ABSTRACT
Genocide is war in the extreme. All war aims to overcome the adversary. Genocide aims to destroy a designated enemy. It is total and complete denial of human security and all its essential elements that are always undermined in any armed conflict. Sexual violence against women increases with the severity of armed conflict. Genocide is a strategy for the destruction of a people, and this article points out what we have called the quotidian or everyday conditions that comprise human security. Without daily expectations of wellbeing, there can be no human security. The gendered nature of daily security attests to the essentially gendered nature of human security and the necessity to address it as such. So, too, remedies and strategies for prevention must be cast in a gender perspective by posing policy queries, including the ones following. What are the ways in which the everyday human security of most people are impeded in wartime and peacetime by the priority the present system places on state security? In what ways are gender roles impediments to the protection of persons and communities in armed conflict? Are there any such impediments outside conditions of armed conflict? Might we discern in what this article refers to as cascading victimhood a pattern of harm that demonstrates the centrality of sexual violence to the war system?
