Kerry F. Crawford

Explaining the Variation in Gender Composition of Personnel Contributions to UN Peacekeeping Operations

How do we account for the dearth of female contributions to UN peace operations (UNPOs)? For answers, this study examines conditions that led the United Nations to move to reduce the gender imbalance in UNPO personnel and provides descriptive evidence that points to the continuing underrepresentation of women in these operations. To interpret this evidence, the study presents theoretical explanations for the varying contributions of personnel to UNPOs—including the political and socioeconomic character of the contributing states, international reputations and norms, and various demand-side influences exerted by missions—and then tests these explanations with a cross-sectional time-series model that accounts for female personnel contributions to each mission in the 2010–2011 period. Although offering significant support for domestic political explanations, the findings indicate that gender diversity is not a primary goal of most contributors and is largely a by-product of force sizes.

International Approaches to Rape edited by Nicole Westmarland and Geetanjali Gangoli

Prejudice, stereotypes, and norms governing gender and sexuality taint efforts to design and enforce progressive legal reforms and to ensure protection, agency, and justice for rape survivors. Focusing in particular on rape of women, editors Nicole Westmarland and Geetanjali Gangoli have compiled examinations of nine states’ attempts at reforming political, legal, and social approaches to rape. At its core the book asks how far have states come in reforming policies related to rape and how successful those reforms have been. Each chapter addresses the unifying themes of the prevalence of rape, the evolution of national policies and legal frameworks addressing rape, and the persistence of rape myths and their impact on the success of reforms. While the editors note the utility of the book’s nonsequential structure—which allows the reader to consult a specific chapter as a reference or compare similar sections across chapters—when taken as a whole, the work convincingly argues that entrenched attitudes about rape survivors and perpetrators still confound reform efforts in a wide range of states and cultures more than a decade into the twenty-first century. The consistent refrain echoed by each of the contributing authors is that, while sociopolitical and legal progress has been made, rape continues to be the only crime in which victims are violated twice: After enduring rape, the victim is often highly scrutinized and retraumatized by the investigative and judicial processes. In presenting their case studies, each of the contributors incorporates three central issues: the prevalence of rape and average conviction rates; the legal frameworks in which investigation and prosecution take place and advances in these frameworks over time; and the rape myths and cultural perceptions of sexuality and gender that influence or inhibit improvements in approaches to rape. Comparing the occurrence of rape across states is a difficult undertaking, and many of the contributors note an absence of consistent and reliable statistics on rape due to lack of resources, failure to prioritize rape as a serious crime, and rampant underreporting of rape (due to a sense of shame, fear of social stigma, family dishonor, the prospect of a traumatic and embarrassing investigative process, and the potential for punishment of the survivor in