Elusive accountability: governing sexual exploitation and abuse under the grip of sexual violence in war

Abstract This article investigates the governance of sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by peacekeepers and aid workers. We argue that efforts to prevent and address SEA reflect a confluence of structural-bias feminism and governance feminism, whereby a focus on sexual harm and consensus on the importance of criminal accountability have been institutionalized, with counterproductive consequences. What feminist and bureaucratic impulses drive these efforts, and what colonial legacies play out in policy implementation? Which feminist concerns lose out when these categories of sexual (mis)conduct are collapsed? We argue that the grip of sexual violence in conflict on feminist imaginations and work—documented by Karen Engle—took hold while SEA governance was being established, and that the former embedded in the latter a preoccupation with the search for criminal accountability. However, this carceral impulse is unsuited to dealing with sexual exploitation, which can span both coercive and consensual interactions. Moreover, in peacekeeping and humanitarian contexts the carceral impulse extends colonial logics by elevating a duty to care and protect ‘vulnerable’ local people through the enactment of rules that materially control their intimate choices.