That violence can be intimate and intimacy violent is hardly a novel insight, experience, or observation. While the meshing of brutality, cruelty, desire, and erotics have been the subject of much feminist consideration, particularly in relation to understanding sexual violence mostly in peacetime settings, there has been less attention to these entanglements in relation to warring. Furthermore, the significance of ‘the sexual’ and its relation to violence in ideas about the politics and practices of sexual violence have been contentious and confusing terrain in feminist theory. How then can we recognize ‘the sexual’; violence; sexual violence? In this talk I will explore some of the many ways the relationship between sex and violence have been conceived in various bodies of literature and legal texts across the war-peace continuum and in accounts of sexual violence among both perpetrators and survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I do so by posing the threefold question: what is sexual and what is violent about sexual violence; and how is the sexual constructed in relation to violence? Better understanding how sex and violence may mesh and, vitally, how they are being held apart in different strands of feminist thought and in different empirical and legal sites globally might help us to both recognize and attend to the harms of sexual violence.