Whilst sexual violence has been an offence associated both with war‐ and peacetime throughout history, its rise to the tables where international peace and security are negotiated, represents a significant shift. This article continues the scholarly conversation about conflict‐related sexual violence and its emergence as a “hot topic” on academic, political, and activist agendas. Specifically, we ask how and why criminal law constitutes the ultimately meaningful response to such violence. Building on frame analysis, we address how the fight against conflict‐related sexual violence has become the fight against impunity. We examine what imageries of victims and perpetrators, causes and consequences key actors within interstate diplomacy and human rights advocacy evoke to drive this development. We argue that these narratives shape the political discourse on conflict‐related sexual violence, which may in turn influence the perceived political maneuverability in the face of such harms.

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In response to recent demands to make use of international criminal justice institutions' archives for social scientific research, this article develops a theoretical approach to international criminal justice called narrative expressivism. Narrative expressivism considers criminal justice as a potent source of information about past crimes-yet also, as a site that impacts on present and future societal understandings of mass violence, promoting a particular structuring of thought. As such, narrative expressivism addresses what kind of knowledge international criminal justice, its institutions and archives, provide the empirical basis for. Theorizing expressivism through a narrative lens, narrative expressivism shifts the emphasis of legal expressivist approaches from facts to stories, from punishment to process, from purpose to function, and from the normative to the descriptive.

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This qualitative literature review provides an overview of the proliferating research field that research on sexualized war violence has become. The article critically reviews some of the main theories on sexualized war violence in light of five basic and interrelated dimensions: terminology and conceptualizations, etiological approaches, disciplinary grounding, contextual emphasis, and, lastly, the policy implications these dimensions imply. The review involves a discussion of critical contestations within the field and an outline of research gaps that still need exploration. Sexualized war violence is a research area that warrants criminological attention; it is an aim of this article to suggest possible theoretical and empirical directions that such inquiries may take.