The ‘war’/‘not-war’ divide: Domestic violence in the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative
| Author | Harriet Gray |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118802470 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118802470
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2019, Vol. 21(1) 189 –206
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118802470
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The ‘war’/‘not-war’ divide:
Domestic violence in the
Preventing Sexual Violence
Initiative
Harriet Gray1,2
Abstract
While recognising the importance of policy designed to tackle conflict-related sexual and gender-
based violence, scholars have increasingly critiqued such policies for failing sufficiently to apprehend
the multiple forms of this violence – from rape deployed as a weapon of war to domestic violence
– as interrelated oppressions located along a continuum. In this article, I explore a connected but
distinct line of critique, arguing that sexual and gender-based violence policies are also limited by a
narrow understanding of how gender-based violences relate to war itself. Drawing on an analysis
of the British Government’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, I identify a key distinction which
emerges between those types of sexual and gender-based violence which are considered to be
part of war, and those which are not. This division, I suggest, closes down space for recognising
how war is also enacted within private spaces.
Keywords
armed conflict, conflict-related SGBV, domestic violence, gender, preventing sexual violence
initiative, private sphere, PSVI, public sphere, sexual and gender-based violence, war, women
peace and security agenda
Introduction
I begin this article from the question: how does domestic violence (dis)appear in policy
on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in conflict? While it may seem acceptable
‘common sense’ that policy on SGBV in conflict focuses on those types perpetrated by
armed actors against women (and men) of ‘enemy’ groupings, several recent studies have
suggested that domestic violence – taken here to mean violence perpetrated against one’s
spouse, common-law spouse, or dating partner – is likely to be the most prevalent form of
SGBV in warzones (Peterman et al., 2011; Stark and Ager, 2011: 130; Swaine, 2015:
759–760; Tanner and O’Connor, 2017: vii; Wood, 2014).1 Domestic violence – a
1Department of Politics, The University of York, York, UK
2School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Harriet Gray, Department of Politics, Derwent College, The University of York, Heslington, York, YO10
5DD, UK.
Email: harriet.gray@york.ac.uk
802470BPI0010.1177/1369148118802470The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsGray
research-article2018
Original Article
190 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 21(1)
prevalent form of violence in peacetime which affects around 30% of women worldwide
(World Health Organization (WHO), 2017) – is thought to increase even further in con-
flict settings (Rehn and Sirleaf, 2002: 14–15). Given this significant prevalence, it is
pertinent to pay attention to whether, and to how, such violence appears in policies
intended to tackle conflict SGBV.
Reflecting this prevalence, as I discuss below, scholars have critiqued the failure of
policy on conflict SGBV – such as the British Government’s Preventing Sexual Violence
Initiative (PSVI), upon which I focus in this article, and the broader UN Women, Peace
and Security (WPS) agenda, in which the PSVI is embedded – to properly engage with
domestic violence. Generally speaking, the overriding critique has been that in focusing
on violence which falls easily into the ‘rape as a weapon of war’ framework – that is,
rapes perpetrated by armed men against (primarily) women of ‘enemy’ collectives – pol-
icy approaches have created a ‘hierarchy of harms’ between different forms of SGBV
(Kirby, 2015b: 463). This hierarchy of harms obscures the continuum of violence which
connects multiple forms of SGBV across both war and peace, making it difficult to see
the everyday violences which are prevalent in all settings and increasingly so during war
(Davies and True, 2017: 9; Kirby, 2015a: 510, 2015b: 463; Kirby and Shepherd, 2016b:
380; McLeod, 2011: 596; Myrttinen and Swaine, 2015: 498; Swaine, 2015: 761). That is,
critics have focused on the failure of policy to connect ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’
forms of SGBV.
The arguments I develop in this article build upon this line of critique but are in signifi-
cant ways distinct from it, in that I am concerned less with the abstraction of particular
forms of SGBV from one another than I am with the abstraction of everyday forms of
SGBV from war itself. I suggest that, in fact, the PSVI does make (limited) moves towards
recognising connections between different forms of SGBV, but that the key distinction
limiting its vision is that between those enactments of SGBV which are considered part
of war, and those which are not. That is, SGBV perpetrated by armed men against ‘enemy’
women is clearly framed within the initiative as part of war. In contrast, domestic vio-
lence emerges from the documents as related to, but ultimately separate from, ‘war’ – the
‘not-war’. Domestic violence thus emerges as something which is connected to the vio-
lences of war, but which is not, ontologically, SGBV ‘in conflict’. This distinction is
largely constructed through the public/private divide. In this article, I draw on feminist
scholarship which approaches war through the lens of everyday experience to argue that
dividing SGBV in conflict spaces into the categories of war and not-war closes down
space for recognising how war is (also) enacted within ‘private’ spaces and through ‘pri-
vate’ experiences within warzones – how the ‘private’ is, itself, a space in which war
(also) takes place. As such, the PSVI is impoverished not only in its understandings of
SGBV but, further, in its understandings of what war is and how it is experienced. My
identification of a war/not-war divide in the PSVI thus contributes to and extends critical
scholarship on SGBV policy by drawing attention to the limitations of the narrow concep-
tualisation of war through which many such interventions are informed.
Before I proceed, it is worth highlighting that I do not assume that all forms of SGBV
are the same. There are important variances in how different violences are perpetrated and
experienced by different subjects in different conflict settings and across war and peace,
as scholars including Meger (2016), Cohen (2016), and Cohen and Wood (2016) have
demonstrated. Moreover, in comparison to marital rapes, rapes perpetrated by armed men
against unknown civilians are more likely to involve extreme and/or fatal violence, mul-
tiple perpetrators, forced witnesses, and the use of objects other than the penis to
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