Description
Analyses of the international community’s attempts to address conflict-related sexual violence primarily focus on the discourse in and effectiveness of prominent institutional developments like Security Council resolutions. I argue that in order to understand the international community’s response to conflict-related sexual violence and more broadly, how moral condemnation is translated into tangible action, one needs to analyse the in-between institutional activities of establishing soft law, guidelines, projects, policies, and procedures. Doing so allows us to uncover how and why an international norm prohibiting conflict-related sexual violence has undergone a continuous and evolving process of institutionalisation since its emergence in a 1993 critical juncture. By process tracing expert interviews and state, UN, and regional organisation records, and drawing on feminist constructivism and historical institutionalism, I reconstruct the mechanisms that have (re)produced the institutionalisation of the anti-sexual violence norm. I suggest that this institutionalisation has been characterised by both innovation and appropriation of institutional responses to other types of conflict-related or gender-based violence, and the exceptionalisation of conflict-related sexual violence. I demonstrate that institutionalisation is (re)produced in recurrent opportunities for the norm’s legitimation and by applicatory contestation from a variety of individual and organisational actors, which spur feedback loops. As such, I claim that despite expansions in the actors and behaviours addressed by the norm, the proliferation or programmes and officials who address this issue, and persistent calls for different approaches, the institutionalisation of the norm has become increasingly path-dependent. While this cements the stickiness of the anti-sexual violence norm itself, it shrinks the realm of possibility for future institutionalisation in a time already constrained by gender backlash and dwindling funding.
