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The testimonies of witnesses who testify before criminal courts provide crucial insights into the situated experience of conflict-related sexual violence. Witness testimonies highlight the complex realities and everyday lives of individuals caught up in situations of armed conflict. The evidence presented by witnesses can provide vital insights into lived experiences of wartime violence, and reveal the seemingly mundane strategies and tactics adopted by victims to cope with, survive and resist the violent and coercive circumstances of war. This article foregrounds conflict-related sexual violence witness testimonies as highly significant sources of knowledge of everyday experiences of conflict. It sets out a bottom-up, mixed-method approach for identifying and analysing the experiential accounts of those who lived through conflict-related sexual violence, while engaging with the opportunities and challenges of using witness testimony. Our approach unsettles existing notions of 'the everyday' in Peace & Conflict Studies as a synonym for narratives and practices of violence, justice and peacebuilding that are private, informal and largely hidden from view. Understanding witness testimonies requires conceptualising the everyday as an amalgam of formal and informal practices, as accessible through both elite and lay knowledges and as documented in both public and private (e.g. redacted) sources. It requires challenging taken-for-granted dichotomies that are frequently invoked to understand conflict and peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict-related sexual violence is now a conspicuous concern of academics, activists, and practitioners. However, a number of central and persistent conceptual and political problems are becoming increasingly evident in this burgeoning research field. This paper analyzes these key problems of knowledge production in the field, which concern the object and subject of research, models of knowing, and values in research. This paper then outlines the Gender Justice Methodology, which offers a new approach to studies of conflict-related sexual violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples' Rights (ACJHPR) will include international crimes of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV). This article explores the challenges the Court is likely to face in building regional and national accountability for CRSV, by considering the lessons that might be learnt from the experiences of the former Yugoslavia in prosecuting these crimes. The article focuses on the two key challenges of developing 'best practice' within regional and national courts, and of linking these prosecutions to peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction. To address these challenges, the article argues for a 'gender justice framework' of guiding principles to ensure effective and equitable CRSV prosecutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]