The sociology of sexual violence activism is a favorite theme of scholars of transnational agenda setting. For centuries, sexual violence was understood as a property crime against men, a natural expression of physical lust, a regrettable side effect of war. Suddenly, in the early 1990s the game changed. Within a span of a few years, rape was reconstructed as a war crime and a human rights violation against women; international organizations began including gender-based violence programming in their bureaucratic tool kits; and sexual violence went from regrettable side effect to solvable global policy problem. A number of studies of agenda setting note as much, but few explain this shift; those who do focus on the nature of women's activism, rather than on the shifts in the political opportunity structure at the end of the Cold War.

Carol Harrington takes a second look, asking us: “Why was the 1990s the right time for rape to become an international security problem?” (p. 1). Her book provides a rich genealogy of sexual violence activism from the abolitionist era through the outcry against United Nations peacekeepers' violence in the “new wars” of the early twenty-first century. And she explores its relationship to the politicization of the problem by governmental and intergovernmental bureaucracies. Her analysis locates the impetus for the women's movement's post-1990 agenda-setting success in two broader components of the political opportunity structure: developments in epistemic communities of trauma scientists, who increasingly sought to medicalize rape and its psychosocial effects, and what Harrington calls the “waning intellectual authority of socialist analysis,” which opened new spaces in the transnational women's movement for theorizing bodily integrity rights violations.

This book usefully bridges two strands in the sexual violence advocacy literature. One is the triumphalist body of work treating rape advocacy as an emblematic case of global civil society retooling the state system in the service of human security and women's rights. By this account, the politicization of sexual violence is a story with a happy ending, there remaining only the hairy problem of implementation. Another literature critiques this very set of norms and discourses as thinly disguised war propaganda itself: The protection of vulnerable, sexualized female bodies has long been a staple in the war propagandists' arsenal, and some writers have argued that the politicization of sexual violence has served to redraw ethnic boundaries or justify imperialistic interventions as much as it has to protect women. Rape continues to be endemic in conflict zones. Here, Harrington offers a middle position, pointing out that the success of feminist antisexual violence activism was contingent on creating categories intelligible to liberal bureaucracies, and this does not mean that such efforts should be dismissed or treated as imperialistic. However, “anti-sexual violence policy suffers all the contradictions of liberal projects to govern freedom through coercion” (p. 10).

Harrington's work offers a contribution to the agenda-setting literature as well, for why issues languish unnoticed for decades before hitting the global agenda remains an important and underexplored empirical question among scholars of transnationalism, most of whom have focused on why campaigns succeed against the odds. Yet, at this level, her effort is somewhat less well executed. Her argument remains largely descriptive, and she never truly hits home in terms of her explanatory claims about the importance of the political opportunity structure associated with the end of the Cold War. Precisely how did it matter? The book provides a strong historical treatment showing how ideological threads of abolitionism, early-twentieth-century antitrafficking discourse, wartime mental health schematics, and peacekeeping culture weave together to arrive at the current alphabet soup of UN gender protocols, codes of conduct, and victims' advocacy units. It is weaker at demonstrating that the key variables stated in its introduction—the decline of socialism and the emergence of the trauma model of rape—primed international actors in the 1990s (but not before) to take sexual violence seriously.

There is a more serious set of limitations to this study as an explanation of the relationship between political opportunity structure and agenda setting: It relies on a single case. To answer the broader question about what constitutes the element of “ripeness” on which, according to Harrington, successful advocacy depends, scholars of agenda setting need to replicate this sort of research on many more cases using a structured, focused comparison. In exploring the politicization of sexual violence so thoroughly, Harrington provides a model for where to start.