Moral spaces, and sexual transgression: understanding rape in war and post conflict

When it comes to rape in war, evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace. Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual violence can be misleading. Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’ sexual relationships — or as part of a continuum of gendered violence. This article shows how, even in war, norms are not suspended; nor do they simply continue. War changes the moral landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research over 10 years in northern Uganda, this article argues for a re-sexualization of understandings of rape. It posits that sexual mores are central to explaining sexual violence, and that sexual norms — and hence transgressions — vary depending on the moral spaces in which they occur. In Acholi, moral spaces have temporal dimensions (‘olden times’, the ‘time of fighting’ and ‘these days’) and associated spatial dimensions (home, camp, bush, village, town). The dynamics of each help to explain the occurrence of some forms of sexual violence and the rarity of others. By reflecting on sexual norms and transgressions in these moral spaces, the article sheds light on the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘ordinary’, rape and war

Mass Rape: The War Against Women In Bosnia-Herzegovina

Alexandra Stiglmayer interviewed survivors of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to reveal, to a seemingly deaf world, the horrors of that ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. The women - primarily of Muslim but also of Croatian and Serbian origin - have endured the atrocities of rape and the loss of loved ones. Their testimony, published in the 1993 German edition, is bare, direct, and its cumulative effect overwhelming. The first English edition contains Stiglmayer\u27s updates to her own two essays, one detailing the historical context of the current conflict and the other presenting the core of the book - interviews with some twenty victims of rape as well as interviews with three Serbian perpetrators. Essays investigating mass rape and war from ethnopsychological, sociological, cultural, and medical perspectives are included. New essays by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Rhonda Copelon, and Susan Brownmiller address the crucial issues of recognizing the human rights of women and children. A foreword by Roy Gutman describes war crimes within the context of the UN Tribunal, and an afterword by Cynthia Enloe relates the mass rapes of this war to developments and reactions in the international women\u27s movement. Accounts of torture, murder, mutilation, abduction, sexual enslavement, and systematic attempts to impregnate - all in the name of ethnic cleansing - make for the grimmest of reading. However brutal and appalling the information conveyed here, this book cannot and should not be ignored. --BOOK JACKE

Security Studies and Organization Studies: Parallels and Possibilities

This note provides an outline of the field of security studies, drawing comparison between it and that of organization studies. It is noted that whilst having many parallels, the two fields exist almost entirely in isolation from each other. The potential overlaps between the fields offer opportunities to extend the range of each and to contribute to the renewal of organization studies