Conflict-Related Sexual Violence and “Humanitarian Intervention”: An Ambivalent History

This article deals with the discrepancy between the visibility and moral condemnation of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and the differing ways how it could or could not legitimize military intervention. This raises the question of the conditions under which CRSV was historically mobilized as a resource to legitimize humanitarian interventions and which political, normative, and discursive frameworks enabled or constrained such instrumentalization. This article analyzes whether and how CRSV was made visible, framed, and functionalized in arguments for military intervention by comparing the discourses on military (humanitarian) intervention in the post-Yugoslav wars, the intervention by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)in Kosovo in 1999, the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the conflict in Darfur. I conclude that states invoked the protection of women or women’s rights, especially from CRSV, when they had already decided to intervene. States used the argument of combating CRSV or protecting women as a reinforcing element to justify the intervention as a kind of post-hoc justification.