Book Project

My ongoing book project examines the driving mechanisms and impact of an emergent global norm to include male survivors in approaches to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). In addition to providing the first comprehensive analysis of this once neglected issue’s newfound visibility, it intervenes in disciplinary debates and assumptions surrounding silence and (un)silencing, offering an original theoretical framework for particularly vast and unwieldy silences which span contexts, cultures, and locales.

Mobilizing process tracing, discourse analysis, and content analysis, I draw from in-depth interviews with CRSV practitioners from around the world across fields such as humanitarianism and international criminal law, participant observation at important conferences in Washington, D.C. and Cape Town, South Africa, deductively generated datasets of Security Council debate records and advocacy publications, and an inductively collected archive of relevant intergovernmental proceedings, international standards and guidelines, and media coverage. Together, this data captures significant and ongoing change and contestation within the heterogeneous CRSV issue network over the past several decades.

The central argument maintains that actors with diverse and even contradictory motivations and commitments repurposed the fungible “weapon of war” framework for understanding wartime sexual violence in ways which consequently made male survivors intelligible. However, the patchwork nature of this recognition has meant that engagement rarely goes beyond lip service, and the prevailing lexicon of “silence” for making sense of the issue can make action even more challenging. The findings are of interest not only to scholars of gender and armed conflict but all those who consciously or unconsciously deploy the concept of silence in their research.