The subject of rape in the context of war has long been the concern of feminist scholars of international law and international relations (IR). ^{Footnote 1} Drawing from both disciplines, Tuba Inal presents a detailed historical and ideological analysis of the changing normative context that has contributed to the creation of prohibition regimes of looting and rape in wartime. Inal’s work, based on her doctoral thesis, ^{Footnote 2} focuses on gender and regime change and demonstrates the significance of regime change to the prohibition of violence perpetrated against property and women in war.

Inal describes the influence of the normative context of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century international affairs on the progressive development of international law (international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law) and state compliance, with an adherence to particular prohibitions and prohibition regimes. She presents a social history of how, over a hundred-year period, the “booty and beauty” ^{Footnote 3} understanding of the spoils of war came to be viewed as uncivilized. Through Inal’s substantive chapters on prohibition and (non)-prohibition, the reader comes to understand the social construction of the rape of women in the context of war as a military necessity, an inevitability, a violation of personal property, a defilement of family honour, an affront to personal dignity, and, only recently, as an act of genocide. Her narration of pillage and rape in the context of war would appeal to both legal historians and IR scholars, although her text is primarily orientated towards IR scholars.

Inal’s introductory chapter poses the following question: “How can [the] historical discrepancy [between the handling of rape and pillage by international law] help us understand the impact of gender on change in international relations?” ^{Footnote 4} The answer to this question lies in the influence of power-based, interest-based, and knowledge-based theories concerning the development of ‘prohibition regimes.’ ^{Footnote 5} Inal’s main argument is that prohibition regimes in IR are directly linked to changes in legal practices and beliefs. Prohibition regimes are concretized under three necessary conditions: a state’s obligation and willingness to comply based on a cost-benefit approach; state acknowledgement of a practice as abhorrent and against core norms; and the persistent recognition of the prohibition in emerging law and policy by state and non-state actors.

The formal legalization of prohibition regimes occurs when states exhibit a high level of legal obligation, interpretive precision, and domestic and international delegation. ^{Footnote 6} This argument draws from existing debates in IR and international law on internal atrocities. ^{Footnote 7} Inal uses feminist modes of explanation to advance her prohibition regime argument and explain the normative context of codifying the Hague Conventions (1899, 1907), the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols (1949, 1977), and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) (1998). ^{Footnote 8} However, she does not address causality through specific empirical claims, focusing on the state as a national actor. In her research, Inal looked to her personal interviews with delegates and activists as well as to reports of diplomatic conferences written by states, international organizations, and women’s organizations. These sources form her descriptive account of core norms, normative shocks, and norm entrepreneurship in the codification of international humanitarian law.

Inal’s second and third chapters focus on the prohibition of pillage and the (non)-prohibition of rape in war and trace the moral force of American and European notions of progress, humanity, and civilization on the preparation of codes and manuals on the conduct of soldiers in war. She examines the writings of jurists, diplomats, and peace organizations involved in the drafting of the Lieber Code (1863), the Brussels Conference (1874), the Oxford Code (1880), the Geffcken Code (1894), and the Hague Peace Conferences (1899, 1907). Not surprisingly, Inal concludes that the influence of economic liberalism, private property, and the rise of the modern state in international society contributed towards the late nineteenth-century prohibition of pillage in war.

Inal draws on historical sources, such as the seventeenth-century writings of Hugo Grotius and the Proceedings at the Laying of a Wreath on the Tomb of Hugo Grotius (4 July 1899) in order to emphasize the centrality of the discourse of civilization and to explain why rape, when framed as a question of a violation of private property and an attack on family (male) honour, is excluded from the Hague Conventions. ^{Footnote 9} However, her primarily Western perspective and her insufficient treatment of the non-Western world weaken her overall argument. For example, this gap is made visible in her discussion of rape in the context of Bangladesh’s war for independence (1971). Her text could have benefited from a discussion of the social construction of the (non-Western) barbarian against which the moral hierarchies of modern states militaries are defined. Inclusion of this discussion would have clarified the significance of discourses of civilization on normative change. This critique is not specific to Inal’s text; it may be said of many scholars in both disciplines. ^{Footnote 10}

Inal offers several other explanations as to the (non)-prohibition of rape that reflect the gendered ideologies of the hundred-year period of her text and that, in many ways, are still reflected in the present day: (1) in the context of diplomatic proceedings, the vulgarity of the term by nineteenth-century standards; (2) the regulation of women in domestic legal discourse; (3) the construction of rape as a sexual activity, not as violence; (4) the notion that rape could only be perpetrated against a virgin or an upper-class woman; and (5) the false medical jurisprudence on rape. Inal uses quotations from the meetings of the International Council on Women and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance to reveal a shift in the feminist agenda to the issue of rape and war and to link to her later arguments on the significance of agenda setting and norm entrepreneurship in prohibition regimes.

In Chapters 4 and 5, she describes the normative context, actors, and factors that led from the protection of women against rape to the prohibition of rape in international law. She emphasizes that this shift from “protection” to “prohibition” in law and legal discourse is significant to understanding regime change. The reader comes to understand the challenges associated with the development of the prohibition regime of rape and the importance of precision and delegation in the legalization of this regime. This insightful analysis has the potential to be applied to prohibition regimes in the making, such as the protection of civilian journalists. ^{Footnote 11} Inal’s detailed descriptive and interpretive accounts of the diplomatic conferences of the Geneva Conventions (1949) and Additional Protocols (1977) in Chapter 4, and the Rome Statute (1998) in Chapter 5, further clarify the challenges associated with the creation of a prohibition regime. ^{Footnote 12}

Rather than focusing on states and their political and military actors, Inal casts women’s organizations, such as the Alliance Internationale des Femmes, the Fédération Abolitionniste Internationale, and the World’s Young Women’s Christian Association, as key actors in the lead up to the Geneva Conference and the moment that rape entered international law in Article 27 of the Geneva Convention IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (12 August 1949). ^{Footnote 13} She links resistance to the legal prohibition of rape as a war crime, and as a grave breach of international humanitarian law, to a failure in the proper delegation of authority in the Additional Protocols. Myopic legal and cultural understandings about rape and violence against women persisted well into the 1990s, where, according to Inal, men controlled diplomatic negotiations and agenda setting at the international level. At this point in the text, Inal’s argument could have been strengthened by a more thorough use of sources, such as domestic legal codes, military manuals, and the statements of high-level officials, which map the extent to which states recognized rape as a crime in war in domestic practices.

Inal credits the role of women’s groups and organizations in influencing the normative context of the negotiations before, during, and after the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, which took place in Rome from 15 June to 17 July 1998. She identifies a shift in core norms and specific normative shocks that led to the prohibition regime against rape, as enshrined in Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute, in Prosecutor v Jean-Paul Akayesu of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and in Prosecutor v Zdravko Mucic (Celebici Camp Case) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. ^{Footnote 14} Similar to her arguments about the prohibition regime of pillage in war, she again grounds the prohibition regime of rape in war in the discourse of civilization. Inal pinpoints the normative shock of the atrocities in the Balkans and Great Lakes and in the “[depiction of] rape as a repulsive, uncivilized practice that should be rejected by all civilized nations. If one wants to be a civilized nation, one needs to reject the practice of rape in war and participate in a prohibition regime to prevent it.” ^{Footnote 15}

By grounding her arguments primarily in the discourse of civilization, Inal diminishes the complexity and instrumentality of rape to, for example, denigrate identity (racial, ethnic, sexual, and so on); humiliate, torture, and gain information; and/or control resources in those states that are marked as fragile or failed in IR debates. Further, her argument supports the notion that the promotion of prohibition regimes is a marker of civilization and creates moral hierarchies among states who demonstrate higher levels of legalization. Inal also ignores the means by which prohibition regimes for rape committed by non-state actors may be addressed. In addition, Inal’s use of gender as a fixed category, and frequent equating of gender and sex, perpetuates the fixed binaries that pervade legal discourse and that have prevented normative change. ^{Footnote 16}

Inal’s explanation of norm entrepreneurship is quite thorough and synthesizes existing feminist scholarship on the topic. Core norms embodied in the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993), ^{Footnote 17} and by the exponential growth in UN subsidiary organs related to women’s rights, provided an impetus for successful agenda setting by norm entrepreneurs who influenced the wording of Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute. Inal’s conclusion repeats the claim that law and change take time and tremendous effort on the part of norm entrepreneurs to shift core norms about gender. She underscores the emancipatory potential in a gendered reading of regime change international law and IR; emancipation occurs at the stage when the creation of a prohibition regime in law and policy encourages enforcement mechanisms and retributive justice beyond law and in the form of norm internalization. In terms of her readership, these conclusions would be of benefit to scholars and policy-makers alike.