This article explores the ways soldiers in the Congo speak about the massive amount of rape committed by the armed forces in the recent war in the DRC. It focuses on the reasons that the soldiers give to why rape occurs. It discusses how the soldiers distinguish between “lust rapes” and “evil rapes” and argues that their explanations of rape must be understood in relation to notions of different (impossible) masculinities. Ultimately, through reading the soldiers’ words, we can glimpse the logics—arguably informed by the increasingly globalized context of soldiering—through which rape becomes possible, and even “normalized” in particular warscapes.
It is now beyond doubt that attention to the ‘security—development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policymaking. However, how ‘the nexus’ is differently imbued with meaning and ultimately employed remains underexplored. In this article, we suggest a possible framework for mapping the multiple understandings that underlie specific articulations of ‘the nexus’ in order to reveal the ways in which meaning may shift in different (yet seemingly similar) discourses. To this end, we draw upon familiar stories about ‘development’ and ‘security’, and we offer a brief reading of ways in which ‘the nexus’ is articulated in policy texts. Ultimately, this framework may hint at what such articulations may imply for the policy agenda.
In this article we critically consider the idea that feminism has performatively failed within the discipline of International Relations. One aspect of this failure relates to the production of sexgender through feminism which we suggest is partly responsible for a weariness inflecting feminist scholarship, in particular as a critical theoretical resource. We reflect on this weariness in the context of the study and practice of international politics – arenas still reaping the potent benefits of the virile political energies reverberating since 9/11. To illustrate our arguments we re-count a familiar feminist fable of militarisation – a story which we use to exemplify how the production of feminist IR is ‘set’ up to ‘fail’. In so doing we clarify our depiction of feminism as seemingly haunted by its inherent paradoxes as well as explaining why it matters to discuss feminism within the locale of the academic study of international politics. We conclude with a consideration of the grammar of temporality that delimits representations of feminism and move to recast feminist failure as aporetic and concomitantly implicated in the process of intervening politically.
The increasing privatization of security and the changing patterns of security governance call into question the foundational lines of demarcation between the “public” and “private.” This article investigates how key actors in the security assemblage at Stockholm‐Arlanda Airport make sense of their roles in relation to public–private distinctions. While central to the ways in which security actors understand themselves and each other, closer inspection reveals that the drawing of these lines is also highly ambivalent and contested—in relation to questions of control and regulation, authority, as well as security rationalities. Further, “private–private” and “public–public” contestations also are informed by the obdurate public–private distinction.
During the last years the DRC has made itself known in the world for terrible acts of violence committed by armed men – militia and the regular army – against the civilian population. The voices of the soldiers and combatants have so far been absent in the accounts of this violence. This silence is problematic, both because it makes it harder to understand such violence, but also because it reinforces stereotypes of African warriors as primitive and anarchic, driven by innate violence and tribal hatred. Enquiry into the particular discursive as well as material circumstances of the armed conflict in the DRC, which might better redress the complex and interrelated context in which ‘people in uniforms’ commit violence, is consequently impeded. The story we recount here emerges from soldiers within the main perpetrator of violence in the DRC today: the Integrated Armed Forces. The soldiers' interview texts challenge the dominant representation of soldiers and combatants in the DRC. The soldiers made sense of the prevalence of violence (in which they too had participated) in several interrelated ways, none of which reflected any expression of ‘natural’ (if dormant) violent tendencies, hatred or vengefulness for the enemy.
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