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I recently completed 19 months of field research in El Salvador, Peru and the United States. This research falls in the areas of conflict and security studies, human rights and transitional justice.

Working Papers

Principals, Agents and Wartime Sexual Violence: An Analysis of Variation in Peru, 1980-2002

Presented at APSA 2010 Download the full article

This paper explores one half of the debate between opportunistic and strategic explanations of violence, namely that sexual violence is unfortunate, but inevitable during the "chaos of war" when leaders cannot effectively monitor or control the self-interested behavior of their soldiers. That this is the prevailing conventional wisdom, often cited by political and military leaders when confronted with reports of abuse, mandates that the opportunity model of sexual violence be given careful consideration and subjected to rigorous empirical testing. I find that the profile of sexual violence victims is statistically different from that of other human rights violations. In Peru, victims of sexual violence are both male and female, are more educated, are less likely to members of rural indigenous communities, and are not members of the population to whom soldiers had the most access. Moreover, I find that the military command was present during and permitted a substantial proportion of these sexual assaults. This evidence demonstrates that opportunism may offer a partial, but ultimately incomplete, explanation of sexual violence during the Peruvian civil war.

Current Publications

Wartime Sexual Violence in Guatemala and Peru

International Studies Quarterly (2009) 53, 445–468 Download the full article

This article is a comparative analysis of sexual violence perpetrated by state armed forces during the Guatemalan and Peruvian civil wars. Focusing on the type of violation and the context in which it occurs provides new insights into the motives behind its use in war. It introduces a new data set on sexual violence compiled from truth commission documents and nongovernmental human rights organizations’ reports. The data reveal that members of the state armed forces perpetrated the majority of sexual violations, that rape and gang rape are the most frequent but not the only abuses committed, and that women are the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual violence. Aggregate patterns suggest that state authorities must have known of mass sexual abuse and failed to act in accordance with international law. Moreover, some evidence suggests sexual violence is used as a weapon of war. However, mono-causal models cannot sufficiently account for the variation and complexity in its use. Even within the same conflict, sexual violence can serve multiple functions in different contexts and at different points in time.

Digging in the Archives: The Promise and Perils of Primary Documents

Politics & Society 2009; 37; 75 Download the full article

This article explores the methodological obstacles to research on wartime sexual violence and the extent to which they can be overcome with archival research. It discusses issues of concept formation, counting victims of human rights abuse, and coding violations. It compares figures from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, an analysis of the Commission’s published materials, and an analysis of the primary documents and finds that (1) the number of reported cases of sexual violence is significantly higher than the 538 cited by the Commission, (2) men were more often the targets of sexual violence than previously thought, and (3) sexual humiliation and sexual torture were common practices during the war.