Despite the immense literature on the myriad aspects of war and political violence, scholarly discussions with an explicit focus on the conduct of war remain somewhat limited. In Looting and Rape in Wartime: Law and Change in International Relations, Tuba Inal takes on the issue of the international community’s reactions to looting and rape during war, and traces the development of institutional prohibition of these traditional wartime practices. The practice of rape during war has existed throughout recorded history and continues to be seen in modern conflicts, such as the rape camps in the Yugoslavian conflict and sexual violence in war-ridden zones of sub-Saharan Africa. This book thus addresses an age-old conduct-of-war issue that remains prevalent in present day conflicts.

Of particular interest in this study is the hundred-year gap between the prohibition of pillage and that of rape. At the outset, Inal asks: “Given that women had historically been considered the property of men, why did the international laws that regulated pillage of property not include ‘pillage’ of women…?” (p. 1). She proceeds then to craft an answer based on a close examination of relevant norms and institutions over a century-long period. The key explanation, she argues, lies in the absence – or presence – of actors in international organizations and treaty-making who are willing to push for certain changes in international law. Specifically, as the number of women delegates increased from zero in the Hague Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) to 267 (19 percent) in the Rome Conference (1998), the prohibition of rape during war became more salient, and more feasible.

Inal establishes a very ambitious agenda for the book by engaging a broad range of theoretical perspectives and issue areas in international relations. Within an overarching constructivist approach, Looting and Rape in Wartime ties together themes in a number of complementary literatures—including international relations theory, institutions and treaties, regimes and norms, international law, and gender in international politics—to address an issue that is of major concern to all those interested in global human rights: violence against women. In doing so, she seamlessly weaves together explanations from multiple theoretical approaches to make an important statement about the reaction of the international community to the treatment of women during militarized conflict, demonstrating that while looting and pillage were prohibited through earlier turn-of-the-century agreements regarding conduct of war, international laws against rape were significantly slower to develop. Specifically, she argues that “once women became active participants in these conferences, the prohibition of rape began to enter international law” (p. 14). Her analysis involves careful dissection of relevant conferences and agreements to evaluate the development of the laws that emerged from those treaties.

The book starts with a thoughtful framing of the question regarding the lag between the prohibitions of looting and rape in international law. The first chapter includes a primer on regime theory and norms, which helps situate the question within a constructivist framework and provides a relevant lens for the analyses of the case studies in subsequent chapters. The emphasis here is on “prohibition regimes,” which pertain to the banning of behaviors that come to be considered unacceptable as norms evolve and regimes emerge. Using this framework, Chapter 2 examines the prohibition of looting and pillage through the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. A detailed discussion of these treaties is undertaken to explicate the normative, legal, and institutional factors that contributed to the prohibition of looting; primarily “the core norms of the sanctity of private property, necessity to be civilized, and progress toward higher forms of civilization” (p. 41) led to the outlawing of the primitive war tactics associated with looting. Next, Chapter 3 sets up the puzzle of why these treaties did not include the banning of rape, and asks “why the Hague Conventions excluded rape and in what kind of normative context this could happen” (p. 25). The answer to this question lies in the view of state actors that rape was an inevitable biological reality of war and could not be prevented, which would make its legal prohibition futile (p. 91).

The solution to the problem of the non-prohibition of rape in war, according to Inal, lies in increased participation of women in domestic and international politics, which begins to manifest itself in a limited way in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Chapter 4 examines the entry of rape into international law through the Geneva Conventions and then the Additional Protocols of 1977; yet an outright ban or prohibition failed to occur under a “normative context that made some improvements in international law regarding women possible, but could not take them far enough” (p. 123). That did not occur until the Rome Statute of 1998, which is the focus of discussion in Chapter 5. By this time, women’s organizations and human rights norms regarding violence against women had grown to an extent that made the prohibition of rape possible, with the ICC issuing “several indictments for rape both as a war crime and a crime against humanity” (p. 166). The concluding chapter offers some final words on the arguments and insights of the book.

While the book appropriately demonstrates the normative frameworks that explain the different timeframes of the prohibitions against pillage and rape in international treaties, it does not address adequately the related issues of compliance with international agreements, enforcement of international laws, and the perpetuation of sexual violence in conflicts since the Rome Statute. To do all this in a thorough fashion would, of course, be beyond the scope of this or any single monograph, and is admittedly not the book's main focus. However, some attention to these issues would have made the book more pertinent to current conflict scenarios, as well as offered some perspective on the effectiveness of these laws. Nonetheless, Looting and Rape in Wartime represents a conscientious effort to trace the institutional approach to the serious issue of rape during armed conflict. As Inal explains the historical developments regarding the prohibition of looting and rape, several intuitively appealing arguments are cogently presented and competently examined through in-depth analyses of the relevant treaties. This work makes a valuable contribution to research on human rights laws and institutions.