Feminists have argued that the civilian immunity principle is constituted by a gendered story of (male) “just warriors” legitimating wars to protect their female “beautiful souls”  back home -  one proves one’s manliness in war (individually and collectively) by “protecting” the feminine nation “back home.” Women then are a symbol of national pride and national purity, and protecting them means protecting the state, nation, or group. This illusion of protection, then, both defines the civilian immunity principle, and provides a justification for fighting wars. A potential implication of this understanding is that, if belligerents fight wars for “their” women and children back home, one wins an absolute victory by destroying one’s opponent’s casus belli, “their” women and children. The resulting hypothesis, then, is that states attack civilians to attack women as the symbolic center of state and nation.

This book begins with a history of civilian victimization in wars and conflicts, and then lays out this feminist theoretical approach, examining the role that gender plays in the causes and impacts of intentional victimization of civilians in war and conflict, with an eye towards anticipating when belligerents will target civilians, addressing the root causes of civilian victimization, and reducing instances in which belligerents target civilians intentionally. We then test the theoretical interpretation two ways: with large-N data analysis, and then through four case studies of civilian victimization in war and conflict: the British blockade of Germany during and after World War I, the Soviet offensive in Germany in 1945, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Rwandan genocide.

The book puts these theoretical and empirical parts together to argue that it is possible to understand belligerents’ intentional targeting of civilians through gendered lenses. The symbolic loss that belligerents are looking to inflict on their opponents is “their” women and children, insomuch as women (their children, households, and way of life) serve as a symbolic proxy for the state or nation that the fighters fight for and fighters’ ability to protect them serves as a justification for their fighting and a validation of their masculinity (and therefore self-worth).

Rape Among Women combines an empirical account of major instances of women’s participation in genocidal rape in 20th and 21st century history with a theorization of that participation through gender lenses.  Empirically, five case-study chapters explore in what capacity, how, and why women participate in and perpetrate rape. Theoretically, the book explores women’s perpetration of genocidal rape as gender subordination, examining the implications both for how we understand the making/fighting of wars and how we understand gender relations.

The puzzle that this book seeks to address is one that, in some ways, interrupts the discourse of genocidal rape as a crime that men commit against women. While that characterization is, as detailed above, largely accurate, women have participated in, encouraged, and even led genocidal rape. If genocidal rape is one the most extreme sites of women’s marginalization, a key threat to women’s security, a communication of domination, and an integral part of the system ensuring the maintenance of the subordination of women, how can we make sense of women’s perpetration of such an act? Why do women commit an act that subordinates women, and what does it mean when they do? With this question comes a whole host of other questions about women who commit genocidal rape.  Why are they largely invisible in the international media and legal discourses surrounding genocidal rape? When women accused of or involved with genocidal rape do appear in politics, the media, and the courts, how are they characterized? How is the apparent contradiction between their participation in genocidal rape and its gender-subordinating implications resolved in those narratives, if it is? This book aims to look at the dynamics of women’s participation in the war crime of genocidal rape against other women. It asks both why women participate in genocidal rape and how their participation is consumed and presented in media and scholarly accounts.

As we begin the second decade of the 21st century, it has never been clearer that gender matters in global politics. Gender has been on the political agenda of most state governments, as well as the United Nations Security Council, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, and a number of other multinational governmental bodies. This book focuses on and incorporates that reality into a theoretical and empirical introduction to international relations, building on, critiquing, and reformulating theorizing about global politics through feminist lenses.

The textbook opens by providing evidence that gender is a pervasive power structure in global politics, guiding divisions of power, violence, labor, and resources and playing a key role in the preservation of race, class, sexual, and national divisions in global politics. After introducing this theoretical framework, the textbook appears much like a “normal” IR textbook – with chapters on different paradigmatic approaches to the study of global politics. The difference between this text and others on the market (e.g., Goldstein, Baylis and Smith, etc.) is that, as it explains each theoretical approach and provides examples used as evidence to support or rebut each theoretical approach, it also provides a critical feminist analysis of each paradigm. These analyses are accessible and in plain language, relating to the empirical and theoretical interests of IR theorizing traditionally and extending and pushing its boundaries all at once.

The distinctiveness of such a textbook is this: this isn’t a book solely for a “gender and IR” class, and “gender” shouldn’t be just a chapter in an IR text that you have to take another course to learn about. Instead, IR is fundamentally different when viewed through feminist lenses, and that argument, while often made, has rarely been explained and supported in textbook form. We tell our students, in monographs and textbooks, that you “cannot think about IR without thinking about gender” - this book means to supply them with the tools to do just that.

Like other books in this series, the objective of this one is to provide an introduction its subject matter (gender, war, and conflict) that is at once accessible to a generally educated audience and informative and useful to students and scholars in international relations. It explores the key ways in which gender is integral both to the overall structure of war and conflict and the day-to-day events in particular wars and particular conflicts. How can thinking about gender help us unpack and understand not only what happens to women and men during wars, but what wars are more generally? This short volume looks to provide an answer to that question.

International organizations (like the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, to name a few) and state governments have becoming increasingly cognizant that thinking about gender is essential to understanding most if not all of the processes in the international arena, including but not limited to the making of wars and the keeping of peace, international trade, labor, migration, health, and communication. These organizations and the governments that make them up have increasingly emphasized “mainstreaming” gender – including it as a crucial consideration when analyzing empirical situations and providing policy prescriptions. The scholarly literature on wars and conflicts, however, lags behind the state of the art in the policy world on these issues – often, gender is not mentioned in core texts on war and militarism, despite its actual importance and the conceptual notice it is increasingly receiving among stakeholders in global politics. This book asks what war and conflict would look like if we “mainstreamed” gender in our observation and analysis of them, and argues that doing so is a crucial step to make visible gender hierarchy, gender-based expectations, gender’s intersections with race, class, ethnicity, and religion, and what happens to ‘women’ and ‘men’ in wars and conflicts. It contends that we fully understand gender only when we think about it in the context of war and conflict, and that we fully understand war and conflict only when we think about its gendered aspects.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325.  A group of [mostly] men got together and passed a resolution mainstreaming gender in the Security Council and related UN bodies. The active clauses in Resolution 1325 require the consideration of gender in global governance, conflict, post-conflict resolution, and other arenas of international politics. It explicitly calls upon a “gender perspective” to change the gendered impacts of the Security Council’s global policies. Was this a watershed moment in gender history? Why would these [mostly] men decide (and their masculine-dominated governments agree) that they need to think about gender every time they think about anything? Were the Security Council and its fifteen member-state governments suddenly converted by feminists? Was it the pervasive nature of women’s groups’ advocacy combined with a political opportunity? Was it a good old-fashioned sense of moral rightness? More cynically, was it the knowledge that they could give into the advocacy and appeal to the moral right by passing an unenforceable resolution?  I believe all these explanations, which others have put forth, hold some weight in accounting for this and other similar puzzles of the security sector explicitly taking account of gender. 

In this article, however, I advance a fourth explanation that I believe played a larger role than it has been given credit for: strategic interests. This explanation inspires this paper to explore the (often positive) relationship between feminism and realism. An evaluation of the positive relationships between feminism and realism serves three primary purposes: first, suggesting that gender emancipation may not be the only motivation for gender-based law-making and exploring the implications thereof; second, it helps to explore the reasons behind these policies’ implementation weaknesses.  It may serve the secondary function of demonstrating the confluence of interest to those who hold power and have thus far not perceived an interest in engaging gender on non-strategic terms.

We use two cases to examine the instrumental use of gender stereotypes by and on behalf of women. The first is Women Strike for Peace, a movement, which originated in the early 1960s United States and, using explicit maternalist rhetoric, was instrumental (along with other peace organizations) to the passing of the Test Ban Treaty of 1963. The second is the integration of women into the political structures of Rwanda in the post-genocide era, where (women’s and others’) arguments about Rwanda’s need for peace and women’s peacefulness propelled women into positions of political power. While there are many differences in time, place, culture, and movement structure across these two cases, we find in both of them the instrumental and genuine employment of maternalist rhetoric by women and for women.

If International Relations (IR) has been slow to accept feminist theorizing, and the development of feminist theorizing in IR has occurred later than in other disciplines, queer theorizing is an approach rarely mentioned, and even more rarely taken seriously, in IR’s delineations of potential theoretical lenses through which to evaluate global politics.  What it might mean to “queer” IR is as foreign now as what it might mean to “gender” IR was thirty years ago before feminists started writing in the discipline consistently.

Some might argue that this omission in the canons of IR’s analysis is costless – that IR is no worse off without the ruminations of queer theorists bemoaning the heterosexism of daily social and political life, since such heterosexism is neither structural in global politics nor operative in state decision-making. Still, some theorists have suggested that such a response to queer theorizing is a misreading both of queer theorizing and of its potential importance as a tool to analyze and understand global politics. For example, Spike Peterson argued that the normalization of exclusively heterosexual desire serves the functions of maintaining the biological and social reproduction of nations, differentiating group identity, and shaping political ideologies, such that “in the context of systemic violence (within and between groups), heterosexism may be the historically constructed ‘difference’ we most need to see – and to deconstruct” (1999, 56). Perspectives like Peterson’s suggest that, not only is queer theorizing relevant to IR, it provides a unique perspective unattainable without thinking about not only gender but sex and sexuality as markers of identification and difference in global politics.

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.

Constructivism is an approach to the study of IR that focuses on norms.  But what is the relationship between constructivism and normative approaches to IR, those that argue the ought rather than the is?  Are constructivists (focused on the social construction of global politics, particularly intersubjectivity and co-constitution) and critical theorists (interested in identifying and changing existing structures of domination) really fellow travelers on the same “side” of the third debate? Or are there differences that matter, and stakes in those differences? Some recent scholarship argues that constructivism is in fact well suited to the normative study of IR, either through the study of norms directly, or because of a thin and permeable line between constructivist and critical IR.  While avoiding the IR sandtrap of boxing and isolating “paradigmatic” approaches, we argue, on the contrary, that constructivism is unsuitable as a tool of normative analysis.  The application of interpretive theory to normative analysis does justice to the epistemological underpinnings of neither, and the claim of a permeable line between constructivism and critical theory rests on a weak reading of the purposes and strengths of each approach.

Critics of the non-combatant immunity principle have described it as shallow, outdated, infeasible, underspecified, ineffective, biased, and susceptible to manipulation. In previous work (Sjoberg 2006), I have argued that these flaws are the result of and reflective of the immunity principle’s inseparability from gendered sex role stories about male just warriors and female beautiful souls which legitimate war, fantasize protection, and render actual protection impossible. More recently, Jessica Peet and I (2011) have recognized that these gendered narratives also provide belligerents with a warrant and a justification to victimize civilians (as a proxy for women) intentionally. This chapter asked what just war theories would look like if wars were not fought “for” women, “over” women, attacking women, and/or “protecting” women. It proposes revising just war theorizing putting aside the gendered combatant/civilian dichotomy , i.e., just war “without civilians.”

"the inseparability of gender hierarchy, the just war tradition, and authorizing war" for Cian O'Driscoll and Tony Lange, eds. just war: the state of the art (united states institute of peace press, forthcoming), submitted and under review

In this chapter, I am interested in the question of the authority of the just war tradition, particularly as it relates to a function of authorizing and/or legitimating wars. I explore whether the just war tradition generally (and the civilian immunity principle that I see as a fundamental foundation of just war theorizing regardless of the telos it serves) is net positive or net negative for international society, normatively or practically. I ask these questions through gendered lenses, both because this is the perspective I use to analyze global politics generally and war ethics specifically, and because I think the answer to the question of the ultimate utility of just war theorizing is bound up in whether or not it is possible to divorce the just war tradition from its gendered pathologies. This chapter, then, starts with a section that explores gender-based critique of the just war tradition. It then lays out a roadmap for how to evaluate whether these gendered problems with the just war tradition are cosmetic and mutable or fundamental and immutable. A third section argues that the gendered pathologies of the non-combatant immunity principle specifically and just war theorizing generally are inseparable both from the tradition and from its role in authorizing or legitimating war(s). Having made the case that, through gendered lenses, the just war tradition is a net liability, the conclusion of this chapter briefly explores potential alternative directions.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the meaning of gender and moves to discussing the study of gender, generally and in the discipline of International Relations (IR) specifically.  It then explores the contribution of feminist work to the study of global politics, both as a whole field of “feminist IR” and then as different feminisms uniquely.  After laying that groundwork, the chapter briefly discusses feminist contributions to two major areas in IR: security and political economy.

The aim of the book is to make a significant contribution to the study of gender and war by producing a volume that provides a snapshot of the state of the field, with chapters that address a wide range of relevant issues. The contributors will include both established scholars and newer entrants to the profession. The focus will be on providing an overview of the key areas of current research and making use of contemporary and fairly recent historical examples (that is, no contributor will be asked or expected to examine events that occurred before the First World War). The book will be divided into four parts, with each part covering a distinct aspect of war (opposition to war, conduct of war, impact of war and aftermath of war) and exploring major issues and debates about the ways in which gender and war are interrelated. It is envisioned that each part of the book will include some chapters that address the theme of the part in broad, conceptual terms and others that focus closely on particular elements, examples or cases.

My chapter, Gender-Based Violence, which would appear in Part Three of the book (Gender and the Impact of War), will explore the relationship between war and gender-based violence, how it affects women and men and also including some discussion of war-related violence within military families.

“morality, legality, and health: the influence of the grounds of abortion legality on abortion-related health issues” for Lyn Boyd Judson and Patrick James, eds. women's global health: norms, state policies, and future prospects (prospectus and sample chapters currently under review), submitted and under review

A substantial literature discusses that, globally, when abortion is illegal, women’s health suffers both directly (from illegal abortions and pregnancy) and indirectly (from impacts of poverty). This literature seems, however, to “stop at the door” of the legality of abortion – assuming that making abortion legal will solve most if not all of these problems. This chapter asks whether that assumption is justified. It is interested in whether the positive effects for women’s health are the same across countries that legalize abortion. In particular, this chapter explores three hypotheses. First, it looks at whether the positive impact of legal abortion is tempered in places where poverty is extreme. Second, it looks at whether the degree of abortion legality (i.e., the situations in which abortion remains illegal) affects the positive health results of legalizing abortion.  Finally, controlling both for poverty and the degree of legality, it asks whether the legal grounds on which abortion became legal impact the health benefits of legalization.

While women remain underrepresented in actual leadership, 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 actual leaders and the gender (masculine) of ideal-typical understandings of leadership in global politics. Despite these sex and 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,” the chapter makes the case that the characteristics that we value in leaders in global politics privilege masculine characteristics and devalue feminine ones.  Contemporary understandings of leadership largely render women unqualified by default because they focus on male sex and masculine characteristics. The chapter makes the case that the idea of leadership is in itself gendered, because it assumes a reactively autonomous concept of human decision-making. These genderings of the concept of leadership are reflected in most approaches to the study of leadership. The chapter discusses feminist alternative frameworks for thinking about and studying leaders and leadership, based on relational autonomy.
Section 1 provides definitions of key concepts, including gender, feminism, and leadership through those lenses. It discusses the genesis of feminist scholarship about leadership in different disciplines, and why the feminist critique evolved. Section 2 outlines feminist critiques of gendered ideas of leadership and leadership studies, focusing on the association between masculinity and leadership in different paradigmatic approaches to the study of leadership. Section 3 focuses on feminist alternative understandings of the concept of leadership and the potentials for understanding how leaders are/could be picked. Section 4 explores the stones feminist approaches to political leadership thus far have left unturned, and some of the remaining questions in two main areas: theoretical development and engagement with the “mainstream.”  Section 5 suggests directions for future research and includes important sources to read.

This chapter uses U.S.-led economic sanctions on Iran to demonstrate the utility of employing various quantitative tools to serve critical, emancipatory theoretical ends in Security Studies. It shows that theoretical geometry can map discourses of sanctions justification; abstract algebra can illuminate algorithms in sanctions bargaining; statistical techniques can show relationships between constitutive factors (such as race, gender, and religious tropes and hierarchies) that make sanctions imaginable; and complexity theory can analyze the multi-level performances of sanctions as securitized and Iran as an ‘enemy.’ Overall, the chapter critiques the “quantitative=positivist”/”qualitative=”positivist and non-positivist” assumption that dominates much of Security Studies. It sees a positivist view of quantitative techniques as unnecessarily narrow, and the emancipatory potential of quantitative work as yet to be fully uncovered. Using quantitative tools for critical ends gives us the potential to know more about sanctions on Iran (and Security Studies generally) than we could know without this innovation.