Abstract
The Strongest Link: An Oral History of Wartime Rape Survivors in Kosovo is a powerful contribution to the historiography of the Kosovo War and to broader understandings of gendered violence in wartime. In the book, Anna Di Lellio and Garentina Kraja weave the oral testimonies of 20 Albanian women who survived weaponised sexual violence through a rich history of causes, course and consequences of the 1998–99 conflict in Kosovo. Until relatively recently, women's voices had been largely missing from this history, and stories of rape and sexual violence were hidden behind a veil of shame and stigma. This book puts these women's voices front and centre. It sits alongside a growing body of academic and artistic contributions that seek to foreground women's voices, such as Alketa Xhafa Mripa's installation, Thinking of You, made from dresses and skirts donated from survivors of sexual violence in Kosovo and globally, and the Heroinat Monument in Pristina. 1 The book is built around a set of intimate first-person narratives, which are set in the wider context of ethnic cleansing, state repression, nationalist agendas and the dynamics of patriarchy. It offers a richly textured and deeply human account of how gendered violence was experienced as weaponised ethnic cleansing and how lives were shaped by it in the continuum of pre, during and post-war in Kosovo. De Lellio and Kraja articulate both the historical conditions that made such violence possible and the long-term social and psychological effects that survivors have navigated in its wake.
The book begins by situating these women's lives in a gendered history of Kosovo's recent past. It follows their experiences from their early upbringing through the escalation of political tensions in the late 1970s and the eruption of war in the late 1990s. From the beginning of full hostilities in Kosovo War in March 1998 to the end of the NATO intervention in June 1999, Serbian forces carried out a state-led campaign of ethnic cleansing in which thousands of Albanian civilians were expelled from their homes, killed and tortured and over 20,000 women and girls were subjected to sexual violence. Rape was weaponised as a tool of ethnic cleansing, deployed to fracture and terrorise communities. It was, as De Lillio and Kraja show, primarily a ‘war against women’ (p. 19). What is immediately striking is how patriarchal norms, family structures and social expectations shaped their everyday lives even before wartime violence and weaponised ethnic cleansing entered their homes and communities.
What distinguishes this book from others and sets it apart is its commitment to oral history as both method and ethics. Rather than treating survivors as abstract figures in a political or historical narrative, the authors foreground the voices and experiences of women survivors, allowing the reader to encounter each woman as an individual. This approach tackles head on the ethical and political stakes of representation. It breaks apart the constraints of testimony in formal criminal justice settings, which, as many scholars have observed, sets limits on both what women can say about their experience, and, crucially, how they can say it. 2 Each of the women's voices is narrated with intimacy and with dignity, creating what De Lellio and Kraja describe as a ‘polyphonic chorus’ (p. 13), where testimonies resonate together without losing their individuality. The women's voices are weaved through separate chapters that proceed chronologically, charting histories of intimate violence, displacement, insecurity, wartime rape and sexual violence, post-war silence and stigma and the struggle for justice. We follow them through the chapters and understand how trauma is ‘written’ in their bodies (p. 189). As such, the book resonates with feminist scholarship demonstrating how war is not an abstract experience, but one that primarily involves injured bodies. 3
The book situates these experiences in the context of public and institutional responses to wartime sexual violence in Kosovo, and globally, as well as describing the social and political shifts that eventually made it possible for more women to come forward. It shows how patriarchal structures both shaped vulnerability to violence and kept it hidden. Ultimately, The Strongest Link demonstrates that these women were not simply victims of violence, but agents of change. Their stories of resilience, care, courage and tenacity in the face of extreme violence reshape historical understanding of the war and challenge the narratives that marginalised them. The book offers major contributions to historiography, gender studies and war crimes research, providing a multidimensional, gendered and textured account of the war and its aftermath.