| dc.description.abstract | During the 1990s, the Western legal feminists got highly involved in prosecuting the sexual crimes committed during the War in the former Yugoslavia, demanding justice for the female victims of rape and other violent assaults. In their structural feminist worldview, they found that rape was not merely a tool of belligerent forces, but part of a global war against women. Wishing to implement these structural views into the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, they constructed the “rape-as-genocide” model that could be prosecuted under the definition of genocide found in the 1948 Genocide Convention, and what is more, would satisfy the criteria of persuasiveness relevant for today’s international law. Nevertheless, since international law has states as its basic constituent entities, the “rape-as-genocide” model required from legal feminists to choose a side in the war and name the opposing ethnicities of both the perpetrators and victims. Therefore, in the new feminist structural and universalist view, the rape was directed toward women because they were Muslim or Croatian and perpetrated against them exclusively by Serbian men. This thesis attempts to uncover the surface-level meaning of this and several similar constructions made by legal feminists, working on cases of mass rape perpetrated on the territory of the former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s. The thesis seeks to explore epistemological (or discursive) conditions that made it possible for these structural feminist ideas to become incorporated into international law, something that prior to the 1990s would not have been epistemically intelligible, let alone supported by the Western liberal system as it was during the 1990s. Finally, the thesis examines the discursive legacy of this feminist legal phenomenon dating from the 1990s. | |
