The More the Context Changes, The More Things Stay the Same

Abstract

The mainstream anti-violence movement in the United States regularly addresses gender-based violence in a variety of contexts: intimate partner violence, acquaintance rape, stranger rape, campus sexual assault, domestic and international sex trafficking, even sexual assault in the armed forces. Rarely, however, are conversations about gender-based violence situated in the context of armed conflict. The United States has been perpetually at war since 2001, but, because that conflict has not occurred on US soil, the gender-based violence related to that conflict has largely been shielded from public scrutiny. The US anti-violence movement has not been terribly involved in interrogating violence connected with conflict around the world, even when the United States is a central actor in that conflict; however, The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict, edited by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Naomi Cahn, Dina Francesca Haynes, and Nahla Valji and published by Oxford University Press in 2018, reveals that many of the conversations that US anti-violence advocates are having about gender-based violence are also taking place in the context of conflict. As a result, The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Conflict provides important insights on many of the issues confronting anti-violence advocates in the domestic context.