Master's thesis laboratoryDraft research proposalThesis titleExplaining wartime rape in armed conflicts: the region (sub- )Great LakesDraft Research StatementSexual violence in armed conflict and rape in war have been part of the spoils of war since time immemorial. An inevitable consequence of the conflict, long ignored, is now widely recognized as a significant international security problem. Its disastrous effects on victims, perpetrators and local communities include forced displacement, the spread of disease, the burden of unwanted children and profound trauma of populations. Rape in war can have devastating impacts on international security and threaten prospects for peace and post-conflict reconstruction. Given the difficulties of working in this context, wartime rape has not been well studied. No part of the world has been spared from wartime rape. However, little effort has been made to gather comprehensive data, and there is no consensus as to why this is happening. The African Great Lakes (sub)region is no exception. Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda have been plagued by decades of political instability, porous borders and humanitarian crises, as well as internal conflict and widespread violence. Within these conflicts, SVACs have emerged as an important modus operandi. Although there is agreement on the use of strategic and systemic rape, many questions remain unanswered regarding its occurrence. I propose to test existing explanations of wartime rape by using a dataset of all active armed conflicts during the period 1989–2009 and then conducting explanatory case studies focused on the selected region. The main objective is to shed light on the frequency of occu...... middle of paper ......ata for other countries in the region. Furthermore, these cases were selected based on the RSC.ii theory. In the second stage of this research, I set out to explain the results obtained in the statistical analysis, focusing on selected cases.iii. For example, if genocide/politicide is found to be statistically significant, the explanation of statistical significance will be formulated and vice versa.c. Sourcesi. With Wood's articles explaining the variety of wartime rape and Cohen's articles and dataset focused on explaining civil war rape between the 1980s and 2009, Leatherman's book Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict (2011) now serves as a cornerstone of my research.ii. Cohen's original dataset, APSR article + supplementary materialiii. recommended datasets, codebooksiv. reportsv. Peer-reviewed articles, booksvi. internet sources