The notion that “boys will be boys” has long framed the cross-cultural acceptance of rape, including sexual violence in armed conflict. Even since the start of the twentieth century, there have been many shocking reports of the systematic use of rape in warfare, such as the estimated 200,000 women and girls from Korea and other countries used as sexual slaves by the Japanese military. Also, during World War II, an estimated two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers. In Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971, an estimated 200,000 Bengali women were raped by Pakistani soldiers. These are just a few historical examples of wartime sexual violence. Despite the evidence of widespread and pervasive use of sexual violence in armed conflict, the international prohibition regime on rape in war has been very slow to emerge. In Looting and Rape in Wartime, Tuba Inal examines a crucial and seemingly historical anomaly behind the long and glacial-paced gendering of international humanitarian law. Why was it possible to outlaw pillage in war a hundred years earlier than the prohibition against rape in war? Why did these two prohibition regimes develop separately, even though in many cultures around the world women have been considered part of the property of men? Why was the prohibition on pillage silent about rape of women?
Drawing from theories of regime development, Looting and Rape in Wartime provides an engaging and systematic historical analysis of international humanitarian law around these central questions. Inal's account is an important contribution to understanding how change happens in international relations, especially in terms of how gender matters. Her study reveals how the exclusion of women from international institutions is one of a set of gendered factors that hampered the development of international regulations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from banning violence against women, especially in the context of war.
Looting and Rape in Wartime explores a set of factors that facilitate or impede the development of a prohibition regime. Inal argues that a key consideration is that states do not want to make commitments that they cannot keep since noncompliance has high costs. However, as she also notes, knowledge-based theories show that states do not operate only under a logic of consequences to maximize utilities, but also are “social beings affected by the social system surrounding them and their own beliefs about their place or identity in that social system” (167–68). This creates a “logic of appropriateness” shaped by ideational factors.
The emergence of a prohibition regime also depends on several other elements: a normative context that is “conducive to the ideas at hand” (168); a normative shock that will help to push the formation of the prohibition regime; and a set of norm entrepreneurs, whether state or nonstate actors or a coalition among them. Prohibition regimes render certain actions or activities deviant and subject violators to enforcement through criminal justice or military measures. Based on norms that prohibit both in international and domestic legal systems, they are aimed at “protect[ing] state and individual interests by providing order, security and justice” (3).
Inal's study focuses on the global prohibition regimes on looting and rape in terms of their robustness—that is, the extent to which they are or are not legally binding and precise and provide for the delegation of authority for interpretation and implementation. Her study encompasses negotiations that led to The Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907), the Geneva Conventions (1949) and Additional Protocols (1977), and the Rome Statute (1998). It is only with the establishment of the International Criminal Court under the Rome Statute that an international prohibition regime covering not only rape in war, but enumerated forms of sexual violence as a war crime, crime against humanity, and as an element of genocide emerges as a hard, legal regime. Until this breakthrough, there was practically no element of a global prohibition regime on sexual violence in war, despite the robust emergence of a regime against pillage from The Hague and Geneva Conventions beginning in the first half of the twentieth century.
Through a detailed analysis of the emergence of these legal regimes, Inal documents the changing normative contexts historically and the kinds of normative shocks and norm entrepreneurs that made it possible to ban pillage but not rape until a hundred years later. As she notes, rape was not considered part of pillage in the negotiations on The Hague Conventions in part because there was no normative context in which to consider rape a violation of women's basic rights. Such rights for women did not exist; moreover, it would have been distasteful or vulgar and diplomatically inappropriate to use the word “rape” or discuss it in a legal text at that time. However, more compelling an explanation for Inal is that key negotiators (men) also believed that they could not prevent rape in war—it was part of their gendered assumptions of masculinity that such sexual desires could not be controlled, especially in wartime.
Much of Looting in Rape and Wartime documents more than a century of struggle for women's rights and women's participation in international negotiations to change the gendered context of international humanitarian law. The transnational feminist movement that created CEDAW and mobilized for women's rights at UN conferences on women ultimately laid the groundwork for a shift of normative context in which violence against women would no longer be considered “normal.” Consequently, the systematic rape of women and other forms of sexual violence in the war in Bosnia and the genocide in Rwanda during the 1990s provoked international outrage that feminist norm entrepreneurs could translate into legal action.
Nonetheless, Inal's findings are sobering. No women participated in The Hague Conventions and comprised only 6.1% of participants in the drafting of the Geneva Conventions; a still meager 19% of the delegates writing the Rome Statute were women, a number that does not rise above the dynamics of tokenism. In spite of these limitations, the global feminist movement has finally, together with women's activism on the domestic front, been able to create laws against rape and advance the rights of women, even in the most dangerous contexts of war.
Looting in Rape and Wartime raises many new questions, even as it sheds light on gaps in the historical development of humanitarian law. Has the logic of the inevitability of rape in warfare shifted as much as the logic against pillage that made it possible to ban looting so much earlier? What will it take to render the Rome Statute a viable instrument for the prosecution of sexual violence crimes in war? To date, the record on this is still very limited. Many challenges still remain with the creation of national laws, policing practices, judicial systems, and related psychosocial and medical supports for survivors of sexual violence that enable them to testify safely and make it possible for prosecutions to go forward.
Increasingly, it is also evident that sexual violence in conflict is perpetrated not only against women and girls, but men and boys as well. Some feminists are opposed to shifting the focus to male victimhood for fear it will divert resources and attention away from responding to sexual violence against women. However, ensuring that laws and resources address the cultural taboos, social stigma, and trauma of male victimhood, along with the needs of other types of victims—including gays, lesbians, or transgendered persons—should help to broaden and deepen the normative context that has supported the development of the global prohibition regime.
A critical factor behind these breakthroughs is the testimony of women, and more recently, men. Women survivors from the wars in Bosnia and Rwanda have helped to make it possible to prosecute these crimes. Their courage to speak up galvanized the development of international law prohibiting sexual violence in warfare. Other women have added their voices, too, including many now elderly survivors from World War II of the system of Japanese sexual slavery. Adding to this growing chorus of women's voices are male victims of sexual violence, such as from the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who have started to come forward to share their stories, too. Similar to women, male victims also risk being abandoned by their family and shunned by their community. In some countries, such as Uganda, male victims of sexual violence also face perils of being labeled homosexual and incarceration under antigay laws.
Collectively, the voices of male and female survivors, the transnational women's movements, and normative entrepreneurs among state delegations have broken the long-standing international silence on rape in war, challenged its stigmatization, and brought a more multifaceted and gendered understanding to its causes and effects. Their steadfastness has helped to finally put the matter of sexual violence in armed conflict on the diplomatic table where such discussion was once taboo.
