A new article in the Annual Review of Political Science by field leaders Ragnhild Nordås and Dara Kay Cohen takes stock of the incredible progress made in recent years in understanding when, where, and why wartime sexual violence takes place. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at two of the most recent articles Nordås and Cohen highlight in order to better understand the state of the literature on sexual violence in conflict.

One of the areas of research where the most progress has been made in recent years is in understanding how armed groups craft policy around sexual violence. In the past, most people assumed that sexual violence in conflict was indiscriminate — the result of wanton cruelty, rather than explicit policy. Yet many armed groups enact rules governing the use of sexual violence by their fighters. In the latest issue of the Journal of Global Security Studies, political scientists Mara Redlich Revkin and Elisabeth Jean Wood have an article that describes the origins of sexual violence policies put in place by the ISIS during the group’s 2014 to 2017 peak in Iraq and Syria.

Revkin and Wood are primarily interested in why ISIS chose to inflict particular forms of violence on some groups but not others. If ISIS violence — and specifically sexual violence — was indiscriminate, we woud expect to see it directed at any civilians with which ISIS fighters came in contact. In reality, however, levels of ISIS sexual violence varied widely based on the religious and ethnic identities of the civilians they targeted.

Specifically, Revkin and Wood point to the differences in ISIS’s treatment of Sunni and Yazidi populations. Sunni Muslims were subject to frequent sexual violence by ISIS, but the forms of that violence were circumscribed. Sunni women and girls in ISIS-held areas were subject to intense pressure to marry ISIS fighters, often as a form of tacit protection for their families. Outside the framework of marriage, sexual violence toward Sunnis was rare, and frequently resulted in punishment for the perpetrator when it did take place. By contrast, Yazidi women and girls faced widespread sexual enslavement by ISIS, with the group establishing a slave market infrastructure to support the practice of enslavement. Other ethnic and religious groups experienced ISIS sexual violence across a specturm between the treatment of Sunnis and Yazidis.

These ethnoreligious differences were not reflections of a change in mood by perpetrators of indiscriminate violence, but rather the direct result of ISIS organizational policy. In 2014, for example, ISIS publicly laid out a clear policy and legal justification for sexual enslavement of Yazidis and other groups it saw as “unbelievers.” Those rules were later expanded with further policy documents that described how slave markets were to be regulated and the conditions under which formerly enslaved people could marry. The rulings reflected the ISIS ideological line — the group’s interpretation of early Islamic law permits the enslavement of prisoners of war who are not Muslims, Jews, or Christians.

The focus on child marriage of Sunni girls was also a policy. In 2015, ISIS declared that “it is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine” in the group’s territory. ISIS bureaucrats frequently issued licenses for child marriages, complete with signatures, fingerprints, and a record of the dowry paid by the bride’s family. That policy was also a reflection of ISIS’ ideological project. The state the group sought to create was a highly patriarchal one that required women and girls to have male “guardians,” increasing incentives for child marriage.

By tying patterns of ISIS violence to the enactment of the group’s ideology, Revkin and Wood go beyond earlier explanations of the group’s actions but did not account for ISIS’s political project. Some security studies scholars had posited that sexual enslavement was a recruitment tactic meant to entice young men into the group. Others argued that ISIS was simply recreating the repressive strategies of the dictatorial governments they were succeeding in Iraq and Syria. Yet neither of these explanations stand up much to scrutiny. ISIS barely mentioned slavery in its foreign propaganda materials, and the group’s use of slavery was circumscribed along ideological grounds. Though the Syrian and Iraqi governments also engaged in sexual violence, sexual enslavement along ethnic lines is just one of the forms of violence ISIS undertook that had no equivalent during predecessor regimes. Even in the realm of sexual violence, Revkin and Wood’s work emphasizes the extent to which an armed group’s tactics tend to reflect its underlying political goals.

Sarang Shidore argued that The Quad — a group composed of the US, Japan, India, and Australia — would be better off organizing to confront climate change rather than pursue its ostensible raison d’etre of pursuing what President Biden called “extreme competition” with China. The Quad got its start in the wake of a climate disaster — the Asian tsunami of 2004 — and it could play a massive role in disaster response around the Pacific and Indian oceans. Financing from Quad countries could also be a crucial part of building up infrastructure in the region to help build up resilience to climate change.

Halima Gikandi marked the 30th anniversary of de facto independence for Somaliland. The country of 3.6 million isn’t recognized by most other countries or international bodies, but has maintained its own government, with passports and a constitution, since 1991. Somalia has not given up its claim on Somaliland, and talks between the two have broken down. Somaliland still intends to go forward with local elections at the end of May and continue to press its case for international recognition in hopes of achieving at least another 30 years of self-government.

Paul Carroll wrote about the damage that Israel’s latest assault on Gaza has done to Palestinian civil society organizations. Airstrikes have prevented international humanitarian aid organizations from doing crucial work to serve civilian victims of Israeli attacks, for fear that their workers could be killed. For domestic Palestinian organizations, the strikes are just another part of Israel’s ongoing effort to discredit, defund and destroy them. Palestinian human rights monitors have been the targets of Israeli laws and rhetoric meant to equate human rights work with support for terrorism.

Time for some (Finnish) game theory.

The Belarusian government staked out some new territory in the realm of bad state behavior when it basically hijacked a passenger flight to arrest a journalist who was on the plane. The arrest does not bode well for Belarusian civil society and budget air travel, but it deserves some points for novelty.

Today in things that will make you feel old or young, depending on whether you actually are old or young.

Turn that rocket-propelled grenade into a shoulder-launched surface to air missile, and it could be a gnome de plume!

It’s incomprehensible that they didn’t put Andrew Card on all of these. Does nominative determinism mean nothing anymore? Also, you could do a whole dissertation on “brave female soldier” as the queen of hearts.

Presumably after reading the greatest ongoing thread on Twitter — of Brazilian police creating artistic poses for the contraband they impound — Italian police have gotten into the publicity-photo-as-massive-self-own game.