As researcher Cynthia Cockburn stated in her work titled War and Security, Women and Gender: An Overview of the Issues, Gender & Development, “To be a woman in an armed conflict is to be doubly vulnerable – as a civilian and as a woman. It means experiencing the brutality of war not just as a generalized victim of violence but as a target of gender-specific violence that is often sexual in nature” (Cockburn, 2013). Throughout the entirety of this website, we will be mentioning the concept of this double-danger on many occasions, either related to intersectionality or to remind us that women almost always have to worry about two different things: how something is going to affect them and how something is going to affect them as women.

In the specific case of armed conflict, we understand that gender-based violence, sexual assault and feminicide are the “second” layer of the conflict’s effect. This does not imply that it is a less important face of the issue, but rather it tries to show that whenever the discipline of IR sits down to analyze a conflict, it is necessary that at least someone decides to put on the “gendered” glasses and considered that conflict’s effects on civilians are not always on the same line. Some qualities often bring that line to an even more gruesome and violent sphere.

This analysis aims to relate militarised masculinities to the UN Peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. Militarised masculinities refer to the assumption that masculinity is forged in the military.

It tends to suppress the emotional aspect and support patriarchal hypermasculinity, and hierarchical power structures, exclude women from leadership roles and perpetuate male-dominated spaces, impunity towards the perpetrators and constantly gendered othering (depicting women as inferior and therefore legitimizing exploitative and abusive behaviour. To tie all of these together, militarized masculinities have persisted because there is a generalized cultural normalization, accepting and overlooking harmful behaviours and assuming they are inherent to men’s nature.

But perhaps there is one aspect that is particularly relevant for this article: gender violence (especially sexual assault and rape) as another weapon, a tool to inflict pain and instil shame on the “enemy”. In the words of author and expert Rosa Shindler “Militarized masculinities within peacekeeping create a culture where hyper-masculine traits are idealized, fostering conditions for SEA to thrive as both a tool of dominance and a mechanism of shame” (Shindler, 2016).

The case study that connects directly to the concept and growingly fascinates academics of IR is that of the sexual abuse and trafficking networks by UN peacekeepers in the Balkans around the 1990s.

During the 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia, a series of conflicts arose in the Balkan region. These wars were marked by ethnic tensions and violence among the people who lived in the region, leading to widespread atrocities that included ethnic cleansing and genocide. As a measure to mitigate the atrocities that had just taken place, The United Nations deployed peacekeeping missions (in particular to Bosnia) to help stabilize the situation and protect civilians who were recovering from the aftermath of the war. However, these protectors of stability and defenders of human rights ended up becoming the very perpetrators of violence and terror, taking advantage of thousands of women who were in vulnerable situations. Kathryn Bolkovac is an American police officer who was hired by  DynCorp corporation to join the Blue Helmets corps in Bosnia during the aftermath of the war in 1999.

During her stay in Bosnia, she was able to witness how several of the peacekeepers themselves were not only engaged in prostitution with young women who had been trafficked, but they had established a complex sexual trafficking network that involved kidnapping the women, transporting them, keeping them in various clandestine brothels for the use of the UN personnel themselves and even murdering them. (Bolkovac and Lynn, 2011). “Bolkovac uncovered this network of brothels and bars at which kidnapped women were enslaved to “service” peacekeepers, where the police and humanitarian workers were frequently involved in not only the facilitation of forced sexual abuse, and the use of children and young women in brothels, but in many instances became involved in the trade by racketeering, bribery and outright falsifying of documents as part of a broader criminal syndicate” (Vulliamy, 2012).