Rape During Civil War

Dara Kay Cohen’s Rape During Civil War begins with variation: if wartime rape were an inevitable product of male aggression, ethnic hatred, or collapsed discipline, why do some armed groups use it extensively while others do not? Combining a cross-national dataset with field research in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, and El Salvador, Cohen tests explanations against patterns rather than assuming one universal cause. This comparative method turns sexual violence from an incomprehensible excess into a phenomenon whose organizational conditions can be investigated.

The central argument links gang rape to the socialization of forcibly recruited combatants. Abduction and coercive recruitment produce units with little prior trust; collective violence can create bonds, enforce complicity, and mark membership. The claim is not that rape is functionally necessary or that every perpetrator lacks choice. It identifies one mechanism that helps explain why some groups develop particular practices, while distinguishing rape from other forms of sexual violence and from command-directed strategies.

Any organizational explanation carries ethical risks: causal language can sound like justification, survivor experience can disappear behind data, and cases cannot exhaust colonial, racial, gendered, or local meanings of violence. Cohen explicitly offers a testable account, not a complete feminist theory of war. Its practical importance is to reject fatalism. If sexual violence varies with recruitment, cohesion, command, and institutional norms, prevention must examine how armed groups are built rather than treating rape as an unavoidable fact of conflict.