(iPoster) Weaponizing Honor: The Destruction of Civilian Society

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Health Politics and Policy & Wartime Violence, Armed Actors, and Civilian Agency
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Wartime Violence, Armed Actors, and Civilian Agency

Abstract

Why do states sometimes adopt extreme forms of sexual violence, such as mass rape camps, despite their enormous military, political and reputational costs? This paper advances a theory of culturally strategic violence, arguing that governments deploy mass rape when they possess intimate knowledge of a target population’s gendered systems of honor, shame and community belonging. Rather than treating sexual violence as opportunistic or merely terroristic, I show that it is often used deliberately to collapse the social and political foundations of civilian life.
The paper develops this argument through a comparative analysis of two cases of state-perpetrated mass sexual violence: the Bangladesh Liberation War (1971) and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar (2016–ongoing). In both cases, state forces systematically used rape, rape camps and forced pregnancy against Muslim civilian populations in which women’s sexual honor was deeply tied to family lineage, marriageability and communal legitimacy. Drawing on interviews, testimonies, archival materials and media sources, I demonstrate how these campaigns were designed not simply to harm individuals but to destabilize kinship networks, produce long-term stigma and fracture the collective capacity for political and social recovery.
This argument speaks directly to the conference theme of “Democracy under Threat?” by showing how authoritarian violence works through cultural and gendered mechanisms. In Bangladesh, mass rape camps undermined the post-war social standing of women in ways that complicated national reconciliation and democratic inclusion. In Myanmar, sexual violence has been central to the Rohingya’s continued displacement and political erasure, reinforcing a regime of exclusion that persists long after the most visible phase of violence. By demonstrating how states weaponize cultural knowledge to select specific repertoires of violence, this paper explains why some regimes are able to convert wartime brutality into durable systems of political domination.
More broadly, the paper contributes to Conflict Processes by disaggregating sexual violence as a strategic choice rather than a uniform by-product of war. It shows how variation in civilian targeting depends not only on battlefield conditions or ideology but on how states understand and manipulate the social worlds of the people they seek to destroy.

Author

• Fariha Ahmed, Temple University