The Global and International Studies Program would like to announce our seventh Works-in-Progress speaker, Dr. Doris Buss, whose paper “Sexual Violence and ‘Conflict’ Minerals: Dis/ordering Insecurity'” will be presented on Friday, February 26th at 12pm in D199 Loeb Building. The discussant for this paper will be Dr. Ummni Khan (Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University).
All papers will be pre-circulated two weeks in advance of each paper presentation. Please register in advance using the form below in order to receive copies of discussion papers.
In 2010, the United States Congress passed an extraordinary provision seeking to regulate the trade in ‘conflict minerals’ from Africa’s great lakes region, in order to address human rights abuses, including sexual and gender-based violence. This paper takes a close look at this innovative development to consider what, if any, new spaces and tools are provided with which to offer a more complex account of sexual violence, mining and conflict in central Africa. It concludes that sexual violence becomes in/visible as epiphenomenal in the context of this new provision and the ensuring debate about ‘conflict minerals’. The terms by which this happens are important to understand in the context of new regimes of governance predicated on (self) reporting and knowledge production. The analysis here considers how the ‘problem’ of mining and conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is framed and contested in the context of this new legislative enactment, and the constrained production of knowledge about sexual violence and its relationship to the political economy of conflict that results.