Sexual and Reproductive Violence as Genocide and the Prevention of Genocide in Contemporary Asia: The Cases of the Rohingya and the Uyghurs

Abstract

Building on feminist international legal scholarship, this dissertation begins from the observation that international law has long been shaped by male-centric frameworks that marginalize women's experiences and treat harms associated with women as peripheral to human suffering. It argues that this gendered framing has also distorted how genocide is legally understood and recognized. Although Article II of the Genocide Convention identifies five genocidal acts without formally ranking their severity, legal and political recognition of genocide has often privileged killing over non-lethal forms of group destruction, despite their devastating and often gendered effects.

To address these omissions, this dissertation introduces the concept of genocidal patriarchy: a specific genocidal logic that weaponizes women in the destruction of the group. Women become central to genocidal violence not because they are reducible to their bodies or reproductive roles, but because patriarchal orders make their position within the group socially and politically consequential.

The dissertation further examines the triple vulnerabilities borne by women in genocide: their exposure to external state violence as members of protected groups; their vulnerability within patriarchal social orders that attach group meaning to women; and their marginalization within international legal frameworks that continue to privilege male-centered experiences of harm. These intersecting vulnerabilities help explain why women may be central to the logic of genocidal destruction while remaining only partially visible within the legal frameworks designed to prevent and punish genocide.

Through the cases of the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Uyghurs in China, this dissertation examines how genocidal patriarchy manifests in contemporary atrocity contexts. These cases show how different forms of gendered violence and governance may converge within broader patterns of genocide. The dissertation calls for a rethinking of genocide law that attends not only to killing, but also to gendered forms of violence that attack the group as such.