Towards a World Order of Dignity

This book was written in response to a 2024 request from the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict (SRSG-SVC), Pramila Patten, inviting Evelin Lindner to apply her research on dignity and humiliation to conflict-related sexual violence and to the situation of survivors in conflict settings. Sexual violence in conflict is never only about bodies. It is also about the systematic weaponisation of humiliation. The author applies experience from her life’s work on humiliation and dignity to the phenomenon of conflict-related sexual violence. Her decades of research across continents, cultures, and disciplines provide a powerful lens to understand how humiliation is produced, intensified, and recycled in contemporary conflicts, and how it can be transformed. This publication brings that lens into sharp focus at a moment when the world can least afford to look away. The book situates conflict-related sexual violence within a wider global paradox. On the one hand, human rights norms, including the equal dignity of all people, have never been more widely affirmed. On the other hand, many communities experience daily realities of dispossession, discrimination, and violence that stand in stark contrast to these promises. When dignity is proclaimed but denied, humiliation acquires an unprecedented explosive potential. In such a context, sexual violence in conflict becomes one of the most devastating weapons of mass destruction. The book offers more than analysis, it also offers ethical orientation. It shows how humiliation operates at multiple levels - from intimate experiences of violation to the dynamics of communities, states, and the international system - and how it interacts with militarisation, economic inequality, and ecological destruction.