Gender, War and Politics


Book Description

This volume addresses war, developing political and national identities and the changing gender regimes of Europe and the Americas between 1775 and 1830. Military and civilian experiences of war and revolution, in free and slave societies, both reflected and shaped gender concepts and practices, in relation to class, ethnicity, race and religion.




Gender, War, and Conflict


Book Description

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.




Gender, War, and World Order


Book Description

Motivated by the lack of scholarly understanding of the substantial gender difference in attitudes toward the use of military force, Richard C. Eichenberg has mined a massive data set of public opinion surveys to draw new and important conclusions. By analyzing hundreds of such surveys across more than sixty countries, Gender, War, and World Order offers researchers raw data, multiple hypotheses, and three major findings. Eichenberg poses three questions of the data: Are there significant differences in the opinions of men and women on issues of national security? What differences can be discerned across issues, culture, and time? And what are the theoretical and political implications of these attitudinal differences? Within this framework, Gender, War, and World Order compares gender difference on military power, balance of power, alliances, international institutions, the acceptability of war, defense spending, defense/welfare compromises, and torture. Eichenberg concludes that the centrality of military force, violence, and war is the single most important variable affecting gender difference; that the magnitude of gender difference on security issues correlates with the economic development and level of gender equality in a society; and that the country with the most consistent gender polarization across the widest range of issues is the United States.




War and Gender


Book Description

Gender roles are nowhere more prominent than in war. Yet contentious debates, and the scattering of scholarship across academic disciplines, have obscured understanding of how gender affects war and vice versa. In this authoritative and lively review of our state of knowledge, Joshua Goldstein assesses the possible explanations for the near-total exclusion of women from combat forces, through history and across cultures. Topics covered include the history of women who did fight and fought well, the complex role of testosterone in men's social behaviours, and the construction of masculinity and femininity in the shadow of war. Goldstein concludes that killing in war does not come naturally for either gender, and that gender norms often shape men, women, and children to the needs of the war system. lllustrated with photographs, drawings, and graphics, and drawing from scholarship spanning six academic disciplines, this book provides a unique study of a fascinating issue.




War, Women, and Power


Book Description

Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.




Women and Militant Wars


Book Description

This book explores women’s militant activities in insurgent wars and seeks to understand what women ‘do’ in wars. In International Relations, inter-state conflict, anti-state armed insurgency and armed militancy are essentially seen as wars where collective violence (against civilians and security forces) is used to achieve political objectives. Extending the notion of war as ‘politics of injury' to the armed militancy in Indian administered Kashmir and the Tamil armed insurgency in Sri Lanka, this book explores how women participate in militant wars, and how that politics not only shapes the gendered understandings of women’s identities and bodies but is in turn shaped by them. The case studies discussed in the book offer new comparative insight into two different and most prevalent forms of insurgent wars today: religio-political and ethno-nationalist. Empirical analyses of women’s roles in the Sri Lankan Tamil militant group, the LTTE and the logistical, ideological support women provide to militant groups active in Indian administered Kashmir suggest that these insurgent wars have their own gender dynamics in recruitment and operational strategies. Thus, Women and Militant Wars provides an excellent insight into the gender politics of these insurgencies and women’s roles and experiences within them. This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of critical war and security studies, feminist international relations, gender studies, terrorism and political violence, South Asia studies and IR in general.




Researching War


Book Description

Researching War provides a unique overview of varied feminist contributions to the study of war through case studies from around the world. Written by well-respected scholars, each chapter explicitly showcases the role of feminist methodological, ethical and political commitments in the research process. Designed to be useful for teaching also, the book provides insight into feminist research practices for students and scholars wanting to further their understanding what it means to study war (and other issues) from a feminist perspective. To this end, every author follows a four-part structure in the presentation of their case study: outlining a research puzzle, explaining the chosen approach, describing the findings and, finally, offering a reflection on the feminist commitments that guided the research. This book: Provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on war by drawing on disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, peace research, postcolonial theory, queer studies, security studies, and women’s studies; Showcases a multiplicity of experiences with war and violence, emphasizing everyday experiences of war and violence with accounts from around the world; Challenges stereotypical accounts of women, violence, and war by pointing to contradictions and unexpected continuities as well as unexpected findings made possible by adopting a feminist perspective; Teases out linkages between various forms of political violence (against women, but increasingly also by women); Discusses theoretical and methodological innovation in feminist research on war. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Security Studies, Gender and Conflict, Women and War, Feminist International Relations and Research Methods.




Women and War


Book Description

This volume explores how art and artifacts can tell women’s stories of war—a critical way into these stories, often hidden due to the second-tier status of reporting women’s accomplishments. This unique lens reveals personal, cultural, and historically noteworthy experiences often not found in records, manuscripts, and texts. Nine stories from history are examined, from the mythical Amazons of Ancient Greece to a female prisoner of war during World War II. Each of the social, political, and battlefield experiences of Penthesilea, Artemisia, Boudica, the feminine cavaliers, the Dahomey Amazons, suffragists, World War I medical corps, and a World War II prisoner of war are intertwined with a particular work of art or an artifact. These include pottery, iconographic images, public sculpture, stone engraving, clothing, decorative arts, paintings, and pulp art. While each story stands alone, brought together in this volume they represent a cross-sectional reflection on the record of women and war. The chapters cover not only a diverse range of women from around the globe - the African continent, the Hispanic territory of Europe, Carian and Ancient Greece and Rome, Iran, Great Britain-Scotland-ancient Caledonia, Western Europe, and North America—but also a diverse choice of artwork and artifacts, eras, and the nature of the wars being fought. This book will be of value to those interested in gender across history and its interplay in the field of war.




Sexing War/Policing Gender


Book Description

Historically, there has been reluctance, from mainstream IR scholars as well as feminists, to seriously engage with women’s agency in warfare. Instead, scholarship has tended to focus on women’s activism for peace or to ignore women’s agency altogether. This book rectifies this omission by exploring the cultural understanding of actors, agents and structures of war and how can we make sense of attitudes towards women, agency and war today. By using a poststructuralist feminist perspective and by analysing empirical cases from a Western ‘war on terror’ cultural context, Ahall argues that all types of stories are informed by ideas about motherhood and maternal reproduction as the foundation of sexual difference. This does not only mean that women are judged/read/valued based on the shape of their, maternalised, bodies, rather than what they actually do, but, it means that ideas about motherhood, not motherhood itself, function to police contemporary gender norms and contemporary understandings of agency in war. Overall, this book argues that maternalist war stories function to reiterate traditional heteronormative gender roles. This is how a ‘body politics’ of war is not only policing gender norms but actually writing ‘sex’ itself. The body politics of war told through maternalist war stories is a process in which the sexing of war means the policing of gender borders, with motherhood acting as the border agent. This work will be of interest to students and scholars in areas such as gender, political violence and international relations.




Handbook on Gender and War


Book Description

This interdisciplinary Handbook offers a comprehensive and detailed overview of the relationship between gender and war, exploring the conduct of war, its impact, aftermath and opposition to it. Offering sophisticated theoretical insights and empirical research from the First World War to contemporary conflicts around the world, this Handbook underscores the centrality of gender to critical examinations of war.