Rape During Civil War

Dara Kay Cohen’s Rape During Civil War begins with a puzzle of variation. If wartime rape were simply an inevitable expression of male aggression, ethnic hatred, or battlefield disorder, why do some armed groups commit it extensively while others in the same conflict have far fewer reports? The question is not how to find a functional excuse for perpetrators. It is how to reject fatalism: rape should not be treated as an automatic by-product of war and therefore beyond prevention. Cohen studies rape by armed combatants against civilians, with particular attention to gang rape; the book is not a comprehensive account of every form of sexual violence, every survivor’s experience, or every war.

The book first compares 91 major civil wars from 1980 to 2012, then examines Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, and El Salvador in depth. Its cross-national analysis codes the reported severity of rape from multiple sources and compares state and insurgent forces, recruitment practices, and other conditions of war. These are data about the level of reporting, not a census of actual incidence. Stigma, fear, investigative capacity, political advocacy, and the survival of records all shape what becomes visible. Treating differences in reports as a complete map of violence would claim more than the evidence can establish.

Cohen’s distinctive explanation is combatant socialization. Abduction, press-ganging, and other forms of coercive recruitment may place strangers into armed units without the trust that voluntary recruits might already share. She proposes that, in some settings, gang rape can help produce peer bonds, enforce complicity in a taboo act, sever ties to civilian life, and perform a militarized masculinity. This is an organizational hypothesis: it shifts inquiry from presumed ethnic or male nature to recruitment, group norms, and what commanders tolerate. It does not claim that rape is necessary for cohesion, nor that the absence of a direct order removes organizational responsibility. Toleration, rewards, supervision failures, and peer pressure are also relations of power.

The three case studies put this account under pressure rather than simply illustrating it. In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) relied heavily on abduction; rape reports rose during particular phases of the war. Cohen triangulates former-combatant surveys and interviews with Truth and Reconciliation Commission material and human-rights records, while also considering other armed groups and opportunities for looting. She argues that socialization best explains the main pattern, without ruling out opportunistic abuse or command-linked violence. Timor-Leste is more complicated: around the 1999 referendum, perpetrators and political conditions changed, as did patterns of reporting. Opportunism amid upheaval, revenge politics, and socialization all require consideration. The case also exposes uneven evidence: information about recruitment among pro-Indonesian militias is thinner, while Indonesian forces committed rape without the same pattern of forced recruitment. El Salvador poses a further limit: coercive recruitment did not automatically yield widespread rape. Cohen considers how institutional norms, external political pressure, and the FMLN’s organizational ideology may have constrained violence. Recruitment is not an on/off switch; its effects depend on other conditions.

The book’s feminist contribution is to locate sexual violence within the organization of war and political responsibility without reducing survivors to data points. Cross-national comparison can reveal patterns; interviews and local records can show how recruitment was experienced, violence tolerated, and testimony shaped by stigma and silence. These forms of evidence complement, but cannot replace, one another. Cohen’s analysis relies primarily on available records about female survivors and acknowledges that male victimization may be underreported. Readers should therefore ask who can leave testimony that researchers can code, and whether “no report” means little violence or a lack of safe conditions for speaking and recording. An organizational account can explain a pattern, but it cannot stand in for survivors’ descriptions of harm, bodies, and life after violence.

The theory has also drawn a consequential challenge. In his scholarly review, political scientist Stathis N. Kalyvas asks whether gang rape is deliberately used to bond a unit or is instead an unintended outcome of forced recruitment, weak discipline, and a violent environment; the answer matters for responsibility and prevention. He also warns against treating state militaries and insurgent organizations as interchangeable and questions what national-level recruitment measures can establish. This is a reviewer’s critique, not a counterexample Cohen resolves within the book. It clarifies the book’s most productive boundary: Cohen offers a mechanism to investigate, not a master theory of every war, every form of sexual violence, or every perpetrator. Confusing “why did this pattern emerge?” with “who is accountable?” can make explanation sound like exoneration and can wrongly narrow responsibility to those who issued explicit orders.

Read alongside Annick T. R. Wibben’s Feminist Security Studies, Cohen’s book makes a useful two-part inquiry possible: how do armed organizations develop violent practices, and how do security narratives make some experiences legible while excluding others? Cohen examines the first question through recruitment and group dynamics; Wibben examines how stories construct threats, protectors, and victims. This is a FemRes comparison, not a claim that the authors cite or endorse one another. Keeping both questions in view helps readers study institutional mechanisms without letting theory displace survivors’ voices.

FemRes’s account of the book’s evidence and cases follows the primary text; the synthesis of its feminist significance and inferential limits is editorial interpretation. Cornell University Press bibliographic information public Google Books contents cross-national research article scholarly review