The issue of sexual violence in war time has come to the fore in recent years following the post-1990 ‘new’ wars in Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda, and the African wars of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Considerable pressure has been exerted on policy makers to recognise this under-reported feature of warfare, to make sexual violence a war crime, and to provide palliative and rehabilitative care for affected women. However, explanations of sexual violence tend to be reductive, articulating the common diktat ‘rape as a weapon’ of war; thus isolating wartime rape from other forms of rape, and from the wider context in which wars occur.

This book provides a useful corollary to the vast body of literature on sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) being produced by non-governmental and other humanitarian organizations, in that it tries to contextualise sexual violence in wider historical, social and economic processes. It is divided into six chapters. The first chapter tackles the silence that has, until recently, shrouded sexual violence in wartime; thus ensuring that it falls outside the purview of international law. The goal of the book, the author explains, is to understand ‘what drives men (and infrequently, women) to commit sexual violence in armed conflict’. In so doing, it uses ‘theories of constructivism to explore systematic factors like hegemonic masculinity and how it links up with situational factors in conflict to produce other masculinities that are subordinate, violence laden and catastrophic’ (p. 40).

The book is targeted at students, policy makers and the general public, in that it introduces and explains clearly the concepts that help to inform its analysis of sexual violence. It shows how masculinity, patriarchy and sexual violence are understood in essentialism, structuralism and social constructivism. It argues that contemporary sexual violence has to be seen as a consequence of how global capitalism adopts a ‘position of non-responsibility towards the economies of reproduction that involve the private sphere of family economies’ (p. 5). This is evident in the ways in which corporations operating in war zones take a ‘position of non-responsibility towards marginalized people’, whose exploitation is linked to global profit-making networks. This approach is useful in helping us to move beyond the essentialist and culturalist interpretations of sexual violence, especially with respect to Africa.

Chapter 2 considers the dimensions of sexual violence by conceptualizing it as a ‘runaway norm’ that ‘justifies and normalizes other forms of violence’. Here, the author produces a helpful four-part typology of sexual violence: ‘the type of violence’, ‘the targets of violence’, ‘the agency of the violence’ and ‘the erosion of neutrality in conflict’. In Chapter 3 Leatherman shows how sexual violence can develop in armed conflict and in Chapter 4 how it can persist into the post-conflict phase. In Chapter 5 she reveals a framework of analysis for explaining sexual violence in conflict that links hegemonic masculinity to the global political economy of war. This enables her to discuss the relationship between the prevalence of sexual violence in places like the DRC and ‘neoliberal globalization and its political economy of violence’ (p. 10). The book ends with a consideration of international interventions to tackle GBV, contrasting them with the strategies employed by local communities. This book is not based on Leatherman's research; it is a framework building review text drawing heavily on the work of others. Nevertheless, the text is most useful for those being introduced to the topic and those seeking explanations beyond the common rhetoric. At the end of the book, there is also a most useful discussion of selected key texts that informed the writing of each of the chapters.