Rape and the Failure of Peace: The Destabilizing Force of Sexual Violence in Civil War

Existing scholarship on post-conflict peace duration fails to account for the level of sexual violence within conflicts as a predictor of the risk of returning to war. This paper presents a new theory, linking the prevalence of rape to post-conflict instability, with the resumption of fighting as a hard test of social and political weakness. Through the merging of two data sets on peace duration and sexual violence within civil conflicts, I offer a unique quantitative, cross-national analysis of the relationship between sexual violence and peace stability. My findings support the theory, and indicate that high rates of sexual abuse in war are indeed correlated with shaky post-conflict peace. The results suggest a need for further analysis and the incorporation of violence against women into security studies.

Conclusion

More importantly, these findings suggest at the least, that sexual violence is a marker of wars that are difficult to end and that the occurrence of sexual atrocities should concern the international community. Few concrete steps have been taken to eliminate sexual violence or to seriously address its existence, but the relationship discovered here indicates a further reason why violence against women is an issue that affects everyone's security.

My findings suggest that it is in fact in leaders' interests to actively discourage sexual violence in conflict-a step no armies or rebels (to my knowledge) have taken. While terrorizing a population or allowing soldiers to act as they please may seem like a good strategy, if the goal of a fighting group is to take control of the state, sexual violence will undermine their control and increase the likelihood of their government returning to conflict. It is possible that this is not a concern for some fighting groups, if their goal is not to gain control of a stable country. Future work could attempt to control for this factor by identifying goals of the main fighting groups.