
Alice Mushagalusa K. joined SWOP as a PhD Fellow in june 2019 and graduated in December 2023 as a Ph.D in Sociology. Beside, Alice completed her Masters Degree in Industrial Sociology at Wits University in 2014 after completing her Honours Degree in 2013. Her Ph.D research report presents the relationship between wartime rape, gender and militarism in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). She maintains that wartime rape in the DRC is rooted in the Belgian colonisation during which people’s identities were politicized. In her comparative analysis of the 1996 First Congo War and the 2004 Kivu Conflict, she develops a three-fold argument to show that wartime rape has not always been ubiquitous in the DRC but became a lexicon that the perpetrators utilised to place divergent claims related to their customary land, military, political power ambitions, gendered ethnic identity, and citizenship aspirations.