Responding to Sexual Violence: How (De-)Politicization and Technicalization Shape Donor-Funded Interventions

Abstract

This article introduces an analytical framework for studying and interpreting the sometimes surprisingly different ‘shapes’ (key topics and approaches) of donor-funded responses to sexual violence in and after armed conflict. Our framework highlights processes of politicization, depoliticization, and technicalization and their influence on interventions. Drawing on available studies, published documents, and our own field research in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone, we show that donor-funded responses to sexual violence since the early 2000s have taken remarkably different shapes – despite the emergence of influential international policy narratives and roughly similar forms of sexual violence in both contexts. A focus on context-specific processes of politicization, depoliticization, and technicalization reveals how these differences came about and persisted over time. (De-)Politicization and technicalization of sexual violence as a ‘weapon of war’ in DRC have led to medicalized and security-centred statebuilding interventions in the county's eastern conflict zones. By contrast, donor-funded responses in Sierra Leone framed and addressed sexual violence as ‘domestic violence’ even before the war had officially ended. We find that these different shapes emerged from initial differences in (de)politicization and technicalization processes driven by different ‘first responders’ in both contexts, which created enduring path dependencies.