Description
Feminist IR scholars have criticised the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda for exclusively focusing on sexual violence in wartime, ignoring the continuum of violence across times of war and peace. This paper not only highlights the problems of viewing sexual violence solely through a conflict prism, but also demonstrates the need to understand sexual violence within the specific gendered, racialized, classed, sexualised, and (post-)colonial context in which it occurs, which, in turn, is historically constituted. Towards this end, the paper focuses on the Cyprus rape case. On 17 July 2019, a 19-year-old British woman on a working holiday in the Cypriot tourist resort of Ayia Napa reported being gang raped by twelve Israeli male tourists. Initially, the Israeli men were arrested by the Cyprus Police but, subsequently, were released without charge and, instead, the woman was accused of making a false allegation. In January 2020, she was convicted of “public mischief” in a Cypriot court and received a suspended sentence. The case-initiated solidarity protests in Nicosia and Tel Aviv by feminist and women’s groups, a campaign on Twitter with the hashtag #boycottcyprus, in addition to raising questions about the relationship of the case to the recently signed Cyprus-Israel gas pipeline deal. Recognising the complex liminalities surrounding the island’s ambiguous postcolonial and post-conflict nature, and its implications for gendered and race-ed notions of sovereignty, we challenge the fictive and reductive binaries established in WPS between the ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ (as spatial domains) and ‘conflict’ and ‘peace’ (as temporal domains). We therefore argue that sexual violence and responses to it should also be viewed as a matter of geopolitics, in that they are constituted through and constitutive of the workings of power across different scales of space, from the personal to the international.
