Although the explicit criminalization and efforts to prosecute sexual violence as an international crime are relatively new when compared to the long historic presence of these crimes in times of conflict, the international judicial response to such crimes is already breaking new ground in attending to the needs of individual survivors even while trying to establish a trail of mass brutality. The stories represented in this volume are very human whether of the survivors of these crimes or of those advocates dedicated to the prosecution of such violations or of the countless others who become involved as field workers or judicial officials. What this volume highlights is, amongst other things, that the issue of sexual violence is not an academic or theoretical subject far removed from people, but is very much an issue of individuals and communities caught up in waves of violence. An issue that concerns and affects us all, and that therefore needs to be recognized and addressed on multiple levels in order to be prevented and prosecuted. It further underscores the need to involve survivors and others in the peace-building process following a conflict beyond judicial process and the punishment of the perpetrators of these acts.

The juxtaposition of single acts of extreme violence against a backdrop of mass brutality of course is one of the reasons why these crimes have been difficult to address. For one thing, a conflict environment is not congenial to the systematic gathering of evidence and the carrying out of orderly judicial and legal process. Yet, strides have been made to prosecute those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but less so when the focus has been on sexual and gender based crimes.

The 1990s proved a turning point for international law and international institutions. In Europe the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought on the one hand hope that freedom and democracy would be restored in many countries, but also led to the destabilization of countries in Central Europe with unexpectedly bloody consequences. On a more global level, the aftermath of decolonization, in conjunction with shifting power balances after the end of the Cold War, ushered in unprecedented episodes of mass killing and brutality. It seemed to take the international community by surprise. The killing of an estimated 800,000 citizens in Rwanda in 1994 and the killing of an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 during the Yugoslav conflict are but two examples of the tremendous human toll taken by these post-Cold War conflicts. Embedded in these numbers are the many untold acts of sexual violence, predominantly against women and children, yet increasingly sexual violence against men is coming to the foreground. Despite the surge of international and noninternational armed conflicts reflecting severe breakdowns of the rule of law, the 1990s will also be remembered as a decade which marks important and innovative steps towards advancing international justice through the development of new codes of law and legal institutions to uphold them.

Although crimes of sexual violence and efforts to punish them can be traced to ancient times, a focused international effort to end impunity for sexual violence and gender-based crime has been much longer in coming. Since the 1970s concerted efforts of the international women's movement to end the silencing and to politicize the problem of violence against women, eventually led to the recognition that sexual violence and rape are systematically used as weapons of war. This historical shift in perspective on violence against women translated into international legal recognition of the discriminatory nature of violence against women and as a violation of the fundamental human rights of women. Since the early 1990s this is firmly established in binding international human rights law.

It should furthermore be noted that the occurrence and severity of sexual violence in times of war and conflict cannot be isolated from wider cultural and social dynamics which to a large extent condone sexual violence against women as an unfortunate yet inevitable part of social life, particularly when the victim and perpetrators are intimate partners.

In the previous chapter, we outlined the basic components and interactions of the normative and operating systems respectively. What happens when there is a change in the normative system? The framework and discussion in Chapter 2 indicated that changes in the normative system do not always lead to commensurate transformations in the operating system as are implied in other treatments. Such alterations might not be needed, but it could also be the case that even desirable shifts in the operating system lag behind or do not occur at all, leaving the two systems in a state of imbalance. What our framework did not provide at that point, however, was a specific model that gave a causal explanation for when and why operating system changes occur (or not). In this chapter, we provide such a model, consistent with the tenets of our theoretical framework.

Normative change comes most commonly in the form of a treaty that creates new rules in a substantive area such as patent rights or the treatment of diplomatic personnel. For example, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (1994) obligates states to mitigate the effects of drought, among other responsibilities. Less common would be changes from alterations in international customary law or law crafted in international bodies (e.g., UN Security Council) empowered to authorize legally binding decisions. For example, the imposition of sanctions on Libya following the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 is an instance of changing rules, albeit very narrow and potentially time bound.