Securitization of Rape: The Application — Case Study I, Bosnia

Abstract

The Bosnian crisis was a conflict of its time. In the summer of 1992, when the new war grammar of rape camps, forced impregnation and the mass rape of Bosnian Muslim women descended onto an oblivious global community, the brutal character of these acts seemed incompatible with the post-Cold War optimism. ‘American television audiences were bewildered that this should be part of the New World Order promised after the defeat of Iraq’ (Robertson, 2000, p. 286). When NATO in February 1994 shot down four Serbian planes over Bosnian airspace, the world witnessed the first use of force by the transatlantic alliance since its 1949 inception. After the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, genocide, the ghosts of the Holocaust, had reared its ugly head once again in Europe.