Kirby, Paul
(2012)
Rethinking War/Rape: feminism, critical explanation and the study of wartime sexual violence, with special reference to the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
It is today commonly acknowledged that rape is a weapon of war. This consensus
has been achieved in significant part through the efforts of feminist scholars and
activists. Yet the consensus hides a multiplicity of ways in which weapons of war
might function. This thesis uncovers and critically explores that variety.
First, it turns to questions of what makes a form of inquiry specifically feminist,
the better to understand the foundations for claims about rape as a weapon of
war. Having offered a critique of existing divisions of empiricist, standpoint and
postmodern feminisms (and of the distinction between feminism and gender
theory), the thesis proposes a view of feminism as critical explanation: as at once
explanatory, political and ethical inquiry. These view is expanded on through a
framework of modes of critical explanation: styles of reasoning that provide
analytical wagers, narrative scripts and normative orientations for feminist
inquiry.
Second, the thesis explores three such modes of critical explanation in relation to
wartime sexual violence. It argues that the modes of instrumentality, unreason
and mythology implicitly structure feminist claims about war rape. Each is
examined in turn, with particular attention to how the forms of explanation
mirror debates found in war studies and in social theory more generally. Each
mode is clarified and expanded on, resulting in sets of propositions for each mode
and in a clearer sense of where modes contradict each other and where they may
combine.
Third, this meta-theoretical and theoretical framework is applied to the specific
case of atrocity in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Working through
several kinds of empirical material (studies of sexual violence, histories of conflict
in the Great Lakes, data on economic dimensions of violence and testimony from
combatants and ex-combatants on the topic of sexual violence), the thesis shows
how ‘the rape capital of the world’ is best understood in terms of themes derived
from the modes of unreason and mythology. It explores retaliatory atrocity,
extractive sexual violence and fragmented sexual aggression as three situated
dynamics of violence. This part thus critiques a narrowly instrumentalist idea of
wartime sexual violence as a strategy of profiteering, whilst also attending to how
economic dimensions matter in the war complex as a whole.
The conclusion draws out consequences for further work, especially in relation to
a comparative project for the critical explanation of wartime sexual violence.
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