class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Dirty Wars ## Status in War & Sexual Violence in Conflict ### Jack McDonald --- class: inverse # Pre lecture Discussion .pull-left[ Consider commensurability: Non-commensurable: "Apples are not oranges." Commensurable: "Apples and oranges are both fruit." ] .pull-right[ .large[Are "normal" acts of violence commensurable with sexual violence? Why/why not?] ] Reminder: slides online at .white[https://www.jackmcdonald.org/static/slides/dw/dw-21-lecture-10.html] ??? --- class: inverse # Outline 2-part lecture on the structure of the law of armed conflict 1. How/why concepts matter in foregrounding harm in war - who or what counts? 1. Human rights and changing perceptions of civilian protection in contemporary wars The constitutive rules of international law create a framework for thinking about harm in war A lot of what we see as a problem with international law and the law of armed conflict is a political battle about what should be regulated, and fundamentally, what the underlying concepts and values of these systems are We're going to look at how we can understand these transformations in the present day by considering how sexual violence in conflict gained prominence in the 1990s and beyond within LOAC This allows us then consider how/why the structures of regulating war also shape the way in which we perceive the legitimacy of war, by obfuscating some forms of harm ??? --- # Case: Sexual Violence in Conflict .left-40[ .large[ - Substitution - Institution/group - Feminist - Cultural Pathology - Strategic - Biosocial ] ] .right-40[ > any act of a sexual nature which is committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive. Sexual violence is not limited to physical invasion of the human body and may include acts which do not involve penetration or even physical contact. _Akayesu_, ICTR > Classic theories advanced to explain conflict-related sexual violence explain only a small part of the observed variation. In particular, theories to explain conflict related rape do not account for its variation because they _over_-predict rape during war. Elizabeth Jean Wood, _Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and the Policy Implications of Recent Research_ ] ??? /// --- class: inverse # Part 1: Framing Violence in War ??? --- # Who Can Kill, Who Can Be Killed? .pull-left[ **UN Charter** > All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. Article 2(4) > Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right to individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a state. Article 51 Chapter VII: UNSC can authorise collective action to maintain or enforce international peace and security ] .pull-right[ **LOAC** Individuals may be harmed or killed based upon their status, or in self defence - Combatants - Non-combatants - Civilians Principles of distinction, proportionality, and necessity (and humanity, depending upon whom you are talking to) Concept of protection: breaching combatant or civilian protections is a war crime, which may now incur individual criminal liability ] ??? --- # Gaps and Silences in International Law .left-33[ > One misses a great deal by looking only at justice. The sense of injustice, the difficulties of identifying the victims of injustice, and the many ways in which we all learn to live with each other’s injustices tend to be ignored, as is the relation of private injustice to the public order. Judith Shklar, _The Faces of Injustice_ ] .right-33[ The constitutive rules of international politics structure our understanding of right and wrong in war The constitutive rules also have big intentional gaps, and are open to interpretation - Absences of prohibition ("I didn't sign that") - Absences of enforcement mechanisms ("I'm afraid you don't have jurisdiction") - Interpretations of law ("Actually, this is an act of self-defence") - Interpretations of fact ("I'm afraid that those people are 'on holiday' in that country") - Silence of states ("I don't have to give you my opinion") - Silence of international organisations ("My patron vetoed your UNSC resolution") ] ??? /// --- # Power and International Law .pull-left[ > As a language of justification, international law is a means to articulate particular preferences or positions in a formal fashion, accessible to professional analysis... The law constructs its own field of application as it goes along, through a normative language that highlights some aspects of the world while leaving other aspects in the dark. Martti Koskenniemi, _From Apology to Utopia_ - How does the language/structure of international law foreground some kinds of harms and exclude others? - LOAC is primarily focused upon regulating the infliction of direct harms ] .pull-right[ ![The Nuremberg Trials](../img/5/nuremberg.png) ![The UNSC](../img/5/unsc.jpg) ] ??? Four sources of constraint and cooperation - Normative - Political/social - Resources - Strategic --- # "The Oldest Crime" > Exactly what happened to women in these situations is largely a matter of speculation, as there are few records on this topic at the very early parts of written history... the Assyrian sources are replete with numerous other cruelties, but are silent about rape. Anthony Gillespie, _A History of the Laws of War_ > Soldiers ought not to be allowed by their officers to commit rape on women and maidens, nor, since it is illegal in itself, does the right of war excuse it, much less justify it. Christian Wolff, _Jus Gentium Methodo Scientifica Pertractatum_ ??? /// --- # Key Issue: Epistemic Injustice .left-33[ Miranda Fricker's 2 types of epistemic injustice: **Testimonial injustice**: Where a person's testimony is devalued because of the bias of listeners **Hermeneutical injustice**: Where a person's experience cannot be adequately interpreted or communicated due to the concepts currently available to them and society ] .right-33[ > when a woman is the target of a sectarian murder in Northern Ireland, invariably there is a great sense of outrage. This outrage exposes the gendered nature of public morality in its opposition to the murder of women in political conflict. However, when a woman has been murdered in a 'domestic' assault in the 'sanctuary' of her own home, there is less of a sense of violation. In Northern Ireland, as elsewhere, there is a kind of continuum that ranges from the least to the most acceptable type of murders that is perhaps best symbolised in the way in which murders not related to the political situation have been euphemistically referred to by police officers as 'ordinary decent murders.' Monica McWilliams, _Violence Against Women and Political Conflict_ ] ??? --- class: inverse # Small Group Discussion .large[Which of the descriptive, causal, and normative issues associated with sexual violence in conflict do you find most troubling? Why?] ??? --- # Part 2: The Changing Characterisation of Sexual Violence in Conflict ??? --- # How Did SVC Become a Crime? .pull-left[ ![norm cycle chart](../img/r2/normcycle.png) ![Amnesty International](../img/r2/amnesty.jpg) ] .pull-right[ > Norms do not emerge out of thin air; they are actively built by agents having strong notions about appropriate or desirable behavior in their community Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, _International Norm Dynamics and Political Change_ Norm entrepreneurs don't just make arguments, often they seek to reframe or reconceptualise an area of public life ] ??? --- # When did SVC Become a Crime? .pull-left[ > the acts committed in Bosnia demonstrate a concerted scheme to annihilate the Muslim population of Bosnia through gender-determined genocide, and confirm the realization that rape is not a random or isolated wartime event. Elizabeth A. Kohn, _Rape as a Weapon of War_ Norm entrepreneurs had to work to get sexual violence in conflict accepted as a war crime ] .pull-right[ ![Bosnia Front Page](../img/5/bosniapage2.png) .picblock[ ![Yugoslavia Map](../img/5/yugoslav.png) ] ] ??? /// --- .left-33[ ![Mugshots of war criminals](../img/5/warrant.jpg) ] .right-33[ ICTY - _Tadić_: Sexual violence against men - _Mucic et al_: Rape as torture - _Furundžija_: Rape as grave breach of the Geneva conventions and violation of laws & customs of war, rape as tool of genocide - _Kunarac et al_: Rape/sexual enslavement as crime against humanity ICTR - Dealing with 250-500k instances of rape ICC - First prosecution Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo (Bemba) in 2016 for sexual violence in CAR ] ??? /// --- # Challenging the War Nexus .pull-left[ Traditionally sovereignty has protected states against international censure for actions within their own borders Certain crimes only become crimes when they occurred in the context of war (e.g. crimes against humanity) The logical step from SVC being recognised as a war crime is to then wonder why mass sexual violence counts as an international crime when a war is occurring ] .pull-right[ > sexual violence in its own right is not accorded the status of an international crime. Rather, it is only when sexual violence has a nexus to armed conflict, the intended destruction of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, or an attack upon a civilian population, that the conduct becomes an international crime. Accordingly, sexual violence is a subsidiary act, which is recognised as an international crime only when framed by other forms of illegality. Kirsten Campbell, _The Gender of Transitional Justice_ ] ??? https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF02461137.pdf --- class: inverse # Small Group Discussion .large[ How might sexual violence in conflict challenge our understanding of what war is? ] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 3: Changing Understandings of Harm in War ??? --- # Measuring Harm in War .left-33[ .pic80[![Counting the dead at Crecy](../img/r3/crecy.jpg)] ![Battle deaths](../img/r3/battledeath.png) ] .right-33[ > Why do the datasets exclude indirect deaths? It’s not to write these kinds of suffering out of the history books, but because direct deaths are the only ones that can be counted with confidence. Steven Pinker, _The Better Angels of Our Nature_ > Death is final and corpses are easier to count than the wounded. That fewer people are dying in war, however, does not mean that war is at an end. Indeed, it does not even necessarily mean that war has become more humane. Tanisha M. Fazal, _Dead Wrong?_ ] --- # "Comfort Women" .left-60[ ![Comfort station map](../img/2021/comfort-station-map.jpg) ] .right-60[ Japan's Imperial Japanese Army organised brothels for use by the Japanese military between 1932 and 1945 Ostensibly to reduce incidences of wartime rape, the system quickly moved from one of voluntary labour, to a coercive complex of sexual slavery System enslaved and transported women from around SE Asia After the war, the women subjected to this were ostracised ] ??? --- # SVC and the Boundaries of Conflict .left-40[ ![French woman being driven out of her community](../img/5/france.jpg) .medium[ > Women almost always were the first targets, because they offered the easiest and most vulnerable scapegoats, particularly for those men who had joined the resistance at the last moment. Anthony Beevor, _An Ugly Carnival_ ] ] .right-40[ > By the time the Americans had fully replaced the French in Indochina the war had sufficiently disrupted South Vietnamese society to a point where it was no longer necessary to import foreign women for the purpose of military prostitution. I do not mean to imply that prostitution was unknown in Vietnam before the long war. As Peter Arnett told me, "Prostitution was a time-honored tradition. Certain heads of families would not think twice before routinely selling their daughters if they needed the money." But as the long war progressed, prostitution increasingly became the only viable economic solution for thousands of South Vietnamese women. Susan Brownmiller, _Against Our Will_ ] ??? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/05/women-victims-d-day-landings-second-world-war --- # The Scale of SVC > Approximately 1.69 to 1.80 million women reported having been raped in their lifetime... and approximately 3.07 to 3.37 million women reported experiencing intimate partner sexual violence. > estimates of rape among women aged 15 to 49 years in the 12 months prior to the survey translate into approximately 1150 women raped every day, 48 women raped every hour, and 4 women raped every 5 minutes. > ...because our data did not capture sexual violence among women and girls younger than 15 years or older than 49 years and did not include sexual violence among boys and men, even our estimates are a lower bound of the true prevalence of sexual violence. Amber Peterman et al., _Estimates and Determinants of Sexual Violence Against Women in the Democratic Republic of Congo_ ??? https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2010.300070 ??? --- # Beyond SVC: Public Health Approaches to War .left-33[ .medium[ > Most published analyses of deaths from conflict have relied on press reports of eyewitness accounts and official announcements of combatants. Many reviews cite figures from other reviews, making estimates of mortality difficult to validate. Exacerbating the problem is a wide range of definitions of conflict used by the databases. C.J.L. Murray et al., _Armed conflict as a public health problem_ ] ] .right-33[ ![Public health chart](../img/r2/publichealth.png) ] ??? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122272/ --- # War as Complex Emergencies > we have redefined complex emergencies as situations in which mortality among the civilian population substantially increases above the population baseline, either as a result of the direct effects of war or indirectly through increased prevalence of malnutrition and/or transmission of communicable diseases, particularly if the latter result from deliberate political and military policies and strategies (national, subnational, or international). > Such emergencies have resulted during the past 30 years in the development of the two new scientific fields of emergency public health and public nutrition. > In absolute terms, the major causes of mortality during emergencies are essentially the same as in developing countries: diarrhoeal diseases, acute respiratory infection, neonatal causes, and malaria. Peter Salama et al, _Lessons learned from complex emergencies over past decade_ ??? .large[ Do you think that the solution to the issues highlighted in this lecture is more treaty-making? Why/why not? Is it ever possible to escape states making legal arguments in bad faith? What do you think the limits should be on the definition of sexual violence in conflict? What kinds of sexual violence would be excluded by those limits? ] .question[ How do incidents or patterns of sexual violence relate to the kinds of wars/conflicts that you are interested in studying? Why do you think this is so? ] .question[Which of the descriptive, causal, and normative issues associated with sexual violence in conflict do you find most troubling? Why?] .question[When, if ever, is the existence of war an objective fact?] .question[ How do your own personal and professional interests shape the kinds of violent conflicts that you choose to study? ]