Creative appropriation: academic knowledge and interventions against sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT

Recent academic research has questioned assumptions about sexual violence in (post-) conflict contexts. Gender norms rather than military decision-making have been found to constitute a major underlying reason for wartime sexual violence. In this contribution, we investigate whether international organisations seeking to prevent sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo have accordingly changed their analytical perspectives and modified policies and programming. We find that many, but not all, such organisations creatively appropriate new academic work in their policy and project documents. However, incentives for continuity in the humanitarian field have slackened the pace of any substantive practical changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarian intervention
• conflict-related sexual violence
• causes of sexual violence
• knowledge production
• policy
• gender

Introduction

In recent years, academic researchers have foregrounded the idea that causes of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict areas are more complex than previously assumed. Scholars still disagree on many assumptions and debate the validity of preliminary results, but the support for this analytical change of perspective is increasing (e.g. Wood 2008; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Boesten 2017). However, the problem of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict areas is not just an academic puzzle; it is also a social problem that intervention organisations are addressing. How do they design their projects and programmes when experts do not agree on the basic assumptions regarding a problem’s causes?

Academic disagreement on this matter has not always been as large as it is now. For an extended period, many researchers supposed that most conflict-related sexual violence occurred because armed organisations instrumentalised rape as a weapon of war to achieve military and political ends (e.g. Card 1996; Seifert 1996). For years, this view was hegemonic not only in academia but also in media and politics. Intervention organisations operationalised this theoretical explanation of the problem to create practical solutions.

However, since 2006, an increasing number of scholars have questioned the general validity of the weapon-of-war argument – in particular, the rationality of armed organisations’ choices. New data also points to different explanations. Many researchers have shifted away from the perspective in which sexual violence in areas of armed conflicts is seen as a rationally and organisationally deployed instrument of warfare; they have moved to the interrogation of gendered norms and structures in both societies and military organisations, and they are seeking to understand how notions of masculinity, rather than rational calculation, legitimise and motivate rape and other forms of sexual assault. Although these newer approaches are illuminating, the debate must be seen as inconclusive. In fact, rather than progressing towards clearer answers, the debate has increased ambiguity.

In this contribution, we address the question of how academic knowledge production regarding the causes of sexual and gender-based violence in conflict areas has affected intervention practices. Are intervention organisations attentive to the academic debate? How much influence does this debate have on policy prescriptions and project designs? How do academic explanations interact with other factors in intervention organisations’ policies and programming?

We show that although some intervention organisations have not taken note of the evolution in the academic debate, many others have actively embraced both older and newer research developments and appropriated them into their own causal analyses. Academic publications, therefore, play a role in intervention activities. However, other than in the academic debate, emerging theoretical contradictions are rarely problematised in the humanitarian field. The resulting inconsistencies are even larger when intervention approaches are considered: Regardless of their theoretical stances, intervention players, especially large ones, prefer continuity over change in their intervention instruments. They invest more in victim-centred aid and institutional statebuilding than in norm transformation. It is accordingly very difficult to reconstruct logical connections among the theoretical causal analyses of sexual violence, the promises to reduce the occurrence of such violence, and the practical intervention instruments. Preventive approaches that address the normative root causes of sexual violence remain in the margins of the humanitarian field.

To explain the differences in theoretical preferences between (and within) organisations, as well as the confluence of mainstream intervention approaches, we argue that, although academic research results are sometimes translated into policy, this knowledge competes with other factors. Whether an organisation rhetorically embraces academic research results and puts them into practice, and the ways in which it does so, depend on its position in the humanitarian field. The organisation’s mandate, expertise, experience, social networks and funding sources determine its position.

This article’s empirical base comprises policy documents, project designs and interviews with the employees of many intervention organisations (at both the headquarters and implementation levels). Additionally, we interviewed staff of Congolese NGOs and Congolese civil servants in the political capital, and in towns and cities of eastern DR Congo.¹ We focus on two large organisations: the World Bank and the United Nations. Both are big players in the humanitarian field, and their policy choices affect all other organisations that are engaged in the fight against sexual violence. Their views thus mark the boundaries of mainstream approaches. The United Nations has a bigger diplomatic impact than the World Bank, particularly because the UN Security Council addresses sexual violence as an international security issue (Mertens and Pardy 2016); however, the World Bank ranks among the most generous funders. To better understand the relationship between academic knowledge and intervention programming, we also analyse projects from UN subdivisions such as the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), as well as World Bank-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Promundo and Women for Women International (WfWI). We analyse interventionist assumptions and practices with a focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), particularly its conflict-ridden eastern provinces. DR Congo is a particularly significant case, as, during much of the period under investigation (c. 2006–2017), the country was undergoing what some regarded as the most severe rape crisis in the world, was the subject of significant scientific research on sexual violence, and had a comparatively high intensity of international intervention engagement regarding this problem.

The article is divided into four major sections. In the first, we situate our contribution among discussions on the relationships between knowledge, policy and intervention practices; we also discuss our theoretical perspective, which is inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. In the following section, we analyse the ongoing academic debate on the causes of sexual violence. A seeming consensus has given way to increasingly complex arguments that consider various factors, particularly gender norms. This has led to a more complex array of plausible causal explanations, but it so far has not resulted in any clear-cut scientific consensus. In the third section, we discuss intervention organisations’ reactions to this academic controversy. We observe that all organisations at least mention the weapon-of-war argument in important documents. At the same time, many (but not all) organisations also take up new academic approaches. All of these organisations reference both rationality- and norms-oriented arguments; the organisations connect these arguments creatively but, to some extent, neglect logical consistency. In the last major section, we reconstruct the project approaches in DR Congo to show that large organisations, regardless of their theoretical choices, prefer well-rehearsed intervention approaches to new ones. Innovation is reserved for the margins of the humanitarian field. We argue that academic debates affect organisational policy and programming, along with other factors such as mandates, funding, expertise, experience and networks.

Before we go into further detail, a note on wording is necessary. In the body of this article, we discuss distinctions that intervention organisations make between conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and ‘sexual and gender-based violence’ (SGBV). Our research began with a focus on CRSV, but for our analysis we needed to employ a more generic term. We use ‘sexual violence’ in the remainder of this article (unless a more specific term is apt) as a shorthand for ‘sexual and gender-based violence in conflict areas’. This shorthand includes all potential meanings that intervention organisations have attached to related terms, but it also allows for readability. Another generic term that we use is ‘intervention organisation’, which refers to all non-Congolese organisations mentioned in the article, including intergovernmental organisations and international NGOs with either humanitarian or developmental agendas. Because sexual violence in DR Congo is primarily understood as a humanitarian problem, we also speak generically of the ‘humanitarian field’, even though many of the intervention organisations we discuss identify with peacebuilding or development.

Academic research and the humanitarian field

For political scientists who are eager to create an impact beyond academia, policy design is an evident field for potential influence. One long-standing modernist belief is that good science can improve policy. In international relations, a few scholars have interrogated the direct impact of academic research on policy by focussing on personal experiences with governments (Krasner et al. 2009; Lowenthal and Bertucci 2014). More systematically, particularly in constructivist-leaning international relations, scholars have discussed knowledge’s role in this field, and particularly its importance to international organisations. One landmark publication is Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore’s (2004) account of ‘expert authority’ as a source of power and autonomy for international organisations’ staff. The World Bank, for example, uses in-house and academic research to legitimise its existence, mandate and practices (Weaver 2008). Important lines of investigation include how such expertise is produced (Bueger 2015), the conditions of that production (Mosse 2011; Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić 2017), and the ways in which such expertise is transformed into authority (Sending 2015).

Our question, in contrast, pertains to how academic knowledge – as produced in academic institutions and published in scientific journals and books – finds its way into intervention organisations’ policy prescriptions and project designs, or fails to do so. Existing research accounts for some ways in which this may occur: Some academic ideas ‘percolate’ (Weiss 1979) into popular frameworks, thus helping both policymakers and wider audiences to understand complex realities and to thereby help ‘order the world’-even if academics often have little control over the reception of their results (Paris 2011). Regarding sexual violence in DR Congo, authors argue that the narrative of rape as a weapon of war shapes interventionists’ imaginations, resulting in oversized projects, a disregard for other social and political aspects, and an array of unintended consequences (Autesserre 2012; Douma and Hilhorst 2012; Koddenbrock 2012; D’Errico et al. 2013). Similar effects have been noted in West Africa (Cohen and Hoover Green 2012). Such unconscious diffusion of analytical frames is possible. However, the humanitarian field is peopled by well-educated professionals who constantly discuss and defend their work.

We therefore suppose the presence of a more deliberate stance regarding academic analysis. Conscious usage of academic ideas in policies has also been discussed before. For instance, the concept of epistemic communities is academically popular; it refers to a group of scientists who plant their ideas within policy (Haas 1992). As epistemic communities’ persuasive authority depends on consensus, the concept may perhaps explain interim weapon-of-war hegemony, but not subsequent controversy. Other authors have discussed the ways in which policymakers use academic facts and ideas as ‘ammunition’ in negotiations about policy (Waldman 2014). Again, regarding sexual violence in DR Congo, Eriksson Baaz and Stern (2013, 59–62) argue that the causal analysis of sexual violence as a weapon of war is attractive for intervention organisations, as it allows them to see the problem as remediable through the improvement of Congolese justice and security institutions. The analytical step from seeing sexual criminality as caused by rational choices, to judicial deterrence as the major preventive instrument, is plausible. Such a connection between causal analysis and intervention design, however, is even more strongly suggestive to those organisations that are already busy with security and justice reforms. The instrument, institutional statebuilding in DR Congo – thus may have predetermined the choice of causal analysis, rather than the other way round. Is the weapon-of-war argument attractive to every organisation in the field, including those that are not involved in institutional reform? Are recent academic research results, even those that are less policy-friendly, still accepted and included in these organisations’ new policy papers?

Interventionists do not find every academic consideration to be credible, relevant and attractive (Lidskog and Sundqvist 2015). Moreover, the supply of ideas has become larger than the demand (Bliesemann de Guevara and Kostić 2017). Which pieces of knowledge do intervention organisations regard as suitable? Economists argue that organisations go where funding is available (Cooley and Ron 2002). In a Bourdieu-inspired analysis of NGO projects, Monika Krause (2014) agrees but shows that humanitarian organisations need to consider not only the availability of material resources but also the feasibility of projects and their own prior experience. We also employ Pierre Bourdieu’s vocabulary and concepts to interpret some important dynamics through which organisations apply (or opt not to apply) academic research on sexual violence to their intervention projects and programmes. Bourdieu’s relational theory is particularly useful in the description of professional configurations that engage in global governance (Sending 2015), including humanitarian interventions that lack a clear-cut difference between normative ideas and self-serving interests. Accordingly, in this paper, we understand the configuration of intervention organisations as a field in which these organisations compete against each other. The organisations vary (in terms of size, mandate, membership, legal status, financial means, funding sources, instruments and culture) but relate to each other via competition for symbolic, material, social and cultural capital.

Academic findings in the humanitarian field are a form of cultural capital that intervention organisations borrow to enrich their products. When donors fund a project, they materially and symbolically confirm the value of the knowledge incorporated in it (Sending 2015). By implementing a project, in other words, by receiving and spending material capital, intervention organisations can stockpile new forms of capital, including social capital (by reproducing their range of partner and funding organisations), cultural capital (e.g. through evaluations) and even symbolic capital (as they are doing legitimate humanitarian work).

Of course, the producers of valuable data and analysis include more than just academic researchers, not least, the intervention organisations themselves. Indeed, the academic field and the field of humanitarian intervention are not strictly separate: Knowledge production is a central practice in both, their truth claims are based on similar methodologies, and institutions from both fields cooperate. With regards to sexual violence, intervention organisations have however featured university-based research (Elbert et al. 2013; Wood 2015) and have appropriated academic analysis to legitimise their approaches, as such research has a specific cultural value: It is supposedly the most objective, independent and methodologically sound form of knowledge.

With the term ‘appropriation’ we do not claim the existence of a causal relationship between academic production and international organisations’ policy and programme design, which would suggest that academic knowledge determines what is being done on the humanitarian field. We rather suggest that international organisations deliberately take up academic ideas in order to bolster their position on the humanitarian field. Defending or improving their position, in a Bourdieu perspective, is not only serving material interests, the survival and growth of the organisation, but is also driven by the ‘habitus’ of professionals in organisations who seek to acquire symbolic status among peers and in wider society.

Changing paradigms in sexual violence research: from rationality to norms

Academic discussions on sexual violence in conflict areas were dominated by rational-choice arguments from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. Sexual violence was explained as an organised, tactical or strategic practice of military organisations. The argument's hegemonic status led to the employment of the expression ‘rape as a weapon of war’ as if it was a self-explanatory term, for exemple in media reporting (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013).

The rise of the weapon-of-war thesis in the 1990s was embedded in debates about post-Cold War changes in warfare. In this period, researchers emphasised cultural and economic factors, rather than political ideas, as military organisations’ motivations (Kaldor 1999). Liberal human-rights researchers and feminist scholars began highlighting sexual war crimes in addition to women’s specific situations and the meaning of gender in war (Skjelsbæk 2001). Particularly in the context of civil wars, sexual violence has been understood as constituting a highly effective military means. The testimonies of surviving women of wars and genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda suggested organised patterns of sexual violence (Allen 1996; Twagiramariya and Turshen 1998). Analysts observed that sexual violence undermined the inner cohesion of communities, terrorised populations into obedience and may have served to strengthen military organisations’ internal cohesion. These scholars suggested that such consequences plausibly constituted perpetrator motivations (Seifert 1996). Both these internal effects and the destruction of the military organisations’ perceived enemy groups may have contributed to the achievement of political and military objectives. In this context, neologisms such as ‘rape warfare’, ‘genocidal rape’ (Allen 1996) and ‘rape as a tool for ethnic cleansing’ were introduced (Niarchos 1995), and academics began to refer to rape as a ‘strategy’, ‘tactic’ or ‘terror’. The most succinct formulation was ‘rape as a weapon of war’ (Card 1996). All of these new terms highlighted the strategic employment of sexual violence for political and military ends. In the following, we use ‘weapon of war’, as it is the most general and successful of these terms.

Starting in the mid-2000s, academic criticism of rationalist weapon-of-war arguments steadily grew. Such criticism may have since become dominant in the academic field. It is important to emphasise, however, that the weapon-of-war thesis has not been refuted altogether. Indeed, some sexual violence incidences are still explained as the rational, ends-oriented actions of military organisations. Although the common baseline of academic criticism of weapon-of-war arguments is their alleged oversimplification of sexual violence, two critical strands can be distinguished. On the one hand, some scholars have argued that the weapon-of-war thesis decontextualises sexual violence from its social setting, depicts women as powerless objects, and renders victims invisible if they do not fit into a binary, ethnicized war narrative. These authors have stated the need for a theory that allows for an understanding of the social realities in which sexual violence takes place (Engle 2005; Buss 2009).

Other analysts have scrutinised weapon-of-war arguments for contradictions and empirical weaknesses. Elisabeth Wood, for instance, states that ‘the conditions for instrumental promotion of sexual violence are not well identified in the literature’ (2008, 340). Her research demonstrates huge differences in sexual-violence reporting across conflicts and between military organisations in the same conflict. Was sexual violence indeed a useful strategic practice, one would expect fewer such differences. Kirby (2013) observes that weapon-of-war analyses depict perpetrators as simultaneously driven by hyper-rationality, frustration, trauma and affect. Other authors point out that massive sexual violence is not proof of a strategic or instrumental employment of rape (Leiby 2009; Cohen, Hoover Green, and Wood 2013).

This criticism is bolstered by newly available empirical material. The original sources in support of the weapon-of-war thesis were victims’ statements. These suggested that authorities have tolerated sexual violence by uniformed men (Stiglmayer 1994). Survivors of sexual violence, however, usually have scant knowledge of the perpetrators’ motivations, especially when the victim and perpetrator were not previously acquainted. Newer research derives its findings from other types of sources, including the records of international courts, tribunals, and truth and reconciliation commissions (Engle 2005; Buss 2009; Mullins 2009); interviews with (former) combatants (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009; Elbert et al. 2013); and larger surveys (Johnson and Scott 2010; Peterman, Palermo, and Bredenkamp 2011).

The evolution of the academic research on sexual violence is also revealed in how the problem has been redefined. Authors in the early literature very often reduced conflict-based sexual violence to rape. As the Web of Science database² and an early literature review (Skjelsbæk 2001, 233–237) both show, before the mid-2000s, publication titles and keywords on sexual violence were dominated by combinations of ‘rape’ and ‘war’.³ From then on, however, ‘sexual violence’ has become more established, even though ‘rape’ continues to figure prominently (Skjelsbæk 2010, 52–56). Presently, two designations dominate the field. SGBV⁴ is the older, broader and more generic of these two terms.⁵ It does not, by default, differentiate between peaceful and conflict-affected contexts, or perpetrators; it does include nonphysical violations. Analysts who prefer SGBV seek to understand connections between different forms or contexts of sexual violence, including and beyond violence in armed conflict, violence perpetrated by military organisations, and physical violations. SGBV implies an interpretive perspective that ultimately attributes violence to patriarchal norms and structures. The other dominant term, CRSV, is more narrowly defined.⁶ CRSV tends to be restricted to physical sexual violence committed by military organisations. Therefore, as compared to SGBV, CRSV is more closely (but not uniquely) related to the weapon-of-war interpretation.

Overall, however, new empirical material and analytical approaches have so far only disturbed the early suppositions. For instance, regarding offenders, researchers have pointed out that not only combatants but also civilians perpetrate these crimes. Indeed, civilians may outnumber combatants among perpetrators, even in conflict-affected areas (Peterman, Palermo, and Bredenkamp 2011). Past analyses may thus have overemphasised the relative prevalence of military strategic sexual violence. Statistical claims regarding sexual violence should however be read very critically, even in relatively peaceful societies (Hagemann-White 2003). Another trend emphasises norms over rationalism. Some authors have proposed focussing on the inner lives of armed organisations through, for example, combatant socialisation, hierarchies, ideologies and strategies (Cohen 2013; Cohen and Nordås 2015; Wood 2018), but others have emphasised other factors that foster sexual violence in (post-)conflict societies, including constructions of masculinity, and structural and normative gender inequality (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Davies and True 2015). The body of material, however, is still far from comprehensive. Although earlier research relied on a very weak empirical basis to come up with the unambiguous weapon-of-war thesis, the new approaches with broader empirical bases have not yet yielded definitive arguments regarding the causes of sexual violence.

Despite the different lines of argumentation, both weapon-of-war and gender-norms arguments centrally highlight the gendered dimensions of warfare. The large success of the weapon-of-war argument, which has seemingly become hegemonic thinking in some discourse communities, is therefore an astounding acknowledgement of originally critical and emancipative feminist lines of thinking. New research questioning the weapon-of-war thesis should, in a normative perspective, be considered as a critical examination, rather than a complete rebuttal of earlier analyses.

The art of reinterpretation

The academic criticism of the weapon-of-war thesis includes a plea for more complex causal analysis. It therefore may have complicated the work of intervention organisations endeavouring to solve the problem of sexual violence. Do these intervention organisations consider new developments in the academic field, though? In the following section, we look for causal explanations in the documents of organisations that conduct anti-sexual-violence interventions in DR Congo. We show that, although some organisational bodies of the United Nations continue to argue straightforwardly from a weapon-of-war perspective, many other organisations have actively embraced more norms-focussed causal analyses. Based on our sample, we find that developmental organisations, unlike organisations with mandates to protect international security, prefer norms-oriented explanations to strategic ones. This finding suggests that mandates are essential to the explanation of analytical preferences. However, mandates alone may not explain whether intervention organisations affirm academic arguments, nor how they choose to do so. As we show, even norms-leaning developmental organisations do not take sides in the academic controversy; rather, they seek to reconcile the weapon-of-war narrative with normative, gender-based arguments in creative (and even seemingly contradictory) analytical narratives.

The least ambiguous position on causal analysis is that of the UN Security Council. In 2008, the UN Security Council fully embraced instrumentalist explanations in the central resolution 1820. This resolution, which is part of a series of statements on women, peace and security, interprets conflict-related sexual violence as an element of larger politico-military strategies; the United Nations thereby acknowledged that sexual violence is related to international peace and security (United Nations Security Council, 2008; Jansson and Eduards 2016, 597–599; Mertens and Pardy 2016). The resolution constructs an argument that is very much in line with the weapon-of-war perspective: In this argument, the perpetrators of sexual violence are military organisations; the victims of sexual violence are civilian women and children; and the sexual violence is ‘commissioned’ by military organisations’ hierarchies.

In 2008, alternative views on sexual violence were rare, but this changed in the following years. The UN Security Council has nonetheless ignored further academic developments. Resolution 1960 (UN Security Council 2010) focusses on military organisations as perpetrators and calls on the UN Secretary General to provide an annual blacklist of ‘parties to armed conflict (…) that are credibly suspected of committing or being responsible’ for systematic rape. The weapon-of-war argument was further emphasised due to an initiative of UK foreign minister William Hague, who put sexual violence on the agendas of the G8 summit and the UN Security Council in 2013 (Kirby 2015). Resolution 2106 (UN Security Council 2013), which refers to the similar G8 declaration ‘Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict’, repeats the weapon-of-war argumentation.

Inside the United Nations as a system of organisations, however, the causal analysis of sexual violence is much more diverse than is implied by the above resolutions. Documents and interviews show that organisations further removed from the UN Security Council’s control are less faithful to the dominant explanation of sexual violence as a strategic practice of military organisations. The differences in interpretation also tend to follow the divide between security- and development-oriented UN sub-entities. The reports from security-tasked organisations under the UN Security Council (through the UN Secretary General), such as the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict (e.g. Team of Experts 2013 and the following annual reports) and the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo (e.g. MONUSCO and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2014), adhere closely to weapon-of-war arguments. However, UN sub-organisations that report to the UN General Assembly, such as UNDP and UNFPA, tend to diverge more strongly from this narrow view and to embrace norms-based causal explanations (e.g. UNFPA 2010). These organisations are mandated to contribute to broad humanitarian and development goals rather than to security. Especially during the past decade, these organisations’ analyses have increasingly appropriated norms-based explanations. Nonetheless, they have usually rearranged weapon-of-war arguments rather than completely discard them (UNDP 2011; UN Action 2015).

The weapon-of-war perspective’s loss of hegemony in the United Nations is most pronounced in the project outline for a flagship project in eastern DR Congo called Tupinge Ubakaji (Swahili: ‘Let’s Fight against Sexual Violence’), which ran from 2013 through 2018. The authors of this document (UNDP and UNFPA 2013) state that sexual violence in the DR Congo should not be reduced to a weapon of war. They provide instead a causal analysis that is fairly radical by UN standards, affirmatively referencing academic works that diverge from the UN Security Council’s orthodox focus, and emphasising societal norms of gender inequality as causes of sexual violence. Most prominently, however, the authors do not present gender norms, but a ‘climate of impunity’ as the central cause (rather than as a contextual factor). While the term ‘climate’ seems close to the language of the normative perspective, the rhetorical move also allows criticising a lack of criminal prosecutions, which then relates back to UN Security Council resolutions emphasising judicial sanctions as a means of prevention.

Although the authors of many UN documents affirmatively cite particular academic studies to bolster their own academic analyses, in our interviews, intervention staff did not mention this academic controversy until we particularly questioned them about it. However, they were acutely aware of the competing designations for sexual violence. At the beginning of the interviews, many participants requested clarification as to whether our research was concerned with SGBV or CRSV. The interviewees understood these abbreviations as symbolic fixtures regarding where and by whom the problem should be addressed. Their definitional preferences confirmed the divide between the security and developmental sub-organisations. The staff of MONUSCO and the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict emphasised the specificities of CRSV, including the high prevalence of mass rape in the eastern provinces of DR Congo, where armed conflicts have been most severe (personal communications, SRSG-SVC office, 5 March 2016; MONUSCO Joint Human Rights Office, 16 February 2017 and 31 March 2017). The staff of UNDP and UNFPA, on the other hand, expressed unease with restricting the discussion to CRSV or to the east of the country. They referred to studies in which researchers found that combatants were a minority of perpetrators and that supposedly peaceful provinces had even higher SGBV rates than did the eastern conflict zones (personal communications, UNDP, 2 March 2016; UNFPA, 3 April 2017).

Our hypothesis that development organisations prefer norms-based analysis also held in our second cluster of organisations: those around the World Bank. The World Bank itself has embraced academic deliberations on norms as key factors in sexual violence in its Strategic Review on sexual and gender-based violence, which summarised its previous activities and proposed future actions. The authors centrally argued that the underlying causes of sexual violence are ‘gender roles and norms that are rooted in unequal power relationships between men and women’ (Willman and Corman 2013, 7). This strongly norms-oriented explanation is applied throughout the review. Although ‘rape as a weapon of war’ is briefly mentioned, the authors quote only academic publications that are critical of this perspective (Willman and Corman 2013, 7–21).

However, developmental organisations do not necessarily discard the weapon-of-war argument; rather, they reinterpret and rearrange the causal narrative. The World Bank-funded projects in DR Congo to which the strategic review refers include the Men’s Leadership Program from 2005 and the Living Peace Groups from 2012. WfWI, an international women’s rights organisation, and Promundo, an organisation that specialises in the promotion of non-violent masculinities, implemented these programmes. Given the analytical preferences of these groups’ donors, as well as their organisational identities, a norms-leaning causal analysis would be expected. However, both project descriptions combine the weapon-of-war thesis with an emphasis on the causal effects of norms. In the Men’s Leadership Program’s outline, confusingly, each causal argument seems always to be weakened by what is written in the following paragraph (WfWI 2007). The Living Peace Groups’ project description more artfully combines these explanatory approaches. Although the academic debate treats instrumentalist, psychological and normative causal explanations as competitors, the Living Peace Groups’ description connects these ideas in a distinctive way. Its authors argue that male civilians commit sexual violence, including domestic abuse, because of disempowerment and that military actors undermine civilian male hegemony through destruction and (non-sexual) violence. Civilian men then abuse family members to ‘cope with traumatic loss and the loss of their reputation as a man’ (Promundo-US 2014, 14). Thus, military organisations are still indirectly to blame for sexual violence: ‘Rape as a strategy of war, as a weapon of war, has achieved its goal’ (Promundo-US 2014, 21). The original weapon-of-war argument is hardly discernible in this text, but the catchphrase is still woven into the analytical approach.

Intervention organisations’ mandates, their core cultural capital, which both restricts and legitimises their work, explain their norms-leaning and rationalist preferences to some extent. From the perspective of a security-mandated organisation, sexual violence will not figure into its area of responsibility unless it is related to mass conflict. The weapon-of-war perspective provides such a circumscription. This perspective may also correspond with the traditional instruments of security interventions, which we examine in the next section. Development-mandated organisations value those academic works that emphasise the violent consequences of gender inequality. These organisations have, for a longer period, worked to reduce gender inequality and argued that women’s societal subordination constitutes a hindrance to economic prosperity. Explaining sexual violence as an aspect and an outcome of norms-based gender inequality thus appears to be consistent.

It is nonetheless remarkable that all the developmental organisations in our sample attempt to reconcile the weapon-of-war and gender-norms perspectives. These organisations do not take sides in the academic debate, even as they acknowledge and embrace academic arguments from both sides, often by affirmatively referencing key works. However, they do not mention the theoretical controversy in the academic field. Instead, their policy papers create novel interpretations while omitting theoretical contradictions. One explanation relates to the interdependencies inside the United Nations. However, the World Bank and its associated NGOs also refer to and creatively reinterpret both perspectives, even when their preferences are clearly geared to norms analyses. Mandates therefore seem to be a necessary but not sufficient factor in explaining organisations’ differing preferences and, especially, their creative appropriation of both causal explanations.

Inertia as a common denominator

As mandates are not the only factor that determines explanatory preferences, we expand our analysis to the instruments and approaches of intervention projects. We analyse the ways in which causal analyses and intervention instruments and approaches are linked, and thereby seek to understand whether these groups’ theoretical preferences match their practices. In this way, we arrive at more suggestions regarding the impact that academic work has on interventions against sexual violence, and we detect further factors that co-determine the intervention organisations’ policies and practices.

As mentioned above, the case of DR Congo is particularly significant because of the high prevalence of sexual violence, and the intensity of both intervention and research. The case is also pertinent for our study because intervention organisations can decide largely autonomous about their agenda. The Congolese government only selectively engages with international efforts against sexual violence, and therefore does not significantly distort the logics of the humanitarian field. While the government passed a strategy against sexual violence in 2009, and despite ministerial official co-hosting of coordination structures, the government does not actively regulate the programming and implementation of projects and programmes (interviews with Congolese authorities, NGOs and intervention organisations in 2016–2017).

Looking at intervention organisations’ programming, the development–security divide at first glance seems to hold, from causality to instrument: Developmental organisations promise to prevent sexual violence by transforming gender norms through empowerment and sensitisation, whereas security-oriented entities emphasise deterrence through judicial prosecution. However, this divide dissolves when considering programming details. A common denominator among the organisations, it turns out, is their penchant for continuity of approaches. Intervention organisations in the humanitarian field prefer to repeat and continue earlier practices, and novel approaches are relegated to the margins. We show this in three aspects. First, in DR Congo, both the World Bank and the United Nations invest most of their budgets on survivor-oriented instruments that mitigate the consequences of sexual violence, thereby continuing past humanitarian approaches from the health and developmental sector; despite these organisations’ proclamations, such approaches offer little preventive potential. Second, projects that include funds for prevention are focussed on the reform of security, judicial and health institutions. Funding for sexual-violence prevention thereby leads to another round of institution-focussed statebuilding, a practice predating programmes against sexual violence. Third, despite controversy over the distribution of sexual violence in the nation, the geographic scope of sexual-violence interventions remains limited to conflict-affected provinces in eastern Congo. In sum, inertia is the common denominator of large intervention organisations.

Intervention organisations prefer mitigation over prevention. We have collected documents and data on projects and programmes in DR Congo since the mid-2000s, and this material suggests that most interventions regarding sexual violence invested in survivor-centred services, including medical, psychological, judicial and socio-economic assistance. Although taking care of victims is an obvious core of humanitarian activity, these services do not significantly affect the causes of sexual violence. From the gender-norms perspective, victim-centred services provide opportunities to build victims’ resilience and empowerment. However, as long as only victims (a comparatively small group of persons) can be empowered, these programmes’ impact on societal norms is likely to remain limited. From the view inspired by weapon-of-war arguments, meanwhile, support for victims in their roles as witnesses for the prosecution of sexual offenders may figure as a preventive activity; however, medical, psychological and economic assistance has little directly preventive impact.

Nonetheless, the World Bank emphasises prevention in its central organisational document. In the organisation’s strategic review, which corresponds to its gender-norms causal analysis, the authors recommend the implementation of behavioural-change campaigns with local partners. The authors also endorse recruiting men as ‘key allies in preventing and responding to’ sexual and gender-based violence (Willman and Corman 2013, 31–39). Corresponding to these preferences, in DR Congo, the World Bank’s first activity regarding sexual violence was the Learning on Gender and Conflict in Africa (LOGICA) initiative. According to the programme’s website,⁷ LOGICA was intended as an application of ‘innovative gender-sensitive approaches’ (see also World Bank 2012). Accordingly, the LOGICA-financed projects that WfWI and Promundo have implemented aimed at changing gender norms, particularly notions of masculinity. For instance, the Men’s Leadership Program trained local elite men in eastern DR Congo to become agents of change with regards to the communal treatment of sexual-violence survivors and advocacy for women’s rights (WfWI 2007, 5–16). The follow-up community-level project, Living Peace Groups, provided a ‘deeper understanding of gender equality’ for men (Promundo-US 2014, 15). Participants were given the opportunity to ‘rethink their attitudes and behaviours, their problems, and their partner relations’ (Promundo-US 2014, 14–15). The preventive instruments in both projects where thus geared towards changing societal gender norms.

The World Bank’s LOGICA initiative, however, was only a pilot for a much larger and expensive activity that started in 2014, the Great Lakes Emergency Sexual and Gender-Based Violence and Women’s Health Project. The new project dwarfed its predecessor, as it reserved US$74 million for DR Congo (World Bank 2014, 15), compared to the US$9 million that LOGICA (as its webpage details⁸) invested across eight African countries. This programme instantly turned the World Bank into the major contemporary donor organisation on sexual violence in the country. The causal analysis section of the project’s appraisal document corresponds closely to what can be called the World Bank’s established view on the causes of sexual violence: Weapon-of-war-arguments are briefly mentioned, but the emphasis is on gender-norm transformation. However, the project’s aims and instruments do not reflect this analysis. Prevention, indeed, is not even an official project aim (World Bank 2014, 156–157, 9–11). Instead, the project follows well-worn paths in mitigating the harm of sexual violence.

The UNDP/UNFPA-led flagship programme in DR Congo, Tupinge Ubakaji, centrally claims to ‘fight against sexual violence’, but it provides comparatively small resources to do so. Nearly a third of the programme’s budget of CAN$18 million was reserved for victims’ medical, psychological and economic support. Another third went to administrative purposes and to the ‘strengthening of coordination capacities’. In effect, despite organisations’ various causal analytical approaches, the major World Bank and UN engagements against sexual violence in DR Congo strongly resemble each other due to a shared emphasis on mitigation over prevention.

Despite its emphasis on mitigation, Tupinge Ubakaji spends nearly a quarter of its budget on ‘fighting against impunity’ (lutter contre l’impunité) and on providing victims of sexual violence with better access to justice institutions, the latter of which is presented as the project’s primary preventive instrument. These organisations from within the UN family have argued that a ‘climate of impunity’ is the central cause of sexual violence, thereby merging the weapon-of-war arguments (promoted by the UN Security Council) and the gender-norms explanations that are more in line with their developmental expertise. The projects’ choice to provide judicial support to victims and institutional support to justice and security institutions follows a logic of deterrence: The idea is that regular sanctions will dissuade potential perpetrators and thereby reduce the prevalence of sexual violence (UNDP and UNFPA 2013).

Both development- and security-oriented UN organisations have been working to reform the Congolese security and justice institutions since the early 2000s. Originally, statebuilding reforms aimed at more general peacebuilding goals such as security and stability (Veit 2010). During the last decade, sexual violence has been added as a problem to be resolved by this solution, as prominently announced in several UN Security Council resolutions (United Nations 2010, 2013). Addressing sexual violence through well-rehearsed reform projects provides much valued continuity for United Nations organisations (personal communications, UNDP, 2 March 2016 and 31 March 2017; SRSG-SVC office, 5 March 2016; MONUSCO Joint Human Rights Office, 16 February 2017 and 31 March 2017; UNFPA, 3 April 2017).

Also survivor-focussed humanitarian services allow for continuity of humanitarian institutional support, including beyond the United Nations. This is particularly notable, as international aid for victims stabilised and fostered the capacities of Congolese health institutions, including state-run basic health infrastructures and NGO-run specialised hospitals. Medical projects with a sexual-violence focus also help to continue institutional cooperation with the national government. The World Bank, for example, administers its Great Lakes Emergency Sexual and Gender-Based Violence and Women’s Health Project with Congolese governmental ministries (World Bank 2014; personal communication, World Bank, 28 April 2017). Major engagements against sexual violence thus continue earlier humanitarian statebuilding approaches.

Finally, inertia also characterises organisations’ geographical preferences. Studies have shown the prevalence of sexual violence in relatively peaceful provinces of DR Congo; there are Congolese demands to expand humanitarian work beyond the eastern provinces; and some staff members are eager to overcome restrictions with regards to the relationship of conflict to sexual violence and the geographic restriction to (post-) conflict areas (personal communication, UNDP, 2 March 2016). Nonetheless, all major international actors continue to implement their sexual-violence engagements nearly exclusively in provinces along the country’s eastern borders.

Intervention approaches are thus stable across the various intervention objects (e.g. peace-building and sexual violence), causal explanations and empirical indications (the weapon-of-war and gender-norms approaches, as well as studies of geographic prevalence), and mandates (security and development). Additional factors seemingly play important roles as well. From a field-theoretical perspective, a track record of successful projects in a circumscribed geographic area provides intervention organisations with symbolic, cultural and social capital that cannot be invested elsewhere without high exchange costs. As the international attention for years has been focussed on DR Congo’s eastern provinces, the humanitarian presence is much more developed there than in the rest of the country. Aside from physical infrastructure, international organisations and NGOs have developed cultural capital through in-house expertise and experience, as well as social capital in the form of local partner organisations. Local networks, including state institutions, ensure that a project is participatory and sustainable. The sustained success of the weapon-of-war narrative has also contributed to this inertia. International diplomats, donors and the media continue to be focussed on CRSV and on the eastern provinces. Even though sexual violence exists in every country, the projects in DR Congo continue to portray sexual violence as exceptional and due to that country’s conflict context (Hilhorst and Douma 2018). Although it is of course possible to move on to other approaches and develop expertise, experience and networks in other regions, it is much easier for organisations to remain in the same place and to apply a similar methodology.

The barriers to rapid changes in intervention approaches, and therefore also to the adoption of new academic perspectives on sexual violence, are thus high. Intervention organisations are more likely to acknowledge causal analyses once they fit into their portfolios. Nonetheless, some change is observable: Developmental organisations have creatively appropriated gender-norms approaches, and they now prefer to understand conflict-related sexual violence as just one among many forms of gender-based violence. The World Bank has rhetorically embraced the newer research on the causes of sexual violence, even if it has also decided to spend the bulk of its investment on well-rehearsed, survivor-centred activities. Promundo and WfWI have continued their gender-norms-focussed work in DR Congo with funding from new donors (personal communications, Promundo, 9 June 2016; WfWI, 5 April 2017). The UN’s Tupinge Ubakaji project has even invested about ten per cent of its budget in gender-transformative activities, mostly in the form of information and sensitisation campaigns (UNDP and UNFPA 2014). Competition in the humanitarian field provides incentives for not only continuity but also innovation. Humanitarian intervention is constantly under suspicion of inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Thus, these groups, especially niche players with unsteady funding and high needs for visibility (e.g. Promundo and WfWI), can increase their symbolic capital by taking risks and embracing new approaches. Even large organisations can embrace academic controversy, however, and invest parts of their budget accordingly to demonstrate their inclination towards improvement.

Conclusion

This study reveals good news for (some) social scientists: Intervention organisations are referencing your work! There is also a downside: Your academic disputes are not as important to intervention organisations as they are to you. As we argue, organisational practices reflect analytical reasoning that is strongly related with academic debates. However, problem-oriented logics are overshadowed, as programming is ultimately determined by the humanitarian field and the intervention organisations’ positions therein. In the humanitarian field, academic knowledge is not directly translated into practice in a causal relationship, but is a form of cultural capital that can be appropriated to consolidate an organisation’s position. This knowledge, accordingly, is creatively appropriated from a field-oriented, rather than problem-oriented, perspective.

Interventionists’ limited interest in academic contestation, as shown in the integration of arguments that academics treat as competing, can be explained through the different logics of competition in the academic and humanitarian fields. Academia places a premium on the originality of knowledge, leading researchers to strive to make strong claims so as to prove the novelty of their findings. Originality is important because there is (supposedly) no other purpose in academia than to advance knowledge. Presenting novel findings that other academics recognise as original, valid and relevant thus strongly add to a researcher’s symbolic capital.

In the humanitarian field, in contrast, the originality of knowledge is much less important. Instead, what is most important is the ability to connect an organisation’s causal problem analysis and problem-solving capacity to mandate, funding, expertise, experience and network. Continuity, as a means to preserve these varied forms of social and cultural capital, is thus an important aspect of competition in the humanitarian field; by contrast, innovation adds to an organisation’s symbolic capital only incrementally. Humanitarian competition for symbolic and material capital, therefore, creates a dialectic of conformity and innovation. On the one hand, in DR Congo, organisations (despite their varied predispositions) often implement strikingly similar programmes. Ambiguity about which instruments actually improve a social problem can thus foster mimesis. Organisations prefer approaches that they know are legitimate. Competition, on the other hand, delimits the benefits of conformity. The incentive to embrace new academic knowledge is related to the apparent lack of efficiency and effectiveness of interventions in post-conflict contexts; this creates demand for innovation. New academic ideas may thus be used, but they may be decoupled from actual action on the ground (Lipson 2007; Kühl 2009). Intervention organisations may seek to stand out from the crowd of organisations by attracting positive attention, albeit inside the boundaries of the field’s existing power hierarchies and social relations. Although non-conformity entails risks, it also promises symbolic capital for avant-gardist organisations (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). The recognition of the validity of academic work, then, is not dependent on a logical connection between causal analysis and a problem-solving instrument. Policy papers and project proposals represent organisations’ symbolic capital rather than soundly coherent ideas. Referencing academic knowledge serves as formal, rather than analytical, rationalisation (Morcillo Laiz and Schlichte 2016).

As pointed out in the introduction of this special section, a paradox of emancipation and domination characterises humanitarian intervention. While critical and emancipative feminist academic analysis has become surprisingly popular on the humanitarian field, it is nonetheless subject to its bureaucratic and economic logics. Critical findings are appropriated as to make them fit into larger organisational strategies, their critical content in the process becoming indiscernible.

What does the confluence of academic dispute and organisational interest mean, then, for the international anti-sexual-violence interventions in DR Congo? Would a stronger embrace of a gender-norms causal explanation actually change organisations’ programming and implementation? The weapon-of-war thesis provides a headline-attracting narrative for the Western world, in part because it rhetorically externalises misogyny to faraway places. If the view that gender norms in DR Congo are a bigger problem than brutal warlords becomes widely accepted, this would contribute to a de-exoticising of the country. After all, the gender norms of inequality that underlie the various forms of SGBV are an acknowledged reality across the globe. Sexual violence in DR Congo appears to be normal, in the sense that it is similar to the violence in other places. Given the logics of the humanitarian field, this normalisation may lead to decreased interest, resulting in fewer projects, both those that mitigate the consequences of sexual violence and those that prevent its recurrence. Given intervention organisations’ inclination towards continuity and their appropriative creativity, new arguments may, however, also legitimise old practices. Obvious candidates in this regard are the interventions to strengthen justice and security institutions, as deterrence and norm transformation are not mutually exclusive effects of prosecution.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Philipp Schulz, Henri Myrttinen and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alex Veit is senior researcher at the University of Bremen. His research is located at the intersection of international relations and political sociology, with a geographic specialization on eastern and southern Africa.

Lisa Tschörner is a research associate at the University of Bremen. Her research interests centre around gender politics, humanitarian interventions and conflict dynamics. Previously, Lisa worked with international NGOs and the German Development Cooperation in several African countries.

ORCID

Alex Veit http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8720-4078

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [grant number VE 856/2-1].

Notes

1. We conducted several months of research in DR Congo, the United States and in various countries in Europe. More than 70 semi-structured interviews have been conducted in the course of this research.

2. webofknowledge.com

3. On Web of Science, 685 publications combine ‘rape’ and ‘war’ as topic, with a steady rate of 10–20 publications per year since 1995 and a peak of 78 in 2015. However, a large minority of these publications are actually focussed on subjects other than rape during war, with these terms used only metaphorically.

4. This includes the variation ‘gender-based violence’, which is often interpreted as encompassing sexual violations.

5. The topic ‘sexual and gender-based violence’ presently has 1490 hits on Web of Science, with mentions beginning in 1993 but becoming steady only in 2002. By 2008, this topic regularly had more than 60 publications per year. Of these, 150 publications (most since 2008) have combined SGBV with ‘armed conflict’ or ‘war’.

6. Web of Science lists 43 hits since 2010 for CRSV, indicating that it has, to some extent, replaced the designation ‘sexual violence in conflict’, which has had 43 results since 2007.

7. http://www.logica-wb.org/home.php

8. http://www.logica-wb.org/Eng/AboutUs.php