Contemporary efforts at nation building have often taken their most conspicuous characteristics from the way in which they have drawn the relationship between men and women.¹ At their most extreme, they have been heavily marked by violence and abuse against women. For example, the subjugation of women in Afghanistan was an important part of the attempt of the Taliban to build a fundamentalist Islamic regime, and also a key issue around which opposition to the regime was mobilised in the West. Similarly, the systematic rape of women by combatant groups in former Yugoslavia or Rwanda was a widespread means of asserting the dominance of one national grouping over another, and also a mobilising theme for their opponents. These extreme examples are both material and symbolic. They are brutally material in that they involve the infliction of physical and mental injury, and they are pointedly symbolic in that they involve the conspicuous demonstration of power and domination. Similar processes can be observed in other less extreme cases, where women have been compelled to undergo oppression or diminishment in various degrees as part of the process of building or rebuilding a nation during or after conflict.