Who is speaking? co-option, authority, and envisioning the nation: women and narratives of sexual violence in conflict

This article presents an investigation of the forces of authority and co-option surrounding the documentation of violence and specifically sexual violence against women in conflict, and examines the representation of survivors in media and academic sources. The first section focusses on the use of oral testimony in the conflicts in East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971 and the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and how survivors' narratives are interpreted and communicated. It then goes on to examine the representation of violence against women in the Bangladesh conflict in a variety of South Asian newspaper sources in the years immediately following 1971. This is then further explored in the final section where these media discourses display the co-opting of women's experiences into discourses of nation-building and state legitimacy in Bangladesh. The article concludes that the sources examined reflect a tendency for narratives of sexual violence in conflict to be co-opted or otherwise 'used' for secondary political purposes by the media, the state and even academic researchers, such that the women survivors retain little authority over the communication of their 'history' and its utilisation