Reports of sexual violence in armed conflict frequently appear in political discussions and news media, presenting a stark contrast to a long history of silence and nonrecognition. Conflict-related sexual violence has transitioned rapidly from a neglected human rights issue to an unambiguous security concern on the agendas of powerful states and the United Nations Security Council. Through interviews and primary-source evidence, Kerry F. Crawford investigates the reasons for this dramatic change and the implications of the securitization of sexual violence. Views about wartime sexual violence began changing in the 1990s as a result of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and then accelerated in the 2000s. Three case studies—the United States' response to sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1820 in 2008, and the development of the United Kingdom’s Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative—illustrate that use of the weapon of war frame does not represent pure co-optation by the security sector. Rather, well-placed advocates have used this frame to advance the antisexual violence agenda while simultaneously working to move beyond the frame’s constraints. This book is a groundbreaking account of the transformation of international efforts to end wartime sexual violence.

This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war. Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival. Civilians and Modern Warprovides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants. This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.

What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.

This important and timely reference work examines violence against women and gender-based discrimination around the world, providing a global perspective on why this kind of oppression is still occurring in the 21st century. Within the past decade, the attention that has been paid to violence against women by international government organizations such as the United Nations and World Health Organization has grown. Yet silences around the violent treatment of women remains across the world, particularly in those countries where women's rights are not protected and statistics are not available. Women and Violence encompasses a global perspective of the history, causes, and complex underpinnings of gender and violence from a multidimensional and cross-disciplinary perspective. Chapters focus on a specific world region, including North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Each chapter begins with a general discussion on its world region, then focuses on particular forms of violence against women in the more specific contexts of particular countries and in relation to the wider region. Readers will be able to make cross-cultural comparisons, learning how to view gender-based violence and women's advocacy against discrimination that is occurring around the world.

This book seeks to interrogate how contemporary policy issues become ‘securitized’ and, furthermore, what the implications of this process are. A generation after the introduction of the concept of securitization to the security studies field, this book engages with how securitization and desecuritization ‘works’ within and across a wide range of security domains including terrorism and counter-terrorism, climate change, sexual and gender-based violence, inter-state and intra-state conflict, identity, and memory in various geographic and social contexts. Blending theory and application, the contributors to this volume – drawn from different disciplinary, ontological, and geographic ‘spaces’ – orient their investigations around three common analytical objectives: revealing deficiencies in and through application(s) of securitization; considering securitization through speech-acts and discourse as well as other mechanisms; and exposing latent orthodoxies embedded in securitization research. The volume demonstrates the dynamic and elastic quality of securitization and desecuritization as concepts that bear explanatory fruit when applied across a wide range of security issues, actors, and audiences. It also reveals the deficiencies in restricting securitization research to an overly narrow set of issues, actors, and mechanisms. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of critical security studies, international security, and International Relations. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage places this renowned, award-winning playwright's contribution to American theatre in scholarly context. The volume covers Nottage's plays, productions, activism, and artistic collaborations to display the extraordinary breadth and depth of her work. The collection contains chapters on each of her major works, and includes a special three-chapter section devoted to Ruined, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. The anthology also features an interview about collaboration and creativity with Lynn Nottage and two of her most frequent directors, Seret Scott and Kate Whoriskey.

The Darfur conflict exploded in early 2003 when two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, struck national military installations in Darfur to send a hard-hitting message of resentment over the region’s political and economic marginalization. The conflict devastated the region’s economy, shredded its fragile social fabric, and drove millions of people from their homes. Darfur Allegory is a dispatch from the humanitarian crisis that explains the historical and ethnographic background to competing narratives that have informed international responses. At the heart of the book is Sudanese anthropologist Rogaia Abusharaf’s critique of the pseudoscientific notions of race and ethnicity that posit divisions between “Arab” northerners and “African” Darfuris. Elaborated in colonial times and enshrined in policy afterwards, such binary categories have been adopted by the media to explain the civil war in Darfur. The narratives that circulate internationally are thus highly fraught and cover over—to counterproductive effect—forms of Darfurian activism that have emerged in the conflict’s wake. Darfur Allegory marries the analytical precision of a committed anthropologist with an insider’s view of Sudanese politics at home and in the diaspora, laying bare the power of words to heal or perpetuate civil conflict.