continue, against their will, to be marked and shaped by the war. It is most interesting that Coulter employs a framework commonly adopted by other researchers, scholars, and humanitarian actors engaged with armed groups and fight- ing forces in order to grasp what has happened to these young women. Her account thus focuses on a number of elements: entry into the rebel group; experiences within that group, with a focus on roles, violence, and violations; exit from the RUF; and reception upon return and liveli- hood strategies at present. In employing this framework, Coulter goes well beyond what most other scholars on these topics have accomplished to date. Important among Coulter’s contributions is her atten- tion to the silences among her key informants. She helps us understand when silence may be about deliberate choice, healing, and survival, and when it expresses pains that go far, far beyond what words could convey. She also raises important questions about why some wartime violations—such as cutting off of hands or disembowel- ing pregnant women to identify the sex of fetuses—were widely recounted (though few admitted to actually see- ing such horrors), while other crimes—particularly sex- ual mutilations of women—though widespread and often witnessed, were rarely recounted. She shows how women formerly with the rebels have learned to narrate their stories to humanitarian actors, often through a variety of silences, omissions, and deadening of their language and emotion. She pays careful attention to the stories that unfold in her own interviews, the work of her Sierra Leonean research assistant, the narratives presented to humanitarian agencies, those running the Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programs, and the proceedings of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court) and the Sierra Leonean Truth and Rec- onciliation Commission (TRC). Refreshingly, her work moves well beyond trying to reconstruct women’s war narratives as something that can be taken and presented at face value. Instead, she further develops our under- standing of the distinction between narratives of “experi- ence and experience as expressed” in light of the present (p. 19). In doing so, she is less worried about reconstruct- ing the stories of her informants and more focused on the understanding that comes from her informants’ re-presentation, reinterpretation and resequencing of their experiences. Throughout the book, Coulter pays careful attention to the social and cultural situation within Sierra Leone during and after the war, and thereby skillfully engages some of the main debates centered around understanding armed conflict and violence through gendered and femi- nist perspectives. She challenges the notion that war is always a masculinizing endeavor, recalling how rebel boys and young men would engage in transvestite dressing using the dresses and hair extensions of women, at which times they carried out some of the most gruesome forms of violence. Drawing from the literature on rape in war, her painful and detailed discussion of the forms of sexual abuse and rape makes clear that the humanitarian discourse of these young women as “sex slaves” or “forced wives” fails to engage with the ways in which these young women experienced violence, sought to shield themselves from it, and tried to mitigate it. Furthermore, such terms obscure how these women survived, maneuvered, or tried to plan and live their lives. The author correctly posits that rape and sexual violence are socially constructed experi- ences, and that the intensity of the trauma will depend in part on the response of the society. For women victims in Sierra Leone, “war rapes thus etched everything from med- ical conditions to social stigma on their bodies,” and this resulted in “factors beyond their control that delineated their possibilities to act” (p. 134). Coulter also draws on feminist analyses of the use of pornography in wartime rapes to make sense of the fact that her informants were subjected to sex acts that they, as rural females, had never known existed—even though the known distribution of pornography was largely isolated to the capital during the time of the war. Moreover, in her damning overview of the gender-blind DDR programs, she adds a further nuance to our understanding of why some women chose not to try and enter the programs, again showing that such programs require a deeper under- standing of the local moral order. She details evidence of much confusion among civilians—and especially those for- merly associated with the rebels—regarding the mandates of the DDR, the Special Court, and the TRC. And she shows how misguided were those internationals who believed that “testifying about violence and humiliation, talking about what happened to them during the war, would be cathartic and healing for people” (p. 179). This is a sobering account of the effects of violence on a society wracked by civil war and especially on the women of such war-torn societies, who are still a long way from any redress for their suffering. The Endurance of National Constitutions. By Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 270p. $85.00 cloth, $28.99 paper. doi:10.1017/S1537592710000988 — Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University Comparative constitutionalism as a distinctive field is his- torically deep and empirically wide. Scholars of politics have compared constitutions since the days of Aristotle. And writing constitutions is increasingly a transnational enterprise, involving the melding of domestic politics, for- eign experiences, and international expertise. Some things should now be clear from an admittedly very diverse set of global experiments with writing consti- tutions: a constitution that attempts to please everyone, Book Reviews | Comparative Politics 700 Perspectives on Politics