ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the transformation in the role of international law in addressing sexual violence in the Yugoslav conflicts. In contrast to the war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia included women at all levels and explicitly considered rape as a war crime, as part of a move internationally to recognize violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights. The tribunal’s work implicated concerns addressed by scholars and activists about the sometimes competing claims of ethnicity and gender and raised questions regarding the empowerment of victims and local activists in this necessarily top-down process. But there are important limitations to this legal approach, including the danger of endorsing gendered and ethnicized notions of war rape, the focus on perpetrators rather than victims, the reality that very few perpetrators can be prosecuted, and the risks for victims who testify, even as they gain voice. Still, this process brought unprecedented attention to gender in Central and Eastern Europe and set the stage for violence against women to become an important issue of concern for outside actors and locals in the region.
