Violence in war is inevitable. Documented cases of war show how violence comes at the destruction of landscapes, cultures, homes, and families. As such, violence is often seen as a symptom of war and not the crux of it. However, as we know, war itself does not occur by mere happenstance; an execution of decisions precedes the fallout. These decisions, typically from sanctioned forms of government or leadership, are what declares war. But what of the fallout? After war comes the work to distribute aid, often in the form of resources. Karen Engle’s The Grip of Sexual Violence in Conflict  offers a feminist intervention into the “legal and political discourse about gender and conflict.” As such, Engle notes that current international institutions were formed by ideologies that relied heavily on the notion that to ‘solve’ sexual violence in conflict required military aid. As such, the stakes within Engle’s work are threaded through each chapter, each one highlighting specific facets such as structural-bias feminism—the ‘common sense’ logics that are used to background institutional decisions—and a rise in what Elizabeth Bernstein forwards as carceral feminism, or as Engle states, “the turn to criminal law in human rights.” Contextually, structural bias feminism refers to how “male sexual domination and female sexual subordination constitute the greatest structural impediment to women’s emancipation,” while Engle asserts that the success of this perspective contributed towards a detriment in both international law and politics and feminism. This ‘common sense’ includes the following propositions: rape and sexual violence are the worse crimes committed during conflict; much of their harm is due to the shame they inflict on individuals and communities; they are perpetrated by individual male monsters; they are committed against innocent women, girls, men, and boys, though they are primarily aimed at women and girls; and investigation, prosecution, and punishment of individual perpetrators offer the best recourse, not only for ending sexual violence in conflict but also for promoting peace.

To note, the concretizing of the common sense of sexual violence includes larger global institutions such as the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the 2014 Global Summit, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)—to which Engle highlights in Chapters Three to Five. These entities sanctioned the use of troops to deploy carceral punishment and to further enact international criminal law amongst other frameworks. For the remainder of her work, Engle constantly refers to the common sense narrative being perpetuated by institutional frameworks. 

What do we lose focus of if we treat sexual violence as the only infraction to warrant criminal procedures during wartime? Do the ends justify the means? Engel states ‘no’ as in doing so we lose sight of the higher order concerns that result in sexual violence—that is to say war, itself. Sexual violence, then, becomes a synecdoche for the war, representing more than itself yet at the same time coming to show that resolving it on its own would not solve larger concerns. 

Within her Introduction, Engle outlines the intellectual frameworks necessary to buttress the structural-bias feminism as we now know it when in reference to sexual violence in conflict. Punishment, in a very Foucauldian sense, can be used here in order to showcase that rape does not have to be a side-effect of war. However, by focusing on the “presumption of deterrence,” two reasons showcase that it is not self-sustaining. The first being that sexual violence in conflict cannot be achieved, and the second being that the use of carceral logics and punishment take away energy and resources that could be used toward social, political, and economic strategies—the likes of which might approach the structural causes of violence. Examples of structural-bias feminism employing common sense are used in Chapters Three,“Calling in the Judges: The Former Yugoslavia,” and Chapter Four, “Calling in the Judges: Rwanda”—namely, the war sites and the aftermath handled by the UN. In so doing, the use of the common sense logic relies heavily upon a cultural essentialism that only reinforces that sexual violence is the sole problem and not the symptom of something larger: war.

Chapter One, “Sexual Violence in Conflict and Women’s Human Rights,” outlines the beginning of the structural-bias feminism, which becomes engrained in later identification of sexual violence in conflict. Therein, Engle notes that certain strands of feminist approaches were put to the side—Third World and sex-positive. Engle’s telling provides, as mentioned in the subheading, “A Genealogy,” how wartime rape in former Yugoslavia turned into an eventual prioritizing of sexual violence in conflict from these same institutions stated. Specifically, she explains how the human woman’s rights movement, whose aim was to end violence against woman (VAW), eventually turned into a focus on sexual violence. 

Chapters Two, “Calling in the Troops,” and Three serve as case studies to provide contextual evidence of the ‘common sense’ forwarded by Engle. In Chapter Two, Engle provides ample context to understanding how military aid became an essential part in identifying and punishing sexual violence. Humanitarian interventions forwarded the need for military assistance, which then translated to international criminal law. Chapter Three and Four provide further context as to the war sites that lent to the current dilemma—that of resources being put towards alleviating conflict-related sexual violence. Notably, within Chapter Three, Engel argues that by the UN Security Council creating the ICTY, they “solidif[ied] the common sense,” in that the ICTY argue that rape victims suffer a fate “worse than death.” But, by its own logic, it distills the idea that women essentially benefit from being victimized as they were not killed like their male counterparts. Chapter Five, “Calling in the Security Council for Women, Peace, and Security,” brings this logic all to a head in the passing of the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. This act provided “measures to protect women and girls in conflict, including protecting them from sexual violence,” and became the first of many that paved the way for the UN Security Council’s Women, Peace and Security agenda (WPS agenda). The WPS agenda, Engle states, reified and contributed to every component of the common sense included in her work. 

Finally, in her epilogue, Engle states that she hopes to produce what she terms ‘productive tensions’ within feminist discourse regarding a number of issues—sex and gender, race and ethnicity, economic distributions, peace and culture. Through individual incrimination, the harms of war and sexual violence would abate or resolve completely. However, as showcased by Engle, that is very much not the case. Here, Engle offers that “through power they often deny, many feminists—including women’s rights advocates and women’s peace advocates—have facilitated, if not deployed, stereotyped images of victims and their communities to support militarized or criminalized responses to sexual violence in conflict.”

Engle provides counter-narratives that can hopefully distill the ideas of the common sense—namely in that the shaming that occurs due to rape no longer need to be inflicted as such.