Talking to the Shameless?: Sexual Violence and Mediation in Intrastate Conflicts

To what extent, does sexual violence influence the likelihood of conflict management in intrastate conflicts? Despite a growing body of research that explores conflict-related sexual violence, the literature presents little insight on its effects on conflict resolution. Extending feminist international relations (IR) theory to intrastate conflicts and applying a gender lens to the power to hurt argument, I argue that when rebel sexual violence is public knowledge, the likelihood of conflict management increases because the state perceives it as a threat to its masculinity. I systematically test this argument on all intrastate conflict years from 1990 to 2009 using the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict and the Civil War Mediation data set. The results provide robust support for the argument. This presents an important refinement of traditional rationalist conflict bargaining theories and opens new avenues for the research and practice of conflict management

You just don't understand: troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists

This paper reconstructs some conversational encounters between feminists and IR theorists and offers some hypotheses as to why misunderstandings so frequently result from these encounters. It claims that contemporary feminist perspectives on international relations are based on ontologies and epistemologies that are quite different from those which inform the conventional discipline. Therefore, they do not fit comfortably within conventional state-centric and structural approaches to IR theorising, or with the methodologies usually employed by IR scholars. As an illustration of how these differences can cause misunderstandings, the paper offers some feminist perspectives on security, a concept central to the discipline. It also demonstrates how feminist approaches offer some new ways to understand contemporary security problems. In conclusion, it suggests how feminist/IR engagements might be more constructively pursued