Minerals and masculinity: a new understanding of sexual violence in war from the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo

© 2012 Dr. Sara A. MegerThe widespread and systematic use of rape and other forms of sexual violence during armed conflict was brought to the attention of the international community through the ground-breaking work of feminist scholars in recent decades. This work helped to shift our understanding of sexual violence in war from being an inevitable, if unfortunate, side-effect of armed conflict to recognising it as a violation of women’s rights and a deliberate tool of war-making. However, much of the research done on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war has sought to reveal the underlying causes of sexual violence as stemming from a singular motivation; some focus on the personal reasons that individual soldiers perpetrate sexual violence, while others focus on the way in which sexual violence has been used as a deliberate weapon of terror and genocide. The singularity of focus has led to disagreement within the field about how we can understand the causes and consequences of sexual violence in war, and to a standard set of prescriptions for how to respond to this atrocity. This thesis offers a new understanding of sexual violence in conflict as the outcome of micro- and macro-level processes of the hegemonic global structures of patriarchy and the international political economy. By examining trends in the form and function of sexual violence in recent and ongoing conflicts, this thesis offers a preliminary typology of wartime sexual violence in order to argue that, in different contexts, the perpetration of sexual violence may take different forms and be used in pursuit of different objectives. This thesis argues that, in order to understand the use of sexual violence in conflict and construct effective responses to its perpetration, we must understand the reason for the conflict itself and the objectives of the armed groups involved. This thesis uses the ongoing conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study by which to demonstrate the relationship between the current hegemonic economic, political and gender orders and the use of sexual violence in economic civil wars. Sexual violence in this conflict has been one of the primary instruments used by all participating armed groups to take control of land, resources, and the people that live in these territories. The conflict is both driven and exacerbated by regional and global economic interests and a pervasive lack of political will to effectively address the widespread and systematic use of sexual violence for economic exploitation. This thesis shows that adequately addressing the root cause of sexual violence in contemporary conflicts thus requires tackling both the underlying gender inequality that gives sexual violence the powerful social effect it has, as well as the reason for the conflict (and use of violence therein), in the first place. Disaggregating our understanding of sexual violence in terms of the instrumental purpose it serves for the perpetrator enables both a better understanding of the causes of sexual violence in war, but also provides a more suitable basis for constructing effective responses that may contribute to a reduction in the perpetration of this wartime atrocity