Sjoberg, Laura. 2008. "Scaling IR Theory: Geography's Contribution to Where IR Takes Place," International Studies Review

This article re-engages International Relations’ longest debates on “where” and “why” global politics happens: the levels-of-analysis debate and the agent-structure debate.  It argues for the continuing relevance of the conceptual questions contained in these debates, but critiques the inadequacy of current iterations of those debates in the IR literature.  In it, I introduce to political scientists political geographers’ concept of scales and scalar processes to replace levels, agents, and structures.  I outline the benefits of such an approach for the substance and method of IR’s studies of global politics. I then formalize a scalar approach to global politics in six principles, modeled after Morgenthau’s six principles of political realism. The article concludes with suggested directions for a scalar approach to IR, focusing on reformulations of IR’s approaches to the study of the "War on Terror."

Sjoberg, Laura and Caron Gentry. 2008. "Profiling Terror: Gendering the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terror and other Narratives," Austrian Journal of Political Science.

Robert Pape (2005) proposed a theory of suicide terrorism which characterized it as the strategic choice of rationally motivated liberation organizations.  While Pape’s model “includes” both men and women suicide bombers, it does not include the gender-based insights of feminist theory critiquing the rational actor model, the tendency of traditional International Relations theory to ignore the individual, and the portrayal of the international arena in terms of characteristics traditionally associated with masculinity (e.g., rationality, objectivity, calculation, competitive strength) while marginalizing characteristics traditionally associated with femininity (e.g., emotion, experience, personal connection, desperation).

As the “flip side” of theories of individual terrorism, however, Mia Bloom’s (2006) argument that female terrorists act (not politically but) to avenge the deaths of loved ones, because they are rape victims, or because they are unable/unwilling to have children had gender problems as well. This argument essentializes women as weak and emotional, ignoring any agency they might have.

In Mothers, Monsters, and Whores (2007), we argue that terrorism studies generally and theories of suicide terrorism specifically theorize with masculine norms in mind, and that “added” stories of women terrorists often characterize them as motivated purely by emotion, insanity, or sexuality. This article seeks to extend that critique of the gendered narratives of scholarship on suicide terrorism. It focuses on a reformulation of theories of individual violence in global politics through gender lenses.

Starting at Cynthia Enloe’s (1993) argument that “the personal is international, and the international is personal,” this article argues that a human-centered, relational autonomy approach inspired by feminist principles is more accurate than either gendered narratives or the strategic actor approach for explaining (not just women but all) suicide terrorism. The first section of the article is a feminist critique of major political science work on suicide terrorism.  The second section presents alternative suppositions about the causes of suicide terrorism based on feminist observations.  The article concludes with case studies from Palestinian and Chechen conflicts that illustrate the empirical “value added” and theoretical importance of gender-based approaches to the study of suicide terrorism.

Sjoberg, Laura. 2009. "Bentham, sanction, and Economic Sanctions." In New Problems, Old Solutions: Rethinking the 21st Century, edited by Laura Sjoberg and Amy Eckert, Zed Books.

In the 1990s, advocates of the use of economic sanctions and the conditioning of humanitarian aid as political leverage argued that economic sanctions were a peaceful solution to problems which otherwise would have required military intervention.  Coming off the successful use of economic coercion to end apartheid in South Africa, advocates saw sanctions as a way to keep dangerous states in check and to coerce reasonable states’ interests into coincidence with the interests of the international community more generally. Economic coercion was lauded as a new, peaceful alternative to war, and applied on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba, to name a few.  Though many states have recognized the humanitarian dangers of economic sanctions in large part as a result of the terrible humanitarian disaster caused by the economic sanctions on Iraq, others still see sanctions as the peaceful middle ground, as demonstrated by the Security Council’s use of sanctions to stem Irani nuclear proliferation.

While sanctions as a problem of domestic and international security are considered relatively new in the 21st century security discourse, theorists from Clausewitz’s time to the present day have considered economic sanctions when discussing the ethics of war. Clausewitz, who considered economic embargo a war tactic, laid the foundation for numerous other moral and political philosophers to consider economic sanctions and their implications for non-combatant immunity, for social contract theory, and for democratic theory.  Through the lens of Bentham’s theory of sanctions, this chapter evaluates the “new” ethical and security dilemmas of economic sanctions through the eyes of “old” ethical theories.

Sjoberg, Laura. 2009. "Feminism and Styles of Political Leadership," In Political Leadership, edited by Mikhail Molchanov and Joe Masciulli, Ashgate.

Women remain underrepresented in actual leadership and both females and femininity remain neglected in our concepts of leadership and the scholarship which examines it. This chapter begins by pointing out the sex (male) of both actual leaders and ideal-typical understandings of leadership in global politics. Despite these gender disparities in actual leadership, this essay does not focus on how to add more women to the ranks of the world’s leadership.  It critiques traditional interpretations of who counts as a leader, what counts as leadership, and how leaders make decisions. After defining “gender,” I argue that the characteristics that we value in leaders in global politics privilege masculine values.  Current understandings of leadership largely render women unqualified by default because they focus on male gender and masculine characteristics. Further, I argue that the idea of leadership is in itself gendered, because it assumes a reactively autonomous concept of human decision-making. I then explain that these genderings of the concept of leadership are reflected in most approaches to the study of leadership. The chapter concludes by proposing a feminist alternative framework for thinking about and studying leaders and leadership, based on a feminist framework of relational autonomy. 

Feminist Interrogations of Terrorism/Terrorism Studies," International Relations 23(1): 69-74 (2008).

It is important to note at the outset that there is not one feminist perspective on terrorism – but many. Like women are different; feminists are different. Like there is variety among IR theories, there is variety among IR feminist theories – IR feminist realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, post-colonialism and post-modernism. Since this short discussion piece cannot cover comprehensively IR feminisms’ various potential contributions to the study of terrorism, I choose to I present a collage of feminist perspectives on the question of terrorism. Some of these feminist perspectives are related or complementary, others are divergent and sometimes conflicting. What they share is being inspired by various observations of gender subordination in global politics.

Feminist approaches to explaining terror might appropriate feminist insights on the incompleteness of human autonomy, the unrepresentativeness of rationality, and the limited utility of strong analytical distinctions between these categories.  Feminist theory can present different readings of terrorism. Nancy Hirschmann’s work on relational autonomy might be used to argue that the decision to commit terror is part agent, part structure – how much of each is based on questions of relative power. Catherine MacKinnon’s work on gender as a derivative difference could inspire the argument that the agency an actor has in a decision to commit terror is both wholly decisional and wholly socially constrained. Christine Sylvester’s (2002) work on empathetic cooperation provides a way to see that it is possible that even the divide between terror/counterterror and the west/Islam can be bridged. Katharine Moon’s work on individuals as bargaining chips in international security can be used to find actors other than ‘terrorists’ and state leaders in international terrorism. Lisa Prugl’s work on the process of constructing gender roles could help understand the gendered constitution of terrorist subjects. Amy Allen’s work on defining alternative strategies of power from the political margins might help to understand ‘terror’ as a tool of the powerless and the powerful.   Anne Fausto-Sterling’s work can be used to analyze the gendered terrorist body as a symbolic manifestation.

"Security Studies: Feminist Contributions," Introduction to edited special issue of Security Studies, July 2009.

In this introduction, I provide a brief discussion of what it means to approach IR from a feminist perspective and a brief overview of questions of epistemology and method in feminist theorizing. I then give a summary of some of the accomplishments of and common themes in Feminist Security Studies to this point and situate feminist work in the larger field of Security Studies. Finally, I introduce the articles in this special issue as analyses of traditional issues in Security Studies through feminist lenses, explorations of the roles that women play in conflict and conflict resolution, and introductions of new or previously neglected issues to Security Studies as a result of taking gender seriously.  

Particularly, I assert goal of improving the quality and quantity of conversations between Feminist Security Studies and Security Studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. This work not only challenges the assumed irrelevance of gender; it argues that gender is not a sub-section of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, I contend that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. As such, accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics.

"Gendering Power Transition Theory," in Laura Sjoberg, ed. Gender and International Relations: Feminist Perspectives, Routledge, 2009.

According to Douglas Lemke, “in recent decades, America’s power advantage over China has diminished substantially.” While some predict that “short of a catastrophic nuclear war or domestic disintegration, one cannot but anticipate the emergence of China as the largest and most productive nation in the international system,” others “suggest that Chinese underdevelopment means that it will take more time before the GDP transition can be translated into a relative power advantage.” In this time of uncertainty about China’s development as a superpower, power transition theorists contend that, “the choice between China as a ‘strategic partner’ and China as a ‘strategic competitor’ looms large” because it could make the difference between a peaceful transition between satisfied powers and a war-like one.

One of the major approaches to the “China question” in political science is the power transition research program.Power transition theory (PTT) argues that China is rising to challenge US hegemony, and that the question of whether or not there will be a conflict turns on whether China is satisfied with the existing international order at the time of the transition.  This chapter examines the PTT research program and its predictions about China from a feminist perspective.

Feminist work has argued that research programs that fail to consider gender as a causal variable and a constitutive element lack explanatory power and empirical validity. Specifically, the omission of gender from PTT gives it a partial conceptual and empirical view of international security. The chapter begins with an introduction to the central tenets of PTT. A second section uses feminists’ insights to ask how PTT contains, reproduces, and reflects gender relations, gender stereotypes, and gender subordination. This section critiques PTT’s concept of power, its choice of actors, and the omission of gender-based variables. The third section presents a feminist analysis of the core hypotheses of the power transition research program. The chapter concludes with a brief feminist (re)evaluation of the major empirical prediction of PTT: that China is likely to overtake the US as the dominant state in global politics.

"Gender, Just War Theory, and Non-State Actors, in Ethics, Authority, and War: Non-State Actors and the Just War Tradition, ed. Brent Steele and Eric Heinze, Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Feminist criticisms and reformulations of just war theory specifically and the ethics of war more generally have argued that the tradition’s vagueness, susceptibility to political manipulation, and difficulty adapting to changes in warfare can be traced to the gendered narratives of the just warrior and the beautiful soul that the just war tradition relies on to simultaneously legitimate and (sometimes) restrain war-making and war-fighting. While these and other complaints have led some scholars to declare just war theory as intellectually irrelevant, others have suggested that a just war theory is indispensible to contemporary global politics. Feminist theorists have argued that “a new just war narrative should be based on a concept that deconstructs gender subordination rather than reifying it.” Such a narrative, feminist theorists have demonstrated, has the potential to clarify, sharpen, and humanize the principles of just war theory.  

In this chapter, I argue that a feminist reformulation of just war theory is not only generally beneficial but especially important to the just war tradition’s attempts to understand, account for, and monitor the “non-state actors” who have taken the making and fighting of twenty-first-century warfare by storm. Specifically, feminist theory critiques and deconstructs the public/private dichotomy that permits just war theory to privilege the state and reify the state/non-state dichotomy in global politics. This chapter begins by reviewing feminist observations of the gendered nature of the just war tradition. Then, it introduces the “problem” of non-state actors from a feminist perspective, arguing that the gendered nature of just war theory can be identified as a key cause of just war theory’s difficulty dealing with these war-makers and war-fighters.  It proposes a feminist reinterpretation of just war standards as the revitalization that the just war tradition needs.  It explains this feminist just war theory in terms of breaking down the public/private and rational/emotional dichotomies in ethical thought about war, and replacing them with an approach centered around relational autonomy, political marginality, empathy, and care. It then explores the insights that these reformulations provide for dealing with the non-state actors that currently confound just war theorizing by analyzing the case of a major non-state force in twenty-first-century warfare—terrorism. The chapter concludes by arguing that the added normative strength and explanatory power coming from a feminist perspective is something just war theory needs now more than ever.

"Feminist Perspectives on International Relations," with J. Ann Tickner, Handbook of International Relations (2nd ed.), ed. Walter Carlsnaes, Beth Simmons, and Thomas Risse, Sage, forthcoming, 2010.

The development of feminist theorizing in the discipline of International Relations (IR) has a number of important parallels with the evolution of gender concerns in the policy world of global politics. In the twenty years since feminist theorizing entered the field of IR, feminist scholarship in IR has proliferated in many measurable ways. This decade, the panel presentations for the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of the ISA have risen 400%, and journal publications, books, and other scholarly outputs also reflect both greater participation in the discipline by women and greater interest in gender issues. Indicators that the discipline of IR has come to take feminist scholarship seriously can also be found – including but not limited to the election of Ann Tickner as the 2006-2007 President of the International Studies Association, the 2009 publication of a feminist special issue of the journal Security Studies, increasing recognition of feminist scholarship as a paradigmatic approach to IR, and increasing inclusion of feminist scholarship in IR introductory texts.  Still, women remain underrepresented in the discipline, especially at the senior levels in a discipline that remains shaped by men and norms associated with masculinity. Feminist scholars continue to puzzle about the marginality of their work to the perceived “core” of the discipline.
 
We begin this chapter with a brief discussion of feminist theory and the meaning of gender in order to introduce the intellectual foundations of IR feminist perspectives. We then provide a brief history of the development of feminist work in the discipline, followed by an overview of feminist ideas about epistemology and methodology in the study of global politics. We then outline some of the questions that IR feminists ask in their research, particularly as those questions push the traditional boundaries of the discipline of IR. In order to illustrate how feminists are going about answering the questions they pose, we conclude this essay by outlining two issue areas with which recent feminist work has been centrally concerned, security and the global economy.

"Feminist Perspectives on Political Violence," Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence, ed. Marie Breen-Smyth, Ashgate, 2010.

Feminist research on the making and fighting of wars has urged students of security to broaden the definition of “war” and to explore women’s multiple roles in conflict with an eye for the complex relationships between gender, gender-based stereotypes, and political violence. This chapter begins by chronicling some important components of feminist work on the meaning of political violence, the people who commit political violence, and the people who are impacted by political violence. It then argues that political violence is constituted by gender “all the way down,” that is, that political violence is gendered, its actors are gendered, and its impacts are gendered. Looking theoretically at women who commit terrorist violence, this chapter contends that a broader understanding of both what gender is and what counts as “political” violence is essential to a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter of political violence. The chapter concludes with a proposed feminist reading of political violence as a gendered concept.

Reconstructing Womanhood in Post-Conflict Rwanda, in Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism, ed. Robin M. Chandler, Lihua Wang, and Linda K. Fuller , Palgrave, forthcoming, 2010.

This chapter examines discursive representations of the (landmark) inclusion of women in the governance of Rwanda in the years since the 1994 genocide.  The conventional story told of their inclusion is that women’s “victimization and endurance” during the genocide meant that they “deserve a significant and official role in the nation’s recovery. Men and women … repeatedly cited this as a primary reason women must be included in governance” (Powley, 2003: 12). Arguing that the story in Rwanda is actually much more complicated, and can be traced not only to women’s victimization in the genocide but also to their participation and perpetration, it further contends that there is an important degree to which women’s increased representation in Rwandan governance reconstructs, rather than removes, gender-stereotypical understandings of women’s roles in Rwandan society.

After reviewing women’s different roles in Rwanda during the genocide, this chapter provides a short history of their involvement in the post-conflict reconstruction process and their representation in government. A third section lays out some concerns about women’s situation in Rwanda, despite their exponential integration into the former structures of governance. It concludes by arguing that the only way to make sense of women’s increased representation in the social context of post-conflict Rwanda is to understand it as embedded in a discursive symbolic politics of gender, influenced not only by women’s roles as victims and as perpetrators in the genocide but also by traditional notions of gender.  It presents a case that women’s increased presence in the Rwandan political arena can be seen not only as women reconstructing Rwanda, but also as Rwanda’s reconstructing its images of women and femininity.  

Women and the Genocidal Rape of Other Women: Gendered Dynamics of Gendered War Crimes,” in Confronting Gender Justice: Women’s Lives, Human Rights, eds. Debra Bergoffen, Paula Ruth Gilbert, Tamara Harvey, and Connie L. McNeely, Routledge, forthcoming, 2010.

Expanding on work from my 2007 book, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (with Caron Gentry), this chapter looks at the dynamics of women’s participation in the war crime of genocidal rape against other women. The women whose actions this paper addresses participated in a variety of conflicts (from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia) at a variety of levels (from perpetration of sexual violence to leadership). It asks two (related but importantly distinct) questions about the gender dynamics of women’s participation. First, it explores both women’s motivations for participation in sexual violence and narratives of their actual behavior to gain leverage in explaining women’s violating other women. Second, it looks at how women’s choices to engage in sexual violence are portrayed in media and scholarly accounts, looking for gender differences in consumption of women’s violence in addition to its commission. The chapter looks at these questions by exploring five cases of women’s (alleged) commission of the war crime of genocidal rape. The chapter concludes with a reformulated approach to the laws and norms against genocidal rape in the international community, taking account of women’s roles in the crime not only as (often) victims but also as (sometime) perpetrators.