Description
Primarily adopting feminist institutional approaches, gender scholars are investigating how and why female and male experience sexual violence, sexual harassment and abuse in militaries. Drawing on extensive field research, including in-depth interviews and non-participant observations with over 150 serving military personnel and adopting a feminist postcolonial theoretical approach, this paper considers whether deployments change normative gendered dynamics within military institutional spaces and examines the strategies that both military institutions and individual soldiers adopt to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse during deployments overseas. It does so by undertaking a comparative analysis of the experiences of male and female military personnel from Ghana Armed Forces and the British Army deploying to UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) between 2017 and 2020. In doing so, the paper reflects on the intended and unintended gendered consequences institutional and personal strategies have for facilitating transformative organisational change within militaries.
