In After Rape, Holly Porter brilliantly and thoughtfully draws our attention to the difficult and dark subject of rape. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Acholi subregion of northern Uganda, the book is an important exposition of what happens in the aftermath of sexual violence, including – but not limited to – rape in the context of war. Porter reveals that the reactions to rape vary as much as the variety of ways in which rape can occur. Critically, she presents the concept of ‘social harmony’ in order to capture what Acholi prioritize when addressing wrongdoing and crime. The book advances our understanding of gender, sexual violence, transitional justice and war.

Porter is able to make such impactful, nuanced arguments because she spent over a decade living in Acholiland. She speaks the Acholi language, and the deep relationships she built with Acholi women are evident in the richness and level of contextual detail included in the book. While the entire book is worthy of a close and careful read, there are several insights that deserve particular mention as they directly challenge existing scholarship – and, by doing so, strengthen it.

First, Porter critiques a dominant framework in the existing literature on gender and violence that emphasizes the separation between ‘political’ rape and that which is not political. Rape during war – especially since the legal responses to Rwanda and Bosnia developed after the mid-1990s – has typically been conceptualized as being motivated by power, putting it in a different space from ordinary sex, which is seen as occurring within the personal realm. Yet Porter questions this separation, suggesting that sexual violence ‘must be understood in the broader frameworks of gender and sex within the particular context under study’ (p. 55). Arguing for a ‘re-sexualization’ of rape, Porter convincingly contends that the lines between rape (ostensibly about power) and legal sex (ostensibly about desire) are problematic. Porter's contribution is to expand our understanding of how we conceptualize rape and ‘acceptable’ sex through the lens of power and violence. As Porter poses: ‘Who can say that there is no element of power in his or her own sexual relationships, even if considered consensual and mutually gratifying?’ (p. 63).

Second, Porter critically intervenes in debates about appropriate transitional justice responses to rape aimed at securing accountability for the crime. In the context of the Lord's Resistance Army activity in northern Uganda, international organizations and efforts linked to the International Criminal Court have been dominated by an attempt to hold perpetrators of sexual violence criminally accountable. Acknowledging the importance, but limitations, of these mechanisms, Porter focuses on the ways in which local responses to crimes differ profoundly from more formal, top-down responses. In lieu of prosecutions or other forms of justice, Acholi offer different responses based on the particular circumstances of the violation. Porter here draws our attention to the need to deconstruct the sharp separation between war-related crimes (ostensibly about power) and ‘ordinary’ crimes (ostensibly linked to deviance, opportunity, or other dynamics of criminality). This is because war crimes occur within a social context shaped by conceptions of moral and appropriate relationships between men and women, and the ‘right’ way to respond to rape will always be situated within this dynamic social reality.

Third, and relatedly, Porter's discussion of ‘social harmony’ reminds readers of the need to centre the social realities of those who are party to wrongdoing when designing justice interventions. Porter thus highlights the micro-level – the daily patterns and knowledge in the two Acholi villages she examines. Seeing rape not just as a crime against an individual woman but as a crime against the social order requires us to reimagine what justice for the crime would look like. For Acholi, Porter argues that addressing wrongdoing through justice requires those involved to have moral jurisdiction over a given crime. Without moral jurisdiction, any measures taken to address the crime do not contribute to social harmony, and thus do not promote justice. This insight reminds us that well-intentioned interventions – including transitional justice, but also perhaps extending to development, women's empowerment programmes, human rights advocacy, and so forth – have to centre local realities and be agreed on by all parties to be able to contribute meaningfully.

This argument, however, raises tricky questions about the normative value of ‘social harmony’, questions that are ripe for further engagement. While Porter notes the importance of social harmony for understanding crime and wrongdoing, she also acknowledges that this concept is fundamentally patriarchal and therefore structurally violent. While local understandings of rape and wrongdoing in general allow some crimes to be seen as ‘less bad’ because they are remedied in a way that repairs social harmony (such as through bridewealth or other social payments), these responses ultimately maintain women's position as subordinate to men and reinforce their value as mothers and wives. How international interventions can ethically centre local knowledge and systems of practice, given these systems’ role in maintaining such gender oppression, deserves deeper theorizing by scholars in the future.

In sum, Porter elegantly deconstructs categories in this book: between war and peace, victim and perpetrator, consensual and transgressive sex, new and old, local and foreign. Lines and continuums, as she puts it, are inadequate (p. 216), as conflict, development and social realities constantly change. Porter's book thus joins a tradition of scholarship which cautions against assuming that emancipatory interventions have only their intended effects. Traditional justice interventions, Porter shows, often lack the moral jurisdiction to adjudicate wrongdoing. They may then create new forms of harm as they threaten social harmony. This deeply thoughtful, ethical and engaging analysis will be of great interest to graduate students, scholars and transitional justice practitioners interested in gender and violence in Uganda and far beyond.