'Feminist state crime theory': elaborating a new approach to the study of atrocities by learning from the case of widespread and systematic sexual violence in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s

Abstract

This dissertation advances a new theoretical approach to the study of the widespread and systematic deployment of sexual violence as a means of genocide by learning from the events characterising the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The dissertation elaborates a Feminist State Crime Theory. It moves forward the feminist debate on the purpose of the rapes deployed in the former Yugoslavia – a debate which saw the interpretation of the women’s bodies as “the real battlefield” (Corradi, 2009: 34) as well as the overly simplistic explanation of the rapes and the enforced pregnancies as a solely Serb-adopted genocidal strategy based on patriarchal beliefs on the role of women as “mere sexual containers” (Allen, 1996: 100). The research adopts a feminist approach that acknowledges both the experiences of men and women and that aims to understand what factors, if any, make sexual violence genocidal and at what level (i.e., physical, social, cultural, etc.). Also, the research integrates the feminist approach with the state crime one so that the interconnections of gender, ethnicity, and class can be inserted within the study of atrocity crimes. In particular, this theoretical framework proposes the integration of victimology within the state crime field (Rothe and Kauzlarich, 2014). The dissertation is based on the adoption of a qualitative research methodology consisting of the application of Fairclough’s (2001) model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

This research method enables to explore the dynamics of gendered power relations within discourses and how a particular ideology can be advanced through specific linguistic choices (Bryman, 2016: 540)- such as the dehumanisation of the members of the targeted group by naming them with degrading ethnic-related epitomes (see Cohen, 1993). The deployment of this peculiar research strategy allows the critical analysis of documents, in this specific case the victims’ testimonies held within the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) web-archive, and the victims’ testimonies already present in existing criminological literature- i.e., Askin’s (1997) “War crimes against women: prosecution in international war crime tribunals”, and Stiglmayer’s (1994) “Mass Rape. The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina”. This is the first study to apply Fairclough’s (2001) model of CDA to these two sets of victims’ testimonies. Since this is the first study on the topic that adopts this particular research strategy and its aim is to provide a new theoretical framework to the study of atrocity crimes, it emerges that the current research offers a meaningful contribution to the field of criminology. Indeed, the dissertation demonstrates how a Feminist State Crime Theory provides an original and more comprehensive way of exploring the use of mass sexual violence as a means of genocide. It shows that integrating the state crime approach to the study of atrocity crimes with the feminist interpretation of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) develops the criminological understanding of the gendered nature of particular atrocities and the different ways in which it affects not only women but also men.