Gendering Global Conflict, by Laura Sjoberg

Copyrighted Material

Introduction

In 1910, Norman Angell instructed political leaders that, in a world of increasing economic interdependence, war could never “avail us anything” and that, therefore, any state that made war would be foolishly casting aside its self-interest.1 A few years later, World War I resulted in an unprecedented level of human casualties and economic devastation. When the United States joined the war, then-President Woodrow Wilson famously declared World War I the “war to end all wars.”2 In the interwar period, Lewis Mumford explained that “misery, mutilation, destruction, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principle part of the product.”3 In 1928, the signing by sixty-two nations of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which states forged an agreement “providing for the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy,” cemented this sentiment.4 A little over a decade later, World War II caused the deaths of almost fifty million people.5 Some scholars argue that war is (again) declining in the twenty-first century,6 but others note that wars remain a consistent and cyclical feature of global politics.7 Whatever our view of the frequency of war, the scholarly community in international relations (IR) and security studies has been always interested in why, given its terrible consequences, states and other actors in global politics continue to initiate wars. Though the “war puzzle” has attracted much scholarly attention, one leading commentator lamented that “much has been written about the causes of war; little has been learned about the subject.”8

Copyrighted Material

2 • I N T R O D U C T I O N

This commentator did not mean to imply that scholars had failed to produce explanations for wars. Scholarship on the meaning, causes, and consequences of war in political science is, in fact, very diverse, emphasizing different causal factors and different levels of analysis9 and drawing evidence from different eras in history. The phenomenon of war has been studied through the lenses of a number of theoretical approaches to global politics, including, but not limited to, realism, liberalism, and constructivism.10 Still, no single theory of what wars are and why they happen has become dominant. As Hidemi Suganami explains, this may be because “war is a multi-causal phenomenon, not only in the oft-noted sense that a variety of factors contribute to the making of war, but also in the less obvious sense that there are multifarious causal paths to war.”11 Perhaps scholars can agree that war’s meaning and causes are complex, and its consequences often brutal. Still, most theoretical approaches to the study of war remain widely divergent and find little common ground.

Despite our collective inability to find a consensus framework to understand or disaggregate war causation, wars continue to plague global politics. It is estimated that war caused more than two hundred million deaths in the twentieth century,12 and conflicts rage around the world in the early twenty-first century. The financial costs and human casualties of war have been of increasing concern to scholars and policy makers; the war puzzle is both as urgent and as puzzling now as it has ever been.

Gender and the War Puzzle

Several scholars have proposed pieces of, or solutions to, the war puzzle. Scholars from the realist tradition have looked to the influence of international anarchy, shifts of power between states, technological advances that favor either offensive or defensive strategies, and alliances and/or power balancing.13 Scholars from the liberal tradition have suggested that state regime type, domestic politics, trading interdependence, and bargaining are key predictors of propensities for war.14 Constructivist scholars (and others) have suggested that cultural differences, state learning, nationalism, or the salience of norms are important variables in the choice and duration of wars.15 While these

Copyrighted Material

INTRODUCTION • 3

theoretical approaches suggest different, and important, pieces of the war puzzle, traditional work on the nature, causes, and consequences of war individually and collectively omits gender analysis.16 In fact, the great majority of studies seeking constitutive understandings of or causal explanations for war do not consider gender or gender subordination as potential causes or elements of war.17 This book argues that this omission is a grave error, because the meanings, causes, and consequences of war cannot be understood without reference to gender. Using gender as a category of analysis transforms the study of war.18 As scholars fit together pieces of the war puzzle, the missing pieces become more visible, and gender is among them.

The feminist tradition in IR19 has demonstrated that the theory and practice of war have been gendered throughout modern history and that gendered elements are important causal and constitutive factors.20 Feminists have tried to communicate to the discipline that the gender “neutrality” of its work masks gender subordination rather than magically producing gender equality.21 Feminist work has redefined core concepts of security, observed new empirical phenomena, and provided important accounts of specific conflicts and security dilemmas.22 This book aims to extend those critiques and reformulations to argue that war cannot be understood without the use of gender as a primary analytical category—that a specifically feminist approach to the study of war is crucial to learning more about the war puzzle.23 While feminists in IR have done important work on gender and security that undoubtedly contributes to this puzzle, epistemological, ontological, and methodological barriers have often prevented this work from attracting a “mainstream” audience in the discipline or the attention of the policy world.24 Critics of feminist work in the security realm have argued that feminist scholarship has yet to produce a theory of war on par with those of the realist and liberal paradigms in IR, with causal and constitutive elements.25 They further insist that those who suggest the analytical importance of gender in IR have yet to systematically address the empirical observations that other paradigmatic approaches rely on as data to support their views or to bring new empirical evidence to bear. This criticism is in part a miscommunication, but in part an accurate account of feminist theory’s reluctance to engage mainstream accounts of the meanings, causes, and consequences of war.26

Copyrighted Material

4 • I N T R O D U C T I O N

In answer to that criticism, and in an attempt to reveal and analyze gender as a crucial piece of the war puzzle, this book engages feminist war theorizing.

A Feminist Approach to the Study of War

It is important, at the outset, to outline what a specifically feminist approach to war might entail. First, it is necessary to note that there is not one feminist approach to IR theory and therefore not one feminist approach to war.27 Instead, like other IR theorists, feminists can approach global politics from realist, liberal, constructivist, critical, poststructural, and postcolonial perspectives (among others). These perspectives yield different, and sometimes contradictory, insights about and predictions for global politics. This diversity, however, is a feature of all the major research programs in IR.28 Feminist work from a realist perspective is interested in the role of gender in strategy and power politics between states.29 Liberal feminist work calls attention to the subordinate position of women in global politics but remains committed to investigating the causes of this subordination, using the epistemological, ontological, and methodological assumptions of traditional IR theory.30 Critical feminism explores the ideational and material manifestations of gendered identity and gendered power in world politics.31 Feminist constructivism focuses on the ways that ideas about gender shape and are shaped by global politics.32 Feminist poststructuralism focuses on how gendered linguistic manifestations of meaning, particularly strong/weak, rational/emotional, and public/private dichotomies, serve to empower the masculine and marginalize the feminine.33 Postcolonial feminists, while sharing many of the epistemological assumptions of poststructural feminists, focus on the ways that colonial relations of domination and subordination established under imperialism are reflected in gender relations, even in relations between feminists.34 Many (if not most) feminist studies express epistemological and normative preference for a particular approach. I choose not to do so.35 Instead of referring to feminism in the singular, I refer to feminisms as a plural group, acknowledging “difference, disagreement, and dissonance

Copyrighted Material

INTRODUCTION • 5

among feminisms” but understanding them as “important contributors to a dialogue mutually interested in gender emancipation.”36 In so doing, I make the epistemological and methodological choice to present feminisms as an argument productive of a paradigmatic approach to theorizing wars rather than a singular, coherent whole.37 Using diverse feminisms, I propose “a” feminist approach to war, which engages these feminisms in dialogue with one another and with war analyses that have omitted gender. This dialogical approach brings multiple feminist voices to bear on the question of theorizing war, which separately and together constitute feminist theorizing of war and war(s).38 These various feminist approaches to IR share an interest in studying gender subordination in global politics. Defining gender, however, presents another challenge. Gender is not a box that we check on our taxes or membership in the traditional biological sex categories, male and female.39 While sex categorization is a part of gender analysis, gender is often described as a social construct,40 an institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system invented or constructed by a particular culture or society that exists because people agree to behave as if it exists or to follow certain conventional rules.41 Gender is the socially constructed expectation that persons perceived to be members of a biological sex category will have certain characteristics. The social construction of gender is complex and intersubjective.42 It is complex because gendering is not static or universal, but relational and changing. Gender can be constructed differently across time, place, and culture—interacting with other factors to produce social and political relations while being produced by them. Gender is, as R.W. Connell explained, both product and producer of history.43 It is intersubjective because genderings, while diverse, constitute a shared cognition and consensus essential in shaping our ideas and relationships, even when we are unaware of their role in our thoughts, behaviors, and actions.

I point out the intersubjectivity of gendering to note that gender is not any less “real” because it is a social construction. Genders are lived in daily lives and global politics. Further, gender is not merely derived difference, but derived inequality.44 The perceived differences between those understood as male and those understood as female create a selfreinforcing inequality of power both between persons assigned to and characteristics associated with these groups. In social life and in global

Copyrighted Material

6 • I N T R O D U C T I O N

politics, men and characteristics associated with masculinity are valued above women and characteristics associated with femininity. Connell describes this difference in the value of gender-associated characteristics in terms of the dominance of an ideal type of hegemonic masculinity in social and political life, to which all other masculinities should aspire, and of which femininities will, by definition, fall short.45 This relationship between masculinities and femininities constitutes and is constituted by gender subordination in global politics.

Using this understanding of gender, the feminist approach to war in this book combines the tools of realist (power relations), liberal (looking for women), critical/constructivist (the influence of gender as an idea), poststructuralist (discourses of gender), and postcolonial (the intersection of gender/race/imperialism) feminisms in order to analyze the meanings, causes, and consequences of war. It is easiest here to think of gender as a lens through which the phenomenon of war is studied.46 All scholarship has a lens, or a focus, that foregrounds some concerns while backgrounding others in order to make the subject matter conceptually viable and empirically limited. A gender lens foregrounds issues of gender, starting with those questions as a way to evaluate the subject matter (here, war) more broadly. Jill Steans describes some of the work that gender lenses do, where “to look at the world through gender lenses is to focus on gender as a particular kind of power relation, or to trace out the ways in which gender is central to understanding international processes.”47 Through gender lenses, then, feminisms’ approaches to global politics highlight gendered power, gendered experiences, gendered knowledge, and gendered values. Feminist scholars argue that, though most of everyday global politics lays a self-conscious claim to gender neutrality, in reality, genderings saturate every level of global politics. This book argues that war is constituted by and constitutes gender and that gendering is a key cause of war, as well as a key impact.48

Feminisms Evaluate War

A quick glance at the stories on war and militarism in the news in early 2012 shows the need to look through gender lenses to understand these phenomena. On 17 December 2011, Private First Class Bradley Manning

Copyrighted Material

INTRODUCTION • 7

of the United States Army defended himself from charges of espionage on the basis of his gender identity disorder.49 His lawyers contended that he could not control his behavior since he thought he might be a (wo)man and implied that inability to determine one’s gender identity is a sign of serious disturbance.50 On 27 December 2011, Lyric Hale argued in a Huffington Post editorial that brutal images of women being abused in Egypt and Bahrain are likely to influence Americans’ willingness to fight Iran.51 On 14 January 2012, the New York Times featured a story about a political conflict over a woman’s immodesty—between ultra-Orthodox Jews and other Israelis—risks Israel’s position vis-à-vis its Arab opponents.52 All of these stories implicate gender in the causes and consequences of conflict.

Looking at war through gendered lenses demonstrates that it is inappropriate to define, analyze, or explain war without reference to gender and gender subordination. Because of their omission of gender, many current theoretical approaches to war have inadequately conceptualized what counts as a war, who actors are in war, and the gendered values reflected in the making and fighting of wars. Gender is conceptually necessary for defining security and war, important in analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential to solutions to violent conflict in global politics.

Gender lenses suggest a group of causal variables in war decisionmaking that enrich current understandings, including structural gender inequality, a cycle of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the (often ignored) influence of emotion in political interactions, a gendered understanding of power, and states’ mistaken understandings of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gender lenses also point out that war reaches into places it is rarely if ever evaluated—such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Gender lenses reapproach, redefine, reevaluate, and reintroduce the war puzzle in IR. The feminist theoretical approach to war in this book proposes that war is productive of and reflective of gender norms in global politics, gender-based causal variables are required to understand war-making and war-fighting, and the consequences of war can be understood along gender lines. Accordingly, the book includes four major topics: discussions of the causes of war(s), discussions of the practice of war-making, discussions of the experiences of war(s), and discussions of the meaning of war itself.

Copyrighted Material

8 • I N T R O D U C T I O N

Chapter 1, “The (Genderless) Study of War in IR,” starts this work.

This chapter begins the book with a critical review of current approaches to the war puzzle in IR. It points out the systemic omission of gender in “mainstream” security studies, despite the persistent presence of women and gender in war-making and war-fighting. It sets the stage for the categorical approaches to the causes and practices of war(s) that come later in the book’s analysis, including systemic, dyadic, state-level, and individual approaches to theorizing wars’ causes, and strategic, tactical, and logistical elements of the practice of war(s). It concludes by pointing out the systematic exclusion of gender(s) from these theories and the explanatory, predictive, prescriptive, and normative perils of such an omission.

The critique of current studies of war found in chapter 1 is followed by chapter 2, “Gender Lenses Look at War(s),” which identifies what is “feminist” about feminist theorizing of war. After extending this introduction’s discussion of diversity among feminisms and addressing various strategies for dealing with that diversity, chapter 2 discusses in depth the dialogical approach to theorizing war from a feminist perspective employed in this book. The chapter concludes by engaging in a substantive and methodological journey from feminist security studies53 to feminist war theorizing.

The theoretical foundations from chapter 2 inform the analyses of the causes of war(s) that follow. This book deals with causal mechanisms that may factor into the occurrence (or nonoccurrence) of war(s), including traditionally recognized factors such as relative power, regime type, domestic politics, balancing, state satisfaction, and culture clash, as well as factors that gendered lenses suggest. Organized by “level of analysis,”54 these chapters engage traditional theories of war(s) through gendered lenses, looking for alternative accounts, questioning traditional boundaries and organization(s), and suggesting critical, reformulative, and transformative contributions of feminist evaluations.

Chapter 3, “Anarchy, Structure, Gender, and War(s),” begins this work with a feminist analysis of structural accounts of the causes of war generally and wars specifically. This chapter focuses on exploring the relevance of gender to understanding the general causes of war, or, in Kenneth Waltz’s terms, “third-image”/international system structural analysis.55 With reference to the work in feminist sociology on

Copyrighted Material

INTRODUCTION • 9

gendered organizations and cultures, this chapter sketches an approach to theorizing international system structure through gendered lenses.

It is followed by a section that makes an initial plausibility case for the argument that the international system structure is gender hierarchical, focusing on its influence on unit (state) function, the distribution of capabilities among units, and the political processes governing unit interaction. It then outlines the implications of an account of the international system as gender hierarchical for theorizing the causes of war generally and wars specifically, focusing on some places where the Waltzian account of international structure and my own feminist account might predict different outcomes in the making and fighting of wars. The chapter concludes by discussing the potential significance of theorizing gender from a structural perspective and of theorizing structure through gendered lenses.

Chapter 4, “Relations International and War(s),”56 discusses feminist (actual and potential) engagements with dyadic-level accounts of war that focus both on shared properties of states (like democracy and capitalism) and/or on the process of state interaction (like steps to war, rivalries, and bargaining). It contends that gender lenses demonstrate that these approaches take insufficient account of relations between states and often hold narrow and incomplete understandings of the components of states’ relationships. It outlines an approach to studying war at the dyadic level based on viewing “relations international” through gendered lenses, which it argues is normatively profitable and empirically advantageous for war theorizing.

Chapter 5, “Gender, States, and War(s),” moves from engaging with dyadic-level explanations of war(s) to state-level explanations of war, which focus on rivalries,57 “steps to war,”58 trading habits,59 bargaining,60 class politics,61 coalitions,62 diversions,63 and culture.64 The first section engages with theories that pair domestic gender equality and the likelihood to go to war, arguing that feminisms have more to contribute to state-level war theorizing than gender essentialism. A second section looks to gendered state identities to explain likelihood of making wars. Engaging with theories of diversion and coalition politics, this chapter argues that gender is often used instrumentally in domestic justificatory discourses of the making and fighting of war(s) and that gendered nationalisms both actually motivate state war choices

Copyrighted Material

10 • I N T R O D U C T I O N

and are used to manipulate in-state coalitions even when they do not change states’ outward war policy choices. Engaging with domestic politics and culture explanations, the chapter discusses states’ strategic cultures of hegemonic masculinities as a potential factor accounting for their likelihood to make wars, both generally and in a particular context. The chapter concludes by summarizing potential contributions of feminism(s) to studying state-level causes of war(s).65 Chapter 6, “People, Choices, and War(s),” engages individual influence, leadership, and decision-making theories of wars’ causes. This chapter argues that gender permeates every level of how “people” impact the causes of and paths to war(s), including, but not limited to, demonstrating the false nature of the “personal/international” dichotomy, interrogating inherited notions of decision-making processes, and reframing how we think about leadership and how it influences war. It begins with a section on gender, leadership, and the causes of war(s), which leads to a section that considers critically feminist empirical research that betrays the oversimplicity and falseness of the personal/international dichotomy. A third section engages approaches to people in war(s) from various critical security approaches. A fourth section, acknowledging the personal as international and the international as personal,66 considers war decision-making as relationally autonomous. The text draws from feminist political theory approaches to agency and interdependence, arguing that individual-based theories of war(s), as they are currently conceptualized, have an inappropriate understanding of what individuals are, how they make their decisions, and what happens as a result of those decisions, owing to the omission of gender analysis from their characterizations. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential contributions of a feminist “first-image” research program on war.

The book then moves to discuss the potential contributions of gender analysis to theorizing the practices of war(s) by examining warfighting through gendered lenses. According to Clausewitz, strategy, tactics, and logistics are the three major parts of the fighting of a war, or arts of warfare.67 Strategy is the plan of how to fight a war. Chapter 7, “Gendered Strategy,” includes evaluation of the theory and practice of strategy from a gendered perspective. It argues that the strategic choices that belligerents make are guided by their gendered understandings of

Copyrighted Material

I N T R O D U C T I O N • 11

their society and their opponents, and critiques strategic thought and strategic analysis through gender lenses. It then argues that two strategies—intentional civilian victimization and the deployment of private military and security companies (PMSCs)—cannot be understood causally or constitutionally without reference to gender, and goes on to argue that strategic choice more generally is gendered, with each conflict strategy, from economic coercion to infrastructural attacks to aerial bombing, displaying gendered elements and gender-differential impacts, which this chapter explores. It argues that both sex (framed as “biomechanics”) and gender (in terms of gendered nationalisms) play a role in strategic choice, and concludes by discussing the potential contributions of a feminist research program on strategy.

Tactics are the methods by which belligerents engage and attempt to defeat their enemies. Chapter 8, “Gendered Tactics,” looks at war tactics and logistics through gendered lenses. It starts at the obvious gendered tactics of war-fighting, including wartime rape and forced impregnation. It then moves on to argue that the gendered nature of tactics can be seen across all tactics, not just those tactics obviously aimed at women. A third section discussing women as weapons of war on a tactical level leads into a fourth section dealing with feminization as a tactic both between states and at the military level. The chapter then argues that the surface-level gendering of tactics is just that—only the surface level—and that one of the key genderings of war(s) at the tactical level is actually logistical—that gendered political economies and humanitarian consequences are inexorably linked to military movement and the wartime maintenance of fighting forces. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the potential contributions of a feminist research on tactics and logistics.

Chapter 9 moves from the practice of war(s) to the experience of war. Rather than accounting for the impacts of war(s) without acknowledging there are people who experience them, this chapter examines gendered lives in war(s) and the gendered experiences of war(s). It argues that the gendered role expectations for individuals in war are a linchpin in supporting the making and fighting of wars and that the gendered impacts of wars show that gender subordination is alive and well, even in a world that claims to value gender equality and gender mainstreaming, especially in times of war and violence. The first

Copyrighted Material

12 • I N T R O D U C T I O N

section uses personal narratives to explore the gendered experiences of gendered wars. The chapter then looks at gendered political economies of/in war(s) and the ways that conflicts and gender subordination support and reinforce each other in people’s economic and social experiences of everyday life during conflicts and after they have (supposedly) ended. A third section explores the gendered consequences of war(s) and militarism(s) for men, not just women—arguing that wars’ subordinating gendered impacts and implications touch more than women’s bodies and lives. A fourth section discusses war as sensed/sensual, arguing that an emotional/felt element of war’s impacts is missing from war studies literatures, even when they give attention to human rights or civilian casualties. The chapter concludes by theorizing what war would mean if it were theorized as experienced and explores the potential contributions of a feminist research program on war as experienced.

The concluding chapter, “(A) Feminist Theory/ies of War(s),” gathers feminist insights from each chapter and, with their help, proposes a feminist theory of the meaning, causes, fighting, and consequences of war. I argue that, through gender lenses, feminists can provide war theorists a marked increase in the definitional clarity and explanatory value of their theoretical insights. Additionally, and perhaps more valuably, feminist theory provides not only a missing piece to the war puzzle theoretically, but insight into addressing the war problem practically and normatively in global politics. I propose that a feminist theory of war could usefully be considered alongside, and as transformative of, other paradigmatic approaches to the study of armed conflict.