Hansen, L. (2000) ‘Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 3:1, 55-57.

Hansen, L. (2000) ‘Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 3:1, 55-57.

• Article examines whether wartime sexual violence should be considered an individual problem exacerbated by war or a collective security problem.
• Besides Hansen, three common perceptions of Bosnian rapes developed:
• Rape as a common problem during wartime and therefore did not require international intervention in Bosnia as opposed to elsewhere. [Realist]
• Rape as an act of the Serbian government against the Bosnian people, requiring intervention. [National]
• Rape as an act of various patriarchal governments and institutions against the women of the Balkans, requiring intervention of behalf of women. [Gendered]
• There is a debate within security studies about whether to expand the role of the field to include security within states or among persons.  (Krause and Williams 1996: 229–30; Buzan et al. 1998)
• Some have also suggested work about the security of citizens threatened by their own state. (Booth 1991).
• Generally peacetime rape may be considered partially the 'fault' of the victim, whereas this is rarely the case in the conceptualization of wartime rape.
• The issues become more complex b/c the issue of paramilitaries come into play. Basically, 'are rapes committed by off-duty military personnel still war crimes or are they individual crimes?'.
• The national interpretation of the wartime sexual violence tends to indicate that the crimes of Bosniak or Croat forces are different from the Serbs not only in number, but also the fundamental character of the violence.
• The gendered interpretation does not line up w/ testimony of Bosnian women, who talk about the assaults and violence in terms of nationalized terms, rather than gendered.