After exploring previous feminist contributions to the debate about the meaning and effectiveness of the non-combatant immunity principle, we introduce a theoretical approach to civilian victimization in war inspired by feminist thinking about the gendered nature of war and militarism.  We argue that states use “civilian” as a proxy for “women” as a Clausewitzian centre of gravity for state and nation, and therefore attack civilians to attack women to attack the essence of the enemy. We then offer empirical evidence in support of this theoretical interpretation in two forms: statistical work on the relationship between sex, gender, and other factors that the civilian victimization literature has identified as influential, and a case study about British Blockade of Germany in the First World War.  After evaluating the evidence, we argue that belligerents do not attack a gender-neutral category of “civilians” when they attack non-combatants. Instead, they attack women. Still, attacking women is not the whole story: belligerents attack women not as women but instrumentally as proxy for state and nation.

This chapter takes a broader look at women’s violence and the reception thereof in historical perspective, with particular focus on the stylized narratives surrounding women’s terrorism contemporary to it and the preservation of these gender-stereotypical accounts across time, space, and culture.  Reading women’s terrorism historically, the chapter recognizes both the historically consistent features and recent evolutions in both women’s relationships to “terrorism” and media, scholarly, and artistic responses to women, gender, and terrorism. It tells some of the stories of women terrorists in modern history, and then turns to tell some stories of gendered stories about women terrorists in the literature on women terrorists up to this point. Two lessons emerge: 1) women were participants in terrorist activities long before it became popular to pay attention to them, and 2) gendered images of women in terrorism are as old and as timeless as women in terrorism.

After briefly introducing women’s terrorism in historical perspective, this chapter provides a brief discussion of three 20th century cases of women’s involvement in terrorism that disrupt the perception of women terrorists as Islamic self-martyrs. While it is fashionable now to think of women terrorists as right-wing (Islamic) religious extremists from outside the West, the women in this chapter (from the West German Baader-Meinhof Gang, the United States Weather Underground, and the Peruvian Shining Path) come from countries where we do not usually think of women terrorists coming from, and engage in militancy for movements that are left-wing and political rather than religious.  After discussing these women, the chapter turns to look at the early literature addressing these (and other) women terrorists, demonstrating that it is not just in thinking about Islamic women terrorists that gendered expectations about and gendered interpretations of women terrorists dominate research and public perceptions, but in thinking about women’s participation in terrorism generally.

Along with other feminist theorists, my work has taken a number of different approaches to (alternatively) bridging, ignoring, minimizing, or valorizing these divides. Inspired by the work of (and conversations with) Hayward Alker, this chapter explores another, possibly more productive, direction: arguing feminist IR. With Alker, Amin, Biersteker, and Inoguchi, this chapter explores the understanding that “scholarly disciplines are constituted by their enduring differences as much as by their shared understandings” (2001, 2). Bringing feminist IR’s (internal and external) differences into dialectical-hermeneutic argumentation, this chapter proposes that feminist IR needs neither to reconcile or ignore its diversity, but instead, recognize that it is constituted not only by its similarities, but also by its contestations.

This chapter introduces feminist perspectives on international relations.  It provides a typology of feminist IR theories, outlining their major tenets with illustrations from specific authors.  Feminist theories of IR use gender as a socially constructed category of analysis when they analyze foreign policy, international political economy, and international security. This chapter focuses on feminist perspectives on international security.  Feminist security research takes two major forms: theoretical reformulation and empirical evaluation.  This chapter chronicles developments in feminist reanalyses and reformulations of security theory.  It illustrates feminist security theory by analyzing the case of United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iraq following the First Gulf War.  It concludes by discussing the contributions that feminist IR can make to the discipline of IR specifically, and to the practice of international politics more generally.

This essay will attempt to provide an overview of the development and current state of FSS, and some insight into the (potential and actual) directions of the field in the near and long-term future. It begins by tracing the beginnings of feminist work in the area of security and some of the foundational ideas that inspired FSS work.  The second section discusses the development of the subfield, and in brief, a number of the theoretical and empirical contributions of FSS work.  The third section introduces some of the debates within FSS. The fourth (and concluding) section, building on these debates, suggests some future directions for feminist work in security and poses some as-yet-unanswered questions for the growing field.

The essays in this Compendium that discuss the theory and practice of feminist research and pedagogy in IR and the ways in which feminists create knowledge claims based on our research reflect the depth, breadth, and debates in feminist IR.  Is feminist IR fundamentally about women? What role should postcolonial awareness have? What epistemological tools are necessary to seeing global politics from a feminist perspective? What, fundamentally, is gender? Several of these essays address (and contend with) the boundaries of feminist theorizing in IR directly.  Others deal with these questions and others in essays about the epistemology, methods, and methodology in feminist IR scholarship. Still others use practice as a lens to read theory – asking how feminism is practiced in global politics as a guide to understanding both what should be studied and how.  The combination of these approaches provides a theoretical and empirical richness that both reflects and furthers scholarly discussion and debate on the nature, past and future, of feminist IR. 

This chapter explores the constructed gender roles in ‘hero’ narratives about individual members of the United States military in the war on terror stylized by military press releases and the outlets that reported the stories.  It reviews the stories that the military tells and the public consumes of stand-outs like Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, Chris Carter, and Paul Ray Smith. This analysis produces two results: first, tropes of militarized masculinity and femininity pervade the military; second, the stories crafted for public consumption are, like the empire they serve, hyper-gendered.  The chapter concludes by arguing that the legitimation and valorization of both the empire and its war-making are reliant on these institutionalized ideologies of gender, which adapt to change over time and combine to present the empire as at once just (feminine) and all-powerful (masculine). It shows how these tropes are crucial to understand how gender ideologies shape the U.S. “war on terror,” as well as the national identity more generally.

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.

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.