Gendering Global Conflict

Laura Sjoberg positions gender and gender subordination as key factors in the making and fighting of global conflict. Through the lens ofgender, she examines the meaning, causes, practices, and experiences of war, building a more inclusive approach to the analysis of violent conflict between states. Considering war at the international, state, substate, and individual levels, Sjoberg's feminist perspective elevates a number of causal variables in war decision-making. These include structural gender inequality, cycles of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the often overlooked role of emotion in political interactions, gendered understandings of power, and states' mistaken perception of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gendering Global Conflict also calls attention to understudied spaces that can be sites of war, such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Her findings show gender to be a linchpin of even the most tedious and seemingly bland tactical and logistical decisions in violent conflict. Armed with that information, Sjoberg undertakes the task of redefining and reintroducing critical readings of war's political, economic, and humanitarian dimensions, developing the beginnings of a feminist theory of war.

Expanding on the issues she originally explored in her classic work, Gender in International Relations, J. Ann Tickner focuses her distinctively feminist approach on new issues of the international relations agenda since the end of the Cold War, such as ethnic conflict and other new security issues, globalizations, democratization, and human rights. As in her previous work, these topics are placed in the context of brief reviews of more traditional approaches to the same issues. She also looks at the considerable feminist work that has been published on these topics since the previous book came out. Tickner highlights the misunderstandings that exist between mainstream and feminist approaches, and explores how these debates developed in the new environment of post–Cold War international relations. Acclaim for Tickner's Gender in International Relations: "For all who seek new ways to think about and understand world politics" —Political Science Quarterly "Tickner... rethinks from a feminist point of view virtually every conventional category used by theorists and practictioners of international relations."—Susan Moller Okin, Stanford University

This compelling, interdisciplinary compilation of essays documents the extensive, intersubjective relationships between gender, war, and militarism in 21st-century global politics. Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly—and uniquely—considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered? Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.

“This volume is interesting both because of its global focus, and its chronology up to the present, it covers a good century of changes. It will help define the field of gender studies of humanitarianism, and its relevance for understanding the history of nation-building, and a political history that goes beyond nations.” - Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History and ARC Kathleen Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney, Australia This volume discusses the relationship between gender and humanitarian discourses and practices in the twentieth century. It analyses the ways in which constructions, norms and ideologies of gender both shaped and were shaped in global humanitarian contexts. The individual chapters present issues such as post-genocide relief and rehabilitation, humanitarian careers and subjectivities, medical assistance, community aid, child welfare and child soldiering. They give prominence to the beneficiaries of aid and their use of humanitarian resources, organizations and structures by investigating the effects of humanitarian activities on gender relations in the respective societies. Approaching humanitarianism as a global phenomenon, the volume considers actors and theoretical positions from the global North and South (from Europe to the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia as well as North America). It combines state and non-state humanitarian initiatives and scrutinizes their gendered dimension on local, regional, national and global scales. Focusing on the time between the late nineteenth century and the post-Cold War era, the volume concentrates on a period that not only witnessed a major expansion of humanitarian action worldwide but also saw fundamental changes in gender relations and the gradual emergence of gender-sensitive policies in humanitarian organizations in many Western and non-Western settings.

The war on terror has been raging for many years now, and subsequently there is a growing body of literature examining the development, motivation and effects of this US-led aggression. Virtually absent from these accounts is an examination of the central role that gender, race, class and sexuality play in the war on terror. This lack of attention reflects a continued resistance by analysts to acknowledge and engage identity-related social issues as central elements within global politics. As this conflict spreads and deepens, it is more important than ever to examine how diverse international actors are using the war on terror as an opportunity to reinforce existing gendered, raced, classed and sexualized inter/national relations. This book examines the official war stories being told to the international community about why and against whom the war on terror is being waged. The book will benefit students, scholars and practitioners in the areas of international relations, women's studies and cultural studies.

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men. Women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, but only recently have they been allowed to join state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist organizations in unprecedented numbers. This begs the question - how useful are traditional gendered categories in understanding the dynamics of war and conflict? And why are our stories of gender roles in war typically so narrow? Who benefits from them? In this illuminating book, Laura Sjoberg explores how gender matters in war-making and war-fighting today. Drawing on a rich range of examples from conflicts around the world, she shows that both women and men play many more diverse roles in wars than either media or scholarly accounts convey. Gender, she argues, can be found at every turn in the practice of war; it is crucial to understanding not only ‘what war is’, but equally how it is caused, fought and experienced. With end of chapter questions for discussion and guides to further reading, this book provides the perfect introduction for students keen to understand the multi-faceted role of gender in warfare. Gender, War and Conflict will challenge and change the way we think about war and conflict in the modern world.

-- Political Science Quarterly

The global political arena is (again) in a time of crisis. Different sources pay attention to different crises: the Global Financial Crisis, the Debt Crisis, the Crisis of ISIL/Daesh in Iraq and Syria, the Crisis of Israel and Palestine, and the Iran Nuclear Crisis have gotten significant attention in media coverage of global politics. But those are not the only crises that scholars and practitioners discuss. Environmentalists warn of ecological crisis, health scholars warn of disease crises, cyber-security experts suggest a coming information crisis, and migration experts warn of population crises. Feminist work on global politics has addressed many of these crises - historical and contemporary - in crisis language and without it, as well as a number of the non-crises that looking for women and gender in the international arena draws into focus. That work, however, had generally not explicitly theorized the conceptualization of crisis, its gendered dimensions, and/or gender-based crises as such. Across this book, feminist conversations about crisis in global politics suggests that a single feminist approach to, definition of, or politics of crisis is impossible to find. That same variety of work, though, makes a strong case that paying attention to crises in the world and to the manufacture of crisis rhetoric alongside events in global politics is not only generally important but an important place for feminist scholarship, feminist political activism, and direct attention. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.