Kathleen Kuehnast
Crawford offers a convincing historic overview of wartime sexual violence and a thorough analysis of the “weapon of war” trope. She astutely crafts her narrative at the intersection of the role of strategic framing and that of advocacy, and perceptively allows this tension to lead the reader on an insightful journey of how sexual violence in war became a credible security issue at the turn of the 21st Century. This book is an essential read for students and professionals alike who are in the peace and security fields, international law and public policy.
Charli Carpenter
Rape has always been part of war as well as peace, but until the late twentieth century this was taken for granted or ignored. In this fascinating work, Kerry Crawford examines why states have recently started thinking about sexual violence as a weapon—and, therefore, as a problem in need of a global policy response. In doing so, she importantly reminds us what is lost when states begin thinking of rape as a weapon of war. For unlike other ‘weapons of war,’ rape is—fundamentally—a human rights violation against not states at all but against people
