooks the paradoxical structure of witnessing, which implies that there is an ungraspable dimension of atrocity. In relation to this ungraspable element, the proposal that victims of atrocity have the power to either offer or withhold forgiveness may have little relevance.

Feminists look critically at any infliction of pain on others, usually requiring that it be consensual, and often both consensual and for the benefit of the person afflicted. Most torture of women is not recognized under official definitions of torture because it is not performed by or with the consent of (government) officials. Women are, however, also victims of torture under official definitions as military or civilian prisoners or as members of defeated populations in war, and are more often subjected (...) to sexual torture, which until recently has not been understood either as torture or even a war crime. Rape, especially serial gang rape, it is argued, should be understood as torture, as the essence of torture is the use of severe pain to obscure or obliterate the victim's sense of agency. (shrink)

Since commencing its illegal invasion in 2022, the Russian military and authorities have committed numerous war crimes against the people of Ukraine. These include the mutilation and execution of combatants; the torture, kidnapping, forced expulsion, rape, and massacre of civilians; and indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas. In this essay, I evaluate the strategic implications of this misconduct, focusing exclusively on Western responses. I argue that war crimes can and often do negatively impact the strategic goals of the perpetrator, (...) but whether and how this occurs is rarely governed exclusively by the offending action. Western perceptions of battlefield atrocity, shaped as they are by identity, race, and politics, may radically shift from one context to another. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, the status of both the participants and the conflict itself has helped inculcate a particular sensitivity among Western actors to the battlefield criminality of Russia. Drawing on evidence from the 2022 Bucha massacre and the ongoing bombing of Ukrainian civilians, I argue that Russian misconduct has consolidated Western support for the Ukrainian military effort, politically, diplomatically, and materially. (shrink)