This collective work takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together the contributions of anthropologists, historians, legal experts, political scientists, and sociologists. The analyzed cases of rape refer to numerous countries like Bangladesh, Columbia or the Republic of the Congo. It also talks about numerous conflicts: the two World Wars as well as local confrontations such as the Greek Civil War or the clash that opposed private militias and Maoist guerrillas in Bihar. This collective body of research underlines an object all too often neglected by the social sciences. It has indeed remained marginalized in the academic field and on the battlefield. However, rape constitutes a weapon of mass terror with regards to civilian populations. It is a question of a crime occupying a central place in wars even though by and large it has been explicitly outlawed by civil and military penal codes since the beginning of the modern era.
Raphaëlle Branche, Fabrice Virigili, Viols en temps de guerre, Paris, Payot, 2013, 359 p.
