This book expands the current 'weapon of war' discourse on sexual violence, highlighting a wider spectrum of conflict-related violence against women.

By comparatively assessing three conflict-affected jurisdictions (Liberia, Northern Ireland and Timor-Leste), Conflict-Related Violence against Women empirically and theoretically expands current understanding of the form and nature of conflict-time harms impacting women. The 'violences' that occur in conflict beyond strategic rape are first identified. Employing both a disaggregated and an aggregated approach, relations between forms of violence within and across each context's pre-, mid- and post-conflict phase are then assessed, identifying connections and distinctions in violence. Swaine highlights a wider spectrum of conflict-related violence against women than is currently acknowledged. She identifies a range of forces that simultaneously push open and close down spaces for addressing violence against women through post-conflict transitional justice. The book proposes that in the aftermath of conflict, a transformation rather than a transition is required if justice is to play a role in preventing gendered violence before conflict and its appearance during and after conflict.

Highlighting gendered violence across layers of social and political organization, from the military to the sexual, this book explores the connections between international security, intra-state conflict and 'domestic' violence. International in scope, it makes the links between the local and the global and between the public and the private, in its discussion of gendered violence. Claiming that it is not enough to simply 'add' women to international relations theory, the contributors to this book brilliantly demonstrate how much more fruitful an in-depth analysis of the different layers of gendered violence can be. This book will be necessary reading for students and academics of women's studies, international relations and political theory.

An examination of the violence perpetrated against women in politically conflicted or militarized areas.

8. Challenging the state.

Sexual violence in conflict is not simply a gross violation of human rights—it is also a security challenge.

The Political Economy of Conflict and Violence against Women shows how political, economic, social and ideological processes intersect to shape conflict related gender-based violence against women. Through feminist interrogations of the politics of economies, struggles for political power and the gender order, this collection reveals how sexual orders and regimes are linked to spaces of production. Crucially it argues that these spaces are themselves firmly anchored in overlapping patriarchies which are sustained and reproduced during and after war through violence that is physical as well as structural. Through an analysis of legal regimes and structures of social arrangements, this book frames militarization as a political economic dynamic, developing a radical critique of liberal peace building and peace making that does not challenge patriarchy, or modes of production and accumulation.