Prosecution as Prevention? : A study of the 'End Impunity' narrative in the UN's fight against conflict-related sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo 

This thesis explores the underlying assumptions guiding the United Nations’ activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with regard to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). The purpose is to reveal how the organization’s ‘End Impunity’ narrative represents the problem of CRSV and to analyze the ideational premises that legitimize the solution of increased accountability and prosecution. This thesis conducts a qualitative discourse analysis inspired by the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ approach to analyze the implicit content of the narrative’s key policy texts. The results show that the narrative problematizes the inability of the Congolese judiciary to prosecute perpetrators, the disregard of legislation prohibiting sexual violence and the lack of justice provided to survivors of these crimes. These problematizations are reliant on assumptions of the rationality of perpetrators of sexual violence, as well as the universality of the Western human rights norm and ‘modern’ institutions. The findings suggest that the UN represents the problem of CRSV to be a problem of law and weak legal institutions in the DRC. Whilst this could be contingent on the ‘collapsed nature’ of the Congolese state, this thesis argues that as the DRC is a central case in the UN’s efforts to fight CRSV, the results of the analysis can be applied to the wider population of countries affected by conflict and sexual violence