I would like to thank Miriam J. Anderson for her thoughtful review of my book. Although our works differ substantially with regards to conceptual frameworks and subjects of analysis, there are many ways that they are complementary. One area that Anderson notes is in the politics of “norm diffusion.” We are both interested in how policy derived from attentiveness to gender inequality becomes operationalized in conflict and postconflict settings. Unlike her Windows of Opportunity, however, in Rape Loot Pillage I am centrally concerned with the assumptions of international norms and the implications of their translation into policy, particularly as it relates to conflict-related sexual violence.
Anderson voices legitimate concerns with the lack of systematic empirical data to support the theoretical claims I put forward regarding the link between sexual violence and global supply chains. She calls for evidence of the link between armed conflict and natural resources in the global economy, data that would greatly strengthen the argument I make for the global political-economic determinants of conflict-related sexual violence. She notes how this link may be counterintuitive, as a “stable state would be much better at securing the unfettered flow of natural resources to the global economy.”
Unfortunately, as my Chapter 2 details, the boundary between illicit and licit trade in primary resources is blurry. Although initiatives that seek to prevent conflict minerals from tainting the global market exist, such as Section 1502 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, these processes are dependent on a nonexistent boundary between licit and illicit. Many have critiqued the attempts at mineral tracing under Dodd-Frank (Lauren Wolfe, “How Dodd-Frank Is Failing Congo” Foreign Policy 2 [2 February 2015] URL: http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/02/how-dodd-frank-is-failing-congo-mining-conflict-minerals/; accessed 9 August 2017) for causing further insecurity among artisanal miners, who make up most of the industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Though informal, artisanal mining is by no means illegal.
The lack of transparency—even within the licit global market in mineral resources—means that it is nearly impossible to know with precision the extent to which goods produced and circulated in the global market can be linked to armed conflict and gendered violence. Armed groups can benefit economically from mineral resource exploitation at innumerable stages in the supply chain beyond controlling mines. In Congo, they illegally tax artisanal miners and trucking routes; in Colombia and Nigeria, they provide private security to licit primary resource sectors (mining and oil) in the form of large-scale human-rights abuses (see Sara Meger, “War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism,” Postcolonial Studies 19 [no. 4, 2017]: 378–92). Thus, to return to Anderson’s point that state fragility, caused by armed conflict and (sexual) violence, may not provide the best access for raw materials—this is consistent with the core argument of Rape Loot Pillage. Sometimes, sexual violence is connected to strengthening state power and controls over resource exploitation. Other times, it is used toward weakening state controls to enable disenfranchised or marginalized groups the opportunity to exploit resources.
What we can generalize, and what I argue in this book, is that regardless of how the materials are extracted, the feminist political economy (FPE) approach opens the door for an interrogation of the structural conditions that give meaning and value to gendered violence in conflict settings. These structures include macroeconomic policies, supply chains, labor markets, and political norms, all of which are in their own way gendered and gender determining.
In our discipline, we tend to view armed conflict and political violence as disruptive forces, aberrant to the normal “peaceful” operations of global governance and the maintenance of international security. However, such a view obscures the multiple ways in which violence is also productive. The FPE analysis of sexual violence examines how this violence is itself a mode of production and reproduction, creating, nurturing, and sustaining systems of political, social, and economic practices. Though admittedly limited, the empirical data open just one small window into demonstrating the material benefits that can be derived from sexual violence in armed conflict. The tension that Anderson identifies between the conceptual and empirical is a recurrent problem of macrotheorizing complex social relations, and I would most welcome further empirical work that would test the validity of my claims.
