Bringing War Criminals to Justice and Justice to Victims: Mass Rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Efficiency of the ICTY

This paper investigates if the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has been efficient in achieving its main objective of “bringing war criminals to justice [and] bringing justice to victims.” This study explores the historical context by which the ICTY was created, and therefore examines the disintegration of Yugoslavia, focusing specifically on the Bosnian War. During this conflict, rape was employed as a method of warfare; this paper presents a brief theoretical examination of rape as a war weapon and analyzes rape and sexual violence as explicit methods of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It explores the evolution of gender and the protection of women in international humanitarian law preceding the ICTY, and discusses the development of gender strategy at the Tribunal. The successes and failures of this strategy are analyzed through four critical Tribunal cases involving charges of rape and sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Finally, this study analyzes the Tribunal’s efficiency in achieving its published objectives, drawing on concerns voiced by both international organizations and individuals interviewed for this research. Efficiency is examined as not only as bringing justice through judicial avenues, but through outreach and relationships with Bosnian organizations, survivors and victims as well. The conclusions of this paper acknowledge the complexities surrounding the Tribunal and its limitations, but call on the international community to combat the failed systems of instituting justice to victims of the Bosnian War, specifically sexual violence victims and their children

Race and Racial Exclusion in Security Studies: A Survey of Scholars

Increased attention to racialized knowledge and methodological whiteness has swept the political science discipline, especially international relations. Yet an important dimension of race and racism continues to be ignored: the presence and status of scholars of color in the discipline. In contrast to other fields, there is little research on (under)representation of scholars of color in security studies, and no systematic studies of race and racial exclusion that center their voices and experiences. Building on scholarship that contends with the fundamental whiteness of academia and knowledge creation, we present results from a 2019 survey of members of the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association. The data show that scholars of color and white scholars experience the field in dramatically different ways; scholars of color report at greater rates feeling unwelcome, experiencing harassment, and desiring more professional development opportunities. Dozens of studies across academia support these findings

Framing the Narrative: Female Fighters, External Audience Attitudes, and Transnational Support for Armed Rebellions

Female combatants play a central role in rebel efforts to cultivate and disseminate positive narratives regarding the movement and its political goals. Yet, the effectiveness of such strategies in shaping audience attitudes or generating tangible benefits for the group remains unclear. We propose and test a theory regarding the channels through which female fighters advance rebel goals. We argue that female fighters positively influence audience attitudes toward rebel groups by strengthening observers’ beliefs about their legitimacy and their decision to use armed tactics. We further contend that these effects directly help them secure support from transnational non-state actors and indirectly promote state support. We assess our arguments by combining a novel survey experiment in two countries with analyses of new cross-national data on female combatants and information about transnational support for rebels. The empirical results support our arguments and demonstrate the impact of gender framing on rebel efforts to secure support

Women in War: Militancy, Legitimacy, and Rebel Success

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018This project examines the role of women militants in influencing rebel engagement with civilians and improving rebel outcomes. A wide literature points to civilian support as key to insurgent success. I demonstrate that rebels believe that women’s militancy can make civilians more receptive to their grievances and that they recognize the importance of civilian support to tangible conflict successes. I further contend that women-inclusive groups do experience more conflict-related success, operationalized as territorial control during conflict and favorable conflict outcomes. I suggest that women’s militancy in front-line, support, and leadership roles can have ideologically and politically legitimizing effects among civilians. Rebels capitalize on women’s participation in ways that legitimize political violence by invoking gendered narratives, signaling the exigency of struggle and integrating the insurgency into local communities. Further, because women are generally unexpected actors they can increase rebel capabilities on and off the front-lines. Rebels reference women’s successful violence to valorize their campaigns, but also to increase civilian confidence in their strength. My conclusions are based on a multi-method research design. First, I argue that rebels portray women militants and civilians in their political visuals to legitimize grievances, integrate their struggles into local communities, and increase popular support. I adopt a qualitative strategy that explores rebels’ gendered attempts to generate legitimacy in visual propaganda. I conduct a detailed case study of 532 unique Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other republican visuals produced during the Troubles (1968-1998), a secondary, and less systematic, study of Palestinian political posters, and a third micro-comparison of Afghan, Namibian, Lebanese, Angolan, South African, Mozambican, Nicaraguan, Bangladeshi, and transnational jihadist militant groups’ visuals to establish the transportability of gender tropes in conflict propaganda across time and space. I find that rebels of varying affiliation, ideology, and tactics use their visual platforms to shape narratives about gender and women militants in ways intended to build legitimacy for their campaigns Second, I employ quantitative methods to demonstrate that organizations with women militants experience more conflict-related success, specifically territorial control during conflict and certain favorable conflict outcomes. I introduce an original dataset, the Rebel Women Data Project (RWDP), of women’s participation in 146 cross-national insurgencies operating between 1960-2016. Using these data, I find that women-inclusive rebel organizations are significantly and substantively more likely to control territory than other groups. I further find that female combatants, auxiliaries, and leaders make rebel victory significantly more likely and may sometimes increase the odds of peace agreements. I emphasize the role of civilian support in rebel success and I highlight the myriad ways in which women’s participation affects conflict dynamics

Queering gender-based violence scholarship: an integrated research agenda

Research on armed conflict's gender dynamics has expanded significantly in the past decade. However, research in this field pays little attention to sexual orientation and gender identity. Moreover, where scholarship focused on violence against sexual and gender minority (SGM) individuals during war exists, it is largely divorced from work on gender-based violence (GBV) in conflict-related environments and from sexuality studies. In this article, we integrate these bodies of work and argue for the theoretical expansion of GBV as a conceptual, empirical, and analytic category to study and explain targeted attacks against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer individuals. We suggest two theoretical interventions to better equip existing GBV frameworks to explain violence perpetrated against SGM people. We argue, first, that violence targeting SGM communities is GBV, as sexuality and gender identity are integral components of gender, and second, that analyzing gender dynamics adds to our understanding of when, how, and why targeting SGM individuals composes part of an organization's regulatory "repertoire of violence."We examine violence in Colombia's civil war as an illustrative application of our approach and we identify future, fruitful research avenues with important policy implications for studying and responding to GBV during war.</p

Deploying justice: strategic accountability for wartime sexual violence

Why do governments and militaries publicly condemn and prosecute particular forms of abuse? This article explores the Sri Lankan government's decision to promote limited legal accountability for state-perpetrated rape committed in a country otherwise renowned for widespread impunity. We argue that rather than representing a turn against impunity, the symbolic stance against conflict-related sexual violence in a small number of high-profile cases served an explicitly politico-military agenda. The state deployed legal accountability in specific cases to garner political legitimacy among key domestic audiences. The Sri Lankan government drew on the symbolism of female victimhood to mobilize support at a time when support for military counterinsurgency was waning. We show that governments can uniquely instrumentalize sexual violence cases to establish moral authority and territorial legitimacy. Through an examination of the domestic legal response to state-perpetrated human rights abuses, we illustrate the many ways in which women's bodies—and the law—can be mobilized in war to serve military ends