Description
While much is now known about the multiple forms of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) to which people are subjected in (post-)conflict spaces, there remains a relative lack of understanding about how the interconnections between such forms of violence are understood by those who experience them, as well as about how these perceived interconnections are enmeshed in gendered social power relations. In this paper, we draw on group and individual interviews carried out with male and female refugees living in Kampala, Uganda, to scrutinise the complex, and deeply gendered, interweavings between SGBV and the destruction/(re)construction of the gendered social fabric in (post-)conflict spaces. Participants in this study repeatedly draw causal connections between sexual violence perpetrated by armed men against ‘enemy’ women and men and subsequent domestic violence. Our discussion of the logics that underpin these perceived causal connections enables a close analysis of the shifting and contingent ways in which various forms of SGBV are understood to be imbricated in one another and implicated in shifting gender norms. This enables us to unpack further than has previously been done the complexities through which SGBV can be understood to destroy, maintain, and reproduce gendered power relations in (post)war contexts.
