A LETTER FROM THE SYMPOSIUM ORGANISERS Dear friends and colleagues, It is our pleasure to present to you the report on a symposium entitled Accountability for conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence: Successes, challenges, narratives, and omissions which took place at the University of Pretoria from 15–17 March 2017. The symposium was jointly organised by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, and the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria. It was our aim, through the symposium, to bring together various stakeholders in accountability for ‘conflict-related’ sexual and gender-based violence with a view to engaging with histories, processes and operational successes and challenges as well as displacements, narratives and accountabilities potentiated by contemporary approaches towards, and policies for, sexual and gender-based violence. Indeed, ‘conflict-related’ sexual and gender-based violence has received a lot of attention in legal, media, and policy circles in recent years. We were interested in facilitating discussions about how this attention was manifesting in actual change, in whose name the authors of legal and policy changes were speaking, and what – and, most pointedly, who – is being included and excluded from this conversation. We purposefully had little by way of agenda for what, explicitly, should come out of the symposium; our hope was that the insights of those we brought together would guide the symposium and, indeed, the committed and thoughtful people in the room allowed the symposium to take on a life of its own and to engender critical and original ideas about how to approach sexual and gender-based violence – ideas that often fall by the wayside in much of the literature and activism surrounding the issue. We did, however, make some very deliberate decisions regarding the symposium, which we thought would best foster the kinds of conversations required. First, the symposium happened under the Chatham House Rule. This enabled us to have challenging, honest and critical conversations in ways that provided space for exploration and held each of the participants accountable. Each of the symposium participants approved the sections on their presentations in this report prior to publication. The openness with which some very difficult conversations took place is a tribute to our participants, and we are grateful for their spirit of engagement. We also made the deliberate decision that the delegates we invited would be predominantly black women. Despite the fact that black women are doing some of the most significant research, legal work and activism on sexual and genderbased violence, bear the brunt of sexual violence globally, and constitute the majority of the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s recognised victims in its current open investigations, very often conversations about sexual violence globally take place without the presence of black women. This was at once a political decision that sought to counteract the hegemonic white dominance in many international justice spaces, as well as a substantive one in recognition of the obviously limited narrations and discourses on international justice absent the theoretical, practical, and empirical contributions of black women. iv\ Accountability for conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence: Successes, challenges, narratives, and omissions