Her trademark smirk made evident her self-righteousness before she even started to speak. Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and twice-failed presidential candidate, was onstage last February at the Institute of Global Politics at Columbia University for a panel discussion on the topic of conflict-based sexual violence, its root causes and its redresses. “We have seen an epidemic, an alarming epidemic of gender-based violence as a weapon of war,” Clinton, who began teaching at the university in 2023, said. “This should be viewed as the global problem that it is, but sadly it is nothing new.”
She then called attention to the sexual violence that is occurring or that did occur in Ukraine and, according to reports that have since been widely discredited, in Israel by Hamas on October 7. She detailed her experiences speaking to rape survivors in the Congo in the 2000s: the women recounted to her how they would return to nearby forests, the site of their rapes, to search for other survivors discarded by the militias responsible. In her retelling, these women shared their unwavering belief that “no how matter long the night, the day is sure to come.” Noting that these courageous women were “doing everything they could to hasten the sunrise,” Clinton reminded us that the United States committed $17 million dollars in 2009 for the general purpose of combating sexual violence, but added that making “the protection of women a priority” still has a long way to go.
Clinton’s harrowing and inspiring anecdote served a double purpose. At the same time that it testified to the women’s unflinching bravery, it less than subtly implied the inadequacy of their action on its own, its want for something even greater: the “humanitarian” intervention of outside state actors, enlightened bastions of feminist virtue like the United States. We hear often about how rape can be used as a weapon of war but less so about how it is taken up and transformed into the grist of empire. In the mouths of elected officials and in the mainstream press, evidence of sexual violence often becomes part of the justification for interfering in states that are variously positioned as incapable of protecting women on their own, or else barbaric, weak, or dysfunctional.
We hear often about how rape can be used as a weapon of war but less so about how it is taken up and transformed into the grist of empire.
Nowhere in recent memory has this gruesome instrumentalization been more vivid than in the aftermath of October 7. Shortly after the attack, rumors began to circulate that Hamas soldiers had sexually assaulted Israeli women on a wide scale during Operation al-Aqsa Flood; that December, the New York Times bolstered these claims with the publication of “Screams Without Words,” an article that contained multiple accounts of assault. The report galvanized the Israeli war effort, mitigating public opposition to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign. To watch rape’s callous weaponization play out in real time, as the sexual violence allegedly perpetrated by Hamas abetted the manufacture of consent for the merciless slaughter of “savage” Palestinians, was to understand in the cruelest and starkest of terms just how eagerly imperial forces will alight upon even the allegation of rape to rationalize their projects.
It mattered little that the no forensic evidence was ever found and that the Times’ investigation was fatally compromised (late last February, The Intercept meticulously broke down the many ways in which the paper failed to provide adequate evidence for its claims). Once Israel’s cynical mobilization of rape to advance its decimation of Palestinians began, it seemed impossible to halt. These allegations reaffirmed existing narratives of the civilized versus the uncivilized, compounded by the need to protect (Israeli) women. This is partly why reports in the New York Times last year of Israelis systematically raping male Palestinian prisoners in Sde Teiman and elsewhere received so much less attention: they did not cohere with the established worldview of who rape’s perpetrators and victims are. The uneven distribution of an ideology, in which some forms of violence become visible as rape (and therefore deserving of intervention) and some forms struggle for bare recognition as the sexual violence they are, plays out with deadly urgency for Palestinians subjected to Israeli force.
At Columbia, Clinton—one of the staunchest advocates of Israel’s right to “defend” itself—was interrupted by anti-Zionist protesters calling for Palestinian liberation. “Yelling doesn’t solve the problem,” she replied dismissively before carrying on with her remarks. What does “solve the problem” of the epidemic of sexual violence, for Clinton and many others like her, is the usual “commonsense” Western prescription: militarized intervention and the application of international law. The protesters’ demands to end the brutal dispossession of Palestinians fell on deaf ears.
Yet the “commonsense” pathways to redress rape that Clinton endorses are not as self-evident or inevitable as they present themselves as. Rape’s social meaning has always been unstable, and with that instability comes a similarly shifting sense of its appropriate redress. To trace rape’s evolution from being conceived, variously, as a “crime of property, to crime against honor, to gender violence and a potential affront to sex equality or autonomy principles, to a violation of human rights and at times genocide,” as Rana Jaleel writes in her towering monograph The Work of Rape, is to complicate what we tend to assume are the right ways to respond, politically and socially, to rape. Once an essentially individual violation, sexualized violence in and around conflict zones becomes elevated into a public, collective harm, one requiring an international response. “A failed state,” Jaleleel writes, “is now often a rape state.” And in a state that is seen as routinely subjugating women, the imposition of external governance can often be perceived as a feminist victory.
An early version of the formula by which the West’s interference became coded as an unqualified feminist achievement emerged from the genocidal conflicts in the Balkans following the violent disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991. In 1992, the government of Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia; the creation of an independent Bosnian nation that would have a Bosniak majority was opposed by Bosnian Serbs, who launched a military campaign to secure coveted territory and “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim civilian population. The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in areas under their control through concerted ethnic cleansing, or the eradication of Bosniak civilians by Serb forces.
As the first major armed conflict in a post-Cold War era, violence in the Balkans, in the words of Jaleel, “set the prototype for the ‘new wars’—conflicts characterized by the ‘fragmentation and decentralization of the state.’” The sexual violence that took place during this conflict was enormous in scale and notoriously brutal. Between ten and seventy thousand women were brutalized, tortured, raped, and subjected to sexual slavery. Many were held in concentration camps; accounts of military orders to rape circulated widely. The evidence of mass rape undermined, on a global scale, an earlier concept of rape as a private violation outside of the scope of international law. The scale and nature of these crimes made them legible not only as war crimes and human rights violations but as acts of genocide, weapons of a concerted Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting Croatian and Bosnian Muslim people generally and Croatian and Bosnian Muslim women specifically.
Although both the Hague and the Geneva Convention already criminalized rape under international law, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia marked the first time perpetrators were prosecuted for rape in an international forum. When reports of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia first began to gain global attention, there were no international criminal forums where mass rape and conflict-based sexualized violence had yet been prosecuted. But within several years, rape would be enshrined by international law as a means of perpetrating genocide, eventually giving cover to the West to selectively interfere in other nations under the guise of securing progress. In 1993, the UN Security Council adopted the Statute of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991. The formation of a second ad hoc tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, would follow in 1994, after reports of mass sexual assault in that nation. These instances of adjudication marked a watershed moment: sexual violence could be prosecuted as a crime against humanity for the first time.
This new system also doubled as a check on state sovereignty, creating populations to be governed by a range of management technologies including lawfare and humanitarian intervention and other such strategies. As Jaleel asserts, these developments showcase “rape’s inception within an emerging international legal system that is calibrated to ensure a social order premised on capitalist expansion through the global extension of rights.” This conception of rape—even and especially brutal rape on an unforeseen scale—emerged at the end of the century as one route by which the West could assert the liberal capitalist order: by utilizing rape’s occurrence as a means of imposing its own external management.
In The Work of Rape, Jaleel posits that this shift was emblematic of a new, post-Cold War world: possible “zones of peace and stability” no longer threatened by Soviet forces but rather “the irrational or spillover menaces of violence-prone areas of the Global South.” (Clinton’s choice of the word epidemic, as something spreading and contagious, recalls that latter formulation.) Put differently, in the absence of communism’s threat to world order, and amid liberalism’s newfound celebration of multiculturalism, nations on the fringes of the West and their ostensibly more regressive, innately violent natures emerged as a new world threat. The former Yugoslavia’s dissolution and concurrent upheavals in Africa—including the conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu people in Rwanda in the 1990s—signaled a new “world imaginary,” of a globe divided and at risk.
The creation of at-risk populations subject to new forms of governance, surveillance, and intervention—all in the name of public health and reproductive freedom—played out in places like Afghanistan and Iraq in the early twenty-first century. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was, in part, justified by the need to “save” women from repression and sexual violence. Take Laura Bush’s infamous defense of bombing Afghanistan after 9/11: “The fight against terrorism is a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” A week after bombs began dropping, Democratic representative Carolyn Maloney donned a burqa on the House floor to declare the offensive a “just war, which we have no choice but to wage” while invoking the Taliban’s many restrictions on women’s lives and their consequences. Soon after, the New York Times editorial board praised the liberation of Afghan women as a “collateral benefit” of the war.
Yet non-military interventions reveal how vulnerable the appearance of sexual violence is to other forms of abuse too. Lila Abu-Lughod has documented, for instance, how Women Without Borders set up “MotherSchools” in 2013, a project that aims to combat gender-based violence by “sensitizing mothers to recognize the signs of radicalization” of their sons and “empowering them ‘for security as an ‘ally’ in the home.” (The program was piloted in Tajikistan, Kashmir, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Zanzibar.) Here, “radicalization” serves as a euphemism for what we can safely assume to mean “violent Muslim extremists.” Implying that Muslim women are inadequate mothers without the West’s help and subtly asserting a link between sexual violence and Islam, this organization and others like it give a humanitarian face to larger projects of management and surveillance.
These modes of governance or surveillance prioritize identity over economic conditions and other ways in which a person can be vulnerable to harm, reflecting the West’s shallow vision of empowerment. Refugee regimes—the bodies of law and governance that surround international migration on the basis of finding safety from persecution—fail to attend to the underlying precarity that enables sexual violence. And as Sima Shakhsari has shown in The Cunning of Gender Violence, the violence of economic sanctions by these regimes becomes minimized.
For instance, at the same time that the United States has imposed devastating economic sanctions on Iran, individuals have been able to apply for asylum in the United States on the basis of persecuted identity—though that seems all but certain to change. As Shakhsari writes, “The assumptions of a refugee’s ‘immutability’ in the essentialist juridical discourses of asylum produce the refugee as one with a fixed, timeless, and universally homogenous identity”: oppression becomes fixed to identity, rather than to the material challenges of economic scarcity. She makes vivid how refugee regimes reduce the entire material conditions of Iranian refugees solely to one aspect of their existence: gender. This reductive response is emblematic of the liberal capitalist response to gender-based violence writ large—fixed and narrow versions of justice are the only forms on offer.
It is imperative to reject the sense that consensus responses to rape are inevitable, let alone unmitigated feminist victories.
These developments are neither wholly repressive, nor are they meaningful sites of emancipation. Rather, they are the natural product of imperialism latching onto a devastating type of harm and coyly naming this relationship “justice.” Yet we can find ourselves, at times, profoundly attached to modest advancements in the campaign against sexual violence, if only because the horizon of possibility has shrunk so dramatically. Even as the West so often relies upon rape to justify its expansion, that same weaponization periodically provides victims with the outcomes they seek, especially via the prosecution of perpetrators. Rather than feeling compelled to deny either of these realities, it’s essential to wrestle with the fact that what is desirable for some victims also serves as a handmaiden to larger oppressive projects.
Rape’s cruel weaponization plays out with exceptional brutality within the United States itself, where the image of the Black male rapist still looms large, as does the continuing sense of ownership by white men of Black women’s bodies. The afterlives of slavery continue to structure who is legible as a victim and who is legible as a perpetrator—in other words, our very sense of what does and does not constitute violence. As Black men continue to be disproportionately imprisoned every year, furthering the United States’ ongoing carceral project, violence against Black women often fails to make itself visible. How racial hierarchy dictates the very terms of rape’s social imaginaries—who we think does it and to whom we think it is done—plays out cruelly and consequentially in the entwined U.S. histories of enslavement and sexual violence. It makes visible how race central is to the history of rape and reveals the state as an unreliable guarantor of justice.
Even if we were to abandon a vocabulary that trades in liberal feminism’s attenuated notions of justice, to say nothing of leadership, the attachment to rape that I have tried to characterize so far would remain part of the Western project because that relationship does not require any meaningful feminist principles to perpetuate itself. The gleeful misogyny of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance does nothing to undermine this truth, such that the real utility of rape to U.S. dominance will likely become, in their administration, abundantly clear. Surely, in their foreign policy, Trump and Vance will lean heavily upon the rhetoric of intervention, but they will dispose with any gestures to enlightened, progressive values as the justification. Perhaps their administration will render the sheen of feminist principle often applied to Western interventions finally visible as just that: a facade.
Rape’s meaning arises from material histories that have gradually structured a popular sense of what violence is, who injures and who can be injured, and how we should respond to such injury. Rape as a concept does not exist outside these histories but is formed in and through them. Because these realities inform what redress to rape is imaginable, what kind of harm rape enacts, and who is and is not capable of being violated, they converge to constitute rape’s social meaning.
Israel demonstrated the consequences of rape’s contingent social legibility through its treatment of Palestinian prisoners. In June of last year, the Times’ investigation into conditions at the Sde Teiman prison relayed testimony from former detainees that Israeli officers had committed torture through anal rape with a metal rod, among other horrific assaults. But the report buried these abuses in the final portion of the nearly four-thousand-word story. Not until leaked surveillance video from Sde Teiman was broadcast in August of last year, showing Israeli soldiers allegedly gang-raping a Palestinian man imprisoned there, did these reports gain wider attention, despite the fact that they build on years of other evidence documenting the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
And yet, while Israel’s abuse was well-documented and widespread, it has struggled to attain wide recognition as the brutal sexual violence that it is, exemplifying how the social circuits through which rapes travels dictate its reception, especially in the West. These abuses, unambiguously caught on camera, were followed by mass public demonstrations in defense of Israel’s right to rape Palestinian detainees. On one hand, we have far lesser-documented claims of sexual violence that have done nothing less than justify a genocide. On the other hand, the mass rape of Palestinian prisoners is obscured. The United States and Israel position these same people as patriarchal would-be rapists to justify the expansion of the settler project. Perversely, Israelis are the ones actually raping Palestinians—and using fictive rapes to justify their genocidal project.
It is imperative to reject the sense that consensus responses to rape, internationally or domestically, are inevitable, let alone unmitigated feminist victories. It can be difficult to take issue with the types of redress currently available to us in response to injury, especially when that redress is so hard won—the product of years of feminist struggle whose original, more radical aims were diluted and often redirected in support of imperialism. But feminism fails when it neglects, or refuses, to attend to victims who would otherwise remain sexual violence’s invisible casualties, lest its project become only one of foreclosure.