This article explores how sex and violence were part of the everyday making of the soldier in the Peruvian armed forces during the internal armed conflict between 1980 and 2000. In-depth interviews with Peruvian veterans indicate the importance of sex and violence in soldiers’ experience of becoming a combatant. The article analyzes the ambiguity in soldiers’ narratives about sex and violence, coercion, and consent, and how they are implicated in both receiving and enacting sexualized violence. In particular, authors discuss veterans’ accounts of collective experiences of sexualized hazing, abuse of women and girls, porn and prostitution, and references to gang rape. Soldiers, while in the army, experience intimacy through performative practices of sex and violence—which profoundly affect their interactions with one another—and the violence they perpetrate against enemy populations. These military intimacies, encouraged through institutional as well as cultural practices, help explain the prevalence of widespread sexual violence during the conflict.

This article looks at the extent to which Peruvian women have been able to use a legal and institutional framework designed to combat domestic violence, despite its significant defects, in order to transform the authoritarian forms of communication that prevail in their families, organisations, and communities. Using in-depth interviews with women in Lima, Huancavelica and Ayacucho, the article suggests that while democratisation from above may often result in limited transformations in many policy areas, we must be attentive to the way in which democratisation can be appropriated, transformed and reinvigorated from below.