This chapter provides an overview of national and international responses to sexual and gender-based violence in DR Congo and South Africa, as well as details of relevant legal instruments and national policy frameworks. It explores how and why legislative and executive elites in both countries have adopted such similar legislation and policy platforms , and why these have resulted in such different local outcomes. The chapter traces the ways in which the Congo wars and South Africa’s transition to democracy in the mid-1990s created openings that allowed domestic and transnational human rights actors in each country to promote gender-inclusive policy. Activists who later came to comprise South Africa’s governing elite meant that domestic gender experts were uniquely positioned to influence law and policy in the aftermath of apartheid, making South Africa’s legal framework for prosecuting rape among the strongest in the world. In DR Congo, gender activists and international experts played similarly crucial roles in shaping new domestic laws, because of international stakeholders’ interventions in the state’s governance activities in the country's transition to democracy.