Silence Breakers in War and Peace: Research on Gender and Violence with an Ethics of Engagement

In 2001 I published an article in EJIR which analyzed 140 studies on sexual violence in war published in the 1900s. It took one year to gather the 140 articles. Today a quick Google search will yield thousands of hits. The political attention given to gender-based aspects of armed conflict, and sexual violence in particular, has created a demand for particular forms of knowledge and in this dynamic lies a tension for the academic community. This article presents an analysis of the social science literature on conflict-related sexual violence based on the notion of an ethics of engagement.