The Bangladesh War of 1971—in which up to 3 million people were killed, and hundreds of thousands of women raped—seemingly has its roots in strange cartography. As University of Chicago professor Rochona Majumdar puts it, the 1947 Partition between India and Pakistan was geographically “very weird,” with the nation of Pakistan split into two noncontiguous land masses.

Four women are raped every five minutes in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a study done in May 2011 by three researchers, including SUNY’s Tia Palermo. “These nationwide estimates of the incidence of rape are 26 times higher than the 15,000 conflict-related cases confirmed by the United Nations for the DRC in 2010,” says Palermo.

In February 2011, protests broke out in Benghazi, the second largest city in Libya, against the more than 40-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi. During the protests, security forces fired on civilian protesters, causing a broader uprising that led to the establishment of the National Transitional Council (NTC), an interim governing body in opposition to Gaddafi’s regime.

The Egyptian Revolution began on January 25, 2011, with millions of Egyptians demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The revolution, while predominantly nonviolent compared to other Arab Spring protests, saw a number of violent clashes between security forces and protesters.

Despite Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war being declared over in May 2009, scholars continue to describe the post-conflict state of the country as “fragmented.”

In March 2003, after decades of tension, fighting erupted in Sudan’s western Darfur region between Sudanese government forces and rebel groups such as the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of Darfuris fled. Government troops and allied militia forces, called the Janjaweed, attacked villages and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, systematically raped women, and murdered whole communities.

The Rwandan genocide, which took the lives of an estimated 800,000 people, the majority of whom were Tutsis, erupted on April 6, 1994. Fueled by ethnic divisions between Hutus and Tutsis dating back to Belgium’s colonial rule, which began after the First World War, the killing was complete in just 100 days.

The 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia was marked by intense sexualized violence that ruined the lives of old women and young girls alike. One hallmark of the terror was the creation of “rape camps” in which women were tortured and violated repeatedly. The fractured history of the Balkans led to three years of war from which the region is still recovering today.

Virtually unexplored until recently, sexualized violence in the Holocaust took many forms, faces, and insidious paths. Among the more than 6 million Jews killed were an unknown number of women, probably thousands, who were raped—in camps, in hiding, in ghettos. The perpetrators were Nazis, fellow Jews, and those who hid Jews. There are few records of this particular form of suffering for many reasons, including no records being kept of rape, that few women survived, and that Nazis were specifically forbidden from sexually touching Jewish women because of race defilement laws called Rassenchande—hence, some scholars have been loath to believe sexualized violence was extensive.