Beyond Strategic Rape and between the Public and Private: Violence Against Women in Armed Conflict

Abstract

This study gets to the heart of examining what counts as conflict-related gender violence under international law. Using empirical research from Liberia, Northern Ireland and Timor-Leste, the study specifically explores and explains variance beyond strategic sexualized violence employed in some conflicts, to analyze the ways that private individualistic violence is influenced by conflict across the three case studies. Proposing a set of variables as possible determinants of wide-ranging forms of violence, the study proposes that on a continuum of “political public violence” to “endemic private violence,” there are forms of violence that may sit somewhere “in between.” The analysis queries where this "in-between" violence should fit in the thresholds provided by law and what consideration should be given to the political and private violence nexus that the research demonstrates.

Keywords: violence against women in armed conflict, sexual violence, Northern Ireland, Liberia, Timor-Leste