While gender-based violence has recently emerged as a salient topic in the human security community, it has been framed principally with respect to violence against women and girls, particularly sexual violence. In this article, I argue that gender-based violence against men (including sexual violence, forced conscription, and sex-selective massacre) must be recognized as such, condemned, and addressed by civilian protection agencies and proponents of a ‘human security’ agenda in international relations. Men deserve protection against these abuses in their own right; moreover, addressing gender-based violence against women and girls in conflict situations is inseparable from addressing the forms of violence to which civilian men are specifically vulnerable.

A proliferating literature in IR theory documents the impact of transnational advocacy networks on global public policy making. We know little, however, about the process by which advocacy networks select issues around which to mobilize in the first place. This paper aims to develop a framework for analyzing variation in issue emergence by comparing two prominent issues in the transnational network around children and armed conflict (child soldiers and girls in war) to an issue absent from this advocacy sphere (the protection needs of children born as a result of wartime rape). This variation is not easily explained by extant hypotheses about issue emergence, which suggests the need for rigorous research on both positive and negative outcomes in global agenda setting. I conclude with several suggestions toward that end.In conflict zones where sexual violence is a feature of war, babies are often born as a result of rape and sexual slavery (Grieg 2001). Anecdotal evidence and press reports have demonstrated for almost fifteen years that such children ''born of war'' are at risk of infanticide, abandonment, abuse, neglect, discrimination, and social exclusion in conflict and postconflict settings specifically as a result of their biological origins

This article offers an explanation for the use of gender essentialisms in transnational efforts to advocate for the protection of war‐affected civilians. I question why human rights advocates would rely upon such essentialisms, since they arguably undermine the moral logic of the civilian immunity norm on which their normative claims are based. This can be understood, I argue, as part of a strategic framing process in which pre‐existing cultural ideas, filtered through an environment characterized by various political constraints, impact the rhetorical strategies available to advocates. In‐depth interviews with civilian protection advocates reveal that many believe that warring parties, the global media, transnational constituencies and partners in the international women's network will all be more receptive to their message if it is couched in terms of protecting “women and children” specifically. Network actors believe that while this may undermine the protection of adult male civilians and while it may reproduce harmful gender stereotypes, these problems are outweighed by the gains in access to needy populations and the benefits of getting “civilians” on the international agenda. I conclude by considering the extent to which this cost/benefit analysis is being contested and reconsidered by some actors within the civilian protection network.

While a number of significant campaigns since the early 1990s have resulted in bans of particular weapons, at least as many equivalent systems have gone unscrutinized and uncondemned by transnational campaigners+ How can this variation be explained? Focusing on the issue area of arms control advocacy, this article argues that an important influence on the advocacy agenda within transnational networks is the decision-making process not of norm entrepreneurs nor of states but of highly connected organizations within a given network+ The argument is illustrated through a comparison between existing norms against landmines and blinding laser weapons, and the absence of serious current consideration of such norms against depleted uranium and autonomous weapons+ Thus, the process of organizational issue selection within nongovernmental organizations~NGOs! and international organizations~IOs! most central to particular advocacy networks, rather than the existence of transnational networks around an issue per se, should be a closer focus of attention for scholars interested in norm creation in world politics+ A number of transnational advocacy campaigns have emerged in recent years bent on regulating or banning certain weapons: landmines, cluster munitions, and small arms to name a few+ These campaigns have had notable effects on international norm-making by governments+ 1 But at least as many equivalent systems have gone uncondemned by such transnational networks+ For example, thermobaric weapons fuel-air explosives!, which create fireballs over large areas and kill through suffocation and burning, have been likened to nuclear weapons in their immediate I gratefully acknowledge Kenneth Anderson, Michael Barnett, Clifford Bob, Lynn Eden, James Fearon, Brooke Greene, Don Hubert, Robert Keohane, Alex Montgomery, Kenneth Rutherford, Richard Price, and Jack Snyder for helpful suggestions as this project developed; Jim Ron, Stuart Shulman, and Richard Rogers for synergistic conversations about the study of human security networks; the director and staff of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program lab at UMass-Amherst; the engagement by graduate students associated with my Human and Social Dynamics grant and course on Global Agenda-Setting at University of Massachusetts-Amherst; and the assistance of all the human security practitioners and norm entrepreneurs who lent their time to speaking with me as part of this project+ 1+ For example, the landmines and cluster munitions campaigns have resulted in binding treaty bans; while the small arms campaign has not yet succeeded in norm development, a process is underway within global policy networks+ and indiscriminate effects, yet have not been condemned by humanitarian law organizations+ 2 Psychotropic weapons such as cognitive enhancers or mood-altering aerosols might fall under the chemical weapons regime and have been criticized by a small but vocal network of U+S+ and Russia-based activists, but these weapons have largely been overlooked by mainstream arms-control networ...

Of all noncombatants in the former Yugoslavia, adult civilian men were most likely to be massacred by enemy forces. Why, therefore, did international agencies mandated with the "protection of civilians" evacuate women and children, but not military-age men, from besieged areas? This article reviews the operational dilemmas faced by protection workers in the former Yugoslavia when negotiating access to civilian populations. I argue that a social constructivist approach incorporating gender analysis is required to explain both the civilian protection community's discourse and its operational behavior. First, gender beliefs constitute the discursive strategies on which civilian protection advocacy is based. Second, gender norms operate in practice to constrain the options available to protection workers in assisting civilians. These two causal pathways converged in the former Yugoslavia to produce effects disastrous to civilians, particularly adult men and male adolescents. Larry. No men under sixty, ok?UNPROFOR General Morrillon to UNHCR official Hollingworth, Srebrenica, 1993.Of all war-affected noncombatants worldwide, those most at risk of summary execution are adult civilian males. 1 The propensity of belligerents to single out adult men for massacre has now been documented in dozens of ongoing conflicts. 2 More often than women, children, or the elderly, military-age men are assumed to be