Colloquium: How Can Historical Research Help Reduce Sexual Violence Committed by Soldiers in Times of War? First Thoughts

  • Date: Jan 28, 2020
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Jan Plamper
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
  • Room: Small Conference Room
  • Host: Center for the History of Emotions
  • Contact: sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2019/2020 colloquium:

Jan Plamper, Goldsmiths, University of London

How Can Historical Research Help Reduce Sexual Violence Committed by Soldiers in Times of War? First Thoughts

Modern wartime sexual violence, particularly the rape of women perpetrated by men, is much studied yet poorly understood. While we know a lot about the psychosocial fallout and while legal-ethical thinking in the 1990s evolved to prosecuting rape as a crime against humanity, our knowledge about the actual how and why remains patchy. Consequently, explanatory models—anthropological constant (esp. in recent evolutionary biological guises), a specific type of masculinity, the symbolic humiliation of nation-states embodied in women, etc.—can beneficially be complemented by others. Jan Plamper is in the process of setting up an interdisciplinary research center and would like to test some ideas about how to best study war-related sexual violence so that the prevalence of the practice ultimately declines.

Jan Plamper is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Associate Researcher at the MPIB, where he was Dilthey Fellow from 2008 to 2012. He edits a Cambridge University Press Element series on “Histories of Emotions and the Senses” and is the author of The New We. Why Migration Is No Problem: A Different History of the Germans (Das neue Wir. Warum Migration dazugehört: Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen, S. Fischer, 2019), The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015), and The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale, 2012).

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