• Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006)
• Mothers, Monsters, and Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (with Caron Gentry)(2007)
• Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures (edited with Carol Cohn)(2009)
• Rethinking the 21st Century: New Problems, Old Solutions(edited with Amy Eckert)(2009)
• Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives (2009)
• Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War (2009)
• Gender, War, and Militarism (edited with Sandra Via)(under review)

Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006)

Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq offers a feminist critique and reconstruction of just war theory. It points out gender biases in the just war tradition and suggests alternative jus ad bellum and jus in bello standards that emphasize women, political marginality, and empathy. Laura Sjoberg applies this feminist just war theory to analyze the wars in Iraq since the end of the Cold War--the First Gulf War, the war of sanctions, and the Second Gulf War. By examining international political discourse from and about Iraq, it shows where war generally and just war specifically are gendered. Through the stories of key just war characters like Jessica Lynch, this book reveals where women are omitted and subordinated in global politics. Sjoberg suggests that dialogue and empathy replace righteousness in just war thinking for the good of human safety everywhere and concludes with alternative visions of Gulf War policies, inspired by feminist just war theory.

Praise for Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq :

"A new and distinctive feminist voice on war! Sjoberg grabs hold of the trickiest issues of justice and war making, as well as war avoiding, and shakes everything up. I especially welcome her use of empathetic cooperation to re-frame feminist thinking on war. This rigorous and reflective study will be a benchmark work for years to come."
— Christine Sylvester, Lancaster University

"What greater challenge for feminists than justifying war and the (gendered) violence it entails? Sjoberg bravely goes where others fear to tread and in this timely book delivers a persuasive account of the Iraqi wars and how feminisms enable more adequate and applicable just war theory."
— Spike Peterson, University of Arizona

See the acknowledgments here, as well as the bibliography.

Mothers, Monsters, and Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (with Caron Gentry, 2007)

A woman did that? The reaction to the recent proliferation of public attention to women’s violence in global politics has been very gender-conscious. Women are capturing hostages, engaging in suicide bombings, hijacking airplanes, and abusing prisoners more frequently than in our historical memory. Moreover, they are doing so on the front page of the New York Times and other major, international newspapers. Women are not supposed to be violent: feminists who study global politics and international security critique the masculine violence of interstate relations.

This book addresses this problematique by studying women who encourage or commit political violence. It recounts popular stories of violent women as irrational or insane-- mothers, monsters, or whores. The book critiques the public and scholarly responses that deny women’s agency in their violence, arguing that agency denial is gender subordination with different stripes. It argues that women are actors in global politics, relationally autonomous and responsible for their decision-making. It sees gender subordination in global politics through the lens of the treatment of violent women, arguing that, until women's choices are recognized, even in the most difficult and uncomfortable areas, gender emancipation will never be achieved. It concludes with insights for criminology, international relations, and gender studies.

Here's some feedback:

‘It's fascinating to see some myths bite the dust.  Sjoberg and Gentry shake down the women-as-mostly-nonviolent-victims-of-men’s wars myth with accounts of women war enthusiasts and perpetrators.  More, they show how women’s violent activities can exhibit agency in international relations rather than pathology.  Everyone will want to read this’
Christine Sylvester, Professor of International Relations and Development, Lancaster University

'Reading Mothers, Monsters, Whores underscores the urgency for us all to  come to grips with the reality of women wielding militarized violence.  Sjoberg and Gentry reveal graphically the way we construct media images that prop up patriarchal ways of explaining the world'
Cynthia Enloe, Clark University, author of Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link

You can find the table of contents here.

Women and War: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures (with Carol Cohn, 2010)

This textbook strives to introduce readers to the complex relationships between women and war, while simultaneously providing them with analytic tools crucial to understanding these relationships and their gendered implications.  It begins by providing an introductory “hook,” designed to foster questions about women and war through lively examples from different historical and regional contexts.  It then includes the equivalent of a “nuts & bolts” chapter, providing readers with the conceptual tools that they will need to read and understand the chapters that follow.  It includes a discussion of the necessity of studying women in the context of gender, and war in the context of the wider social systems that produce and attempt to recover from it.  This chapter introduces gender as a system of division of labor/power and symbolic structure, the relevance of feminist analyses of gendered nature of war/war discourse, the changing nature of warfare, the centrality of femininity and masculinity to war, and the concept of “gendered organizations.”  These “tools” are brought together to serve as the analytical framework to understand the book’s three substantive sections.

The first substantive section discusses women’s war politics.  It contains two chapters. The first addresses the long tradition of women’s anti-war movements, interspersed with rarer but existent women’s movements in support of war. The second discusses the symbolic deployment of women’s gender in war-making and war-fighting. It covers the idealization of women as the prizes of war (ie, Helen of Troy), as the innocent who are protected by war, and as people that good wars save from bad people (ie., Afghan women and the Taliban.

The second substantive section asks how women participate in and are impacted by wars. Throughout the section, chapter authors focus on women’s experiences of war and women’s organization in response to those experiences. Women experience war in multiple ways: as soldiers, as fighters, as civilians, as caregivers, as sex workers, as sexual slaves, as refugees and internally displaced persons, as anti-war activists, as community peace-builders, and more. This section includes chapters which attempt to locate women in war and see how war changes their lives.  It studies women who participate in wars, either as soldiers in organized militaries or as members of paramilitaries, revolutionary groups, and terrorist groups. It examines the effects of wars on women’s livelihoods, on their health, and on their status in families and society. It examines the disproportionate rate at which women are displaced during the fighting of wars, and the gender-subordinating experience that women have in refugee camps or other locations for displaced persons. This section concludes with chapters which examine the intimate connection of sexual violence and war, both at the individual and state levels.

The third section begins with the premise that “war” is not a discrete event, but part of a continuum of processes and experiences; therefore, this section looks for “women in war” both before the shooting starts and after it officially ends. It looks at the long, strong history of women’s peace movements, and contrasts that with a history of women either advocating or being used as a justification for war. It looks at women’s informal peacemaking work, as well as (barriers to) women’s participation in formal peace processes.  It also explores women’s experiences of and in peacekeeping operations. This section studies the increasingly active role international NGOs and international organizations have taken in creating a “women, war and peace” agenda,” and examines its implications for women in war zones. It concludes by discussing the role of women in and the gendering of post-conflict reconciliation procedures.

The textbook’s final chapter is entitled “War and the Shape of Women’s Lives”. It reviews the substantive contributions of the subject-based chapters in terms of the theoretical framework outlined in Chapter II.  It is followed by a glossary, a list of references for future reading, an index, a list of contributors, and perhaps a list of experts in each substantive field.

The rough table of contents is here.

New Problems, Old Solutions: Rethinking the 21st Century (edited with Amy Eckert)(2009)

The twenty-first century quickly demonstrated that it was a century of very different threats than the one on which it followed.  The shocking attacks of September 11, 2001, carried out by a terrorist organization, put the US and the rest of the world on notice that the greatest threats could come from the most unexpected sources.  A few years into this new century, other threats from equally unlikely sources populate the security agenda.  These new threats, exemplified by North Korea and its weapons program, the potential avian flu epidemic, and environmental degradation differ starkly from the Cold War era, when threats emanated from great powers.  Just as these threats require new strategic thinking, they also require new ethical reasoning.  The ethical norms of the international arena, including human rights standards and laws pertaining to armed conflict, evolved in that era of great power threat.  While they have continued relevance to this new international landscape, they need to evolve with the new realities of the international system.  This book is a contribution to the effort of adapting ethical reasoning to the new security landscape.

Though there has been no shortage of work on ethical approaches to 21st-century warfare, the great majority of it has focused narrowly on the tenets of just war theory or on the moral statements of current leaders in foreign-policy. This project looks to get away from that narrowness and reinvigorate the timeless tenets of political philosophy for their contributions to current security problems.  It is based implicitly on the argument that scholars of international security are so caught up in the newness of their current dilemmas that they are failing to take advantage of older ethical literatures that make a real contribution to understanding “new” problems.  It does so by applying the insights of ancient, Enlightenment, and 20th century ethical theories to the 21st century’s “new” security dilemmas.

Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives (2009)

It was fifteen years ago that Ann Tickner's observation that the provision of national security theory and practice has been, and continues to be, an almost exclusively male domain. This observation put gender on most International Relations syllabi and was heralded as likely to begin a productive debate involving international relations scholars, feminist thinkers, and others concerned about security in the most inclusive sense. Feminists aspired to move the suspicion of officially ungendered IR texts to their subversion and to replace their theories and even skeptics recognized that their insights would fundamentally change IR's greatest debates. Despite this initial hope, Tickner herself has become aware of "awkward silences and miscommunications" in some areas of IR brought about by a lack of understanding between more traditional IR audiences and feminist scholars which illustrate a gendered estrangement that inhibits more sustained conversationsbetween feminists and international relations scholars in certain areas. The study of international security is one area where gender scholarship and mainstream scholarship have largely failed to engage in a productive conversation.

Even though scholars have been slow to integrate the study of gender and security, the practice of global politics has refused to wait for an adequate scholarly framework to integrate gender analysis and international security theory and practice.  The passage and implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (gender mainstreaming Security Council operations) shows that gender is a salient concern in global governance.  The integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration, and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity to actors on all fronts in global security.  Attention paid to the gender of security officials like Madeline Albright and Condoleeza Rice shows that global politics is asking about the effects of gender on security leadership, even if Security Studies is not.  The rising volume of commentary on gender integration and equality in the United States military demonstrates that gender matters in global security, whether scholars recognize it or not.  Given the rising salience of gender considerations in the practice of global politics, it is clear that international security cannot be adequately defined or explained without examining its gender dimensions.

If gender analysis is crucial to international security, however, the discipline of IR does not reflect the importance of gender-based work.  Gender in security is undertheorized, and the work that is produced in the area is not given its due attention or credit. IR scholars generally and feminists specifically would benefit from productive conversations to explain and understand the role of gender in shaping global security, as well as how gender is conceptually and empirically affected by global security. This edited book aims to jumpstart and set the tone for that discussion.

Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War (2010)

Women can frequently be found among the most salient images of war. One of the iconic images from September 11, 2001 was that of crying widows of firefighters who died in the attack.  Official stories about the United States' invasion of Afghanistan were filled with discussions of how the war could save Afghan women from the terrible men of the Taliban.  One of the early heroes of the United States' war in Iraq was Jessica Lynch, a blonde "teenage girl" prisoner of war who captured Americans' attention. Women's exposure to disease, their risk of malnutrition, their experience of wartime rape, their vulnerability as civilian casualties, and their moves into the legions of combat have become important issues in the policy world.

Though women and gender are increasingly important in state war discourses, the academic field of International Relations (IR) has, for the most part, observed, rather than set the pace for this trend.  While there is a lot of important work on gender and security, epistemological, ontological, and methodological barriers have often stopped this work from attracting a mainstream audience or the attention of the policy world. Gender-based work in Security Studies is often met with a somewhat chilly initial reception and receives little lasting incorporation into the field's research agenda.

This book looks to bridge this divide by establishing and expanding a research program of specifically feminist Security Studies. While not denying the importance of previous feminist redefinitions of the core concepts of security, their observations of new empirical phenomena, and their important accounts of specific security dilemmas, this book aims to provide a definitive answer to mainstream IR's demand that feminist IR construct a coherent research program, and with it, a theory of war. It seeks to do so while maintaining the unique and important insights that feminist IR brings to what we know and how we know it about global politics.

Critics of feminist work in the security realm have argued that feminist scholarship has yet to produce a theory of security or a theory of war on part with those of the realist and liberal paradigms in IR, with causal and constitutive elements. They further insist that feminist IR has yet to systematically address the empirical observations that realist and liberal scholars rely on as data for their views on war and security. In other words, feminist IR has yet to demonstrate that (not just sex but) gender matters on their terms in addition to in ways that are important to feminist theory and research. This book aims to achieve that goal.

Feminist scholarship, on the other hand, has argued that the theory and practice of war has been gendered throughout modern history; that gendered elements at all levels of global politics are important causal and constitutive factors. Feminists in IR and Security Studies have tried to communicate to the discipline that gender neutrality masks gender subordination rather than magically producing gender equality. They have argued that war-making and war-fighting cannot be understood without the use of gender as a primary analytical category. This book aims to provide a sophisticated and in-depth understanding of that perspective, readable to the scholars whose work it criticizes.

While demonstrating the value of feminist approaches to international security to the discipline of IR, this book hopes to add depth and diversity to feminist scholarship.  Feminist IR has studied war, for the most part, from an anti-war normative perspective. Feminist scholars have expressed discomfort studying war directly because to do so might be seen as an implicit endorsement of the violence that seems so antithetical to feminist normative understandings. Without letting go of these normative understandings, this book sees war as a systemic force affected by and affecting gender. As such, it looks for the causal and constitutive relationships that make up war, patterns in war-making and war-fighting, and the causes and consequences of conflict more generallyfrom a feminist perspective.

See the Gendering Global Conflict pagefor more information as the project progresses.