The Strongest Link: Rape as Strategy, From Kosovo to Today’s Wars (10/29/26)

Anna Di Lellio (New York University) is joined by literary translator Ellen Elias-Bursac for a discussion of The Strongest Link: Rape as Strategy, From Kosovo to Today’s Wars, the book she co-authored with Garentina Kraja (Oxford University Press, 2025). Drawing on oral history, Di Lellio and Kraja present the testimonies of women who survived weaponized rape during the 1998–1999 Kosovo War, situating their accounts within a broader history of state repression, ethnic cleansing, and unmet justice. Through these survivors’ own words, readers glimpse what it means to have one’s life altered and undone by a violent regime, by war, and by patriarchal rules, and what Kosovo, in turn, can teach us about sexual violence in conflict and its long-term consequences.

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