The Girls of War: 1914 and 2014

The work of Dr. Laura Sjoberg focuses on gender and just war theory. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, where she uses gender-based and feminist approaches to the study of international security. In this week's WAPPP Seminar, she discussed the ways that war narratives can help perpetuate and fuel war, highlighting the crucial role of the depiction of women and girls in the process.

War narratives are stories of wars told to citizens. They are important because “stories we tell of wars is a part of what makes them possible”, Dr. Sjoberg argues. According to her, narratives about war form the foundation for people to be motivated to fight, both at individual level, but also at the national level. How does this happen?

Dr. Sjoberg argues that narratives about war are part of what makes them happen

There is a model of the ideal soldier. It is conveyed through a narrative. This soldier fights in the war bravely, but his motivation for being there is not the enjoyment of violence or the thrill of war, rather, this soldier is fighting 'the good fight'. He is a 'Just Warrior'. This is often translated into fighting that is necessary to 'save' the women and children back home from a foreign evil that encroaches upon them. She illustrated this idea by referring to a Nazi slogan that exclaimed: "Don't Let the Red Beast Rape Our Women!".

The 'Just Warrior' must enlist to protect the
'Beautiful Soul' from the 'Mad Brute'

While clarifying that she is not making a claim that women do not engage in combat or that men are not civilians, she said that her research is arguing that war narratives are gendered. They frame women very seldom not as women but as girls, but more importantly, as a 'Beautiful Soul'. This soul is pure and innocent. This soul must be protected by the 'Just Warrior'.

Dr. Sjoberg uses the images of war to convey how these narratives circulate among us and reach our consciousness. During the First World War, the U.S. military alone produced more than 300 images for recruitment posters, as did other countries. The images portray the different ways in which the 'Beautiful Soul' participated in the war effort. In some instances, the woman is shown helpless; in others, she is shaming the man into participating in a war in which he would have been otherwise reticent to participate. Finally, there was the image of the woman as threat: “Pure innocent women are the things you should fight for, women who don’t meet that mold are the things you should fight against.” The posters depicting the latter showed women who could be carriers of venereal disease. 'Loose' women were the foreign women present in the country where the fighting was happening. They were unlike the women back home, they were not to be protected, quite the opposite, the soldier had to protect himself from them.


Women encouraging men into the fight

How are the women of the 1914 war similar or different from the women of war in 2014? Dr. Sjoberrg chose to concentrate on the abduction of 200 Nigerian girls by Boko Haram and the imagery created around that horrifying event to make the comparison.

Posters made by Nigerians call for a stop in this kind of incidents, pointing out that this was not the first instance of abduction, and in fact, it had happened multiple times. This case caught the eye of the public because it fit this narrative of helpless and innocent girls being taken to be enslaved and violated. The 'Just Warrior' should bring them back.

The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, according to Sjoberg, can depict the beautiful sentiment of kinship among human kind by calling the girls 'ours', but at the same time, she argues, it carries the possessive claims with colonialist undertones. "The intent is beautiful, the effect is violent", she said.

Carefully clarifying that she did not have enough evidence to claim this with confidence, she shared that she sensed that the shift in the narrative revolving around the girls, from being innocent school girls to potential threats in the news pieces that claimed that Boko Haram could use them as suicide bombers, developed as a result of the painful realization that they would not be saved. The policy claim to protection does not equal actual protection for women in wars, she explained, "women are by definition being protected, in reality, it isn't being offered." She reminded the audience that domestic violence tends to rise in countries that are engaged in war. In this way, the State has a "claim to fame" as a protector of the innocent, but within its borders, the protection is amiss. In the end, the girls are still missing, no matter how viral the hashtag became. "Armchair activism is a really big problem in something like this".

The session ended with Dr. Sjoberg's prediction about the changing nature of the U.S. armed forces with increasing presence of women in combat. “Putting women in structures... does not change the institution”, she notes. Equality is much more than that.

Dr. Sjoberg is the author of several books and academic publications on international relations, gender, and law. Follow her research to learn more.

Trying to Explain Rape in Civil Wars

Gang rape has been a vicious element of war since time immemorial. It is slowly starting to receive the attention it deserves by the international community, with campaigns to Stop Rape Now and Stop Rape in Conflict, particularly as its use in the killing fields of the Democratic Republic of the Congo has continued to shock the world.

But when and where has gang rape happened during civil wars? And why, even in the same war, do some factions commit rape while others don’t?

Those are the questions that Professor Dara Kay Cohen of the Harvard Kennedy School has sought to answer in her last years of research. She presented some of those findings at her WAPPP Seminar last week.

As rape has become a weapon of war in places as diverse as Rwanda, Bosnia, the DRC, most people have tried to explain it in three ways. First, that it is due to opportunism and greed: a collapse of norms and access to resources attracts violent people that will commit violent deeds with impunity. Second, that it is due to ethnic hatred: rape is part of humiliating or erasing the next generation of a people based on their race. And third, that it's a symptom of extreme gender inequality: that even in times of peace, women lack rights and opportunities, so rape is a byproduct when other norms break down.

However, Professor Kay Cohen argues that, in fact, gang rape may be a tool of combatant socialization during wartime. Using the cases of Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and East Timor---even analyzing situations where rape did not occur---she suggests that when armed groups recruit foot-soldiers by force, through random abduction or impressment, gang rape is used by the members of the combatant group to create unit cohesion. Because there is no basis for unity amongst the diverse, abducted soldiers, gang rape of the victim population creates a shared experience that builds a twisted form of solidarity. In fact, gang rape during civil conflicts is rarely ordered by commanders. But a “desire to fit in” compels even female abductees to participate in gang rape of their victims.

Though many have referred to rape as a “costless weapon” that evidently also increases unit cohesiveness, it often has multiple costs to the perpetrators---including the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases and reduced battlefield effectiveness.

The difficulty for outside policy-makers trying to respond to or intervene in these horrendous situations is that wars with widespread rape tend to be more difficult to end, and have less durable episodes of peace. However, understanding that it is the composition of a warring faction that drives gang rape in war, can serve as a warning signal to outside observers that rape as a tool of war is imminent---hopefully prompting earlier intervention.

Image Source