(with Jessica Peet) Gender and Civilian Victimization in War (Routledge, 2019).

Traditional narratives suggest that killing civilians intentionally in wars happens infrequently, and that the perpetration of civilian targeting is limited to aberrant actors. Recently, scholars have shown that both state and non-state actors target civilians, even while explicitly deferring to the civilian immunity principle. This book fills a gap in the accounts of how civilian targeting happens, and shows that these actors are in large part targeting women rather than some gender-neutral understanding of civilians. It presents a history of civilian victimization in wars and conflicts, and then lays out a feminist theoretical approach to understanding civilian victimization. It explores the British Blockade of Germany in World War I, the Soviet ‘Rape of Berlin’ in World War II, the Rwandan genocide, and the contemporary conflict in northeast Nigeria. Across these case studies, the authors lay out how gender is key to how war-fighting actors understand both themselves and their opponents, and therefore plays a role in shaping strategic and tactical choices. It makes the argument that seeing women in nationalist and war narratives is crucial to understanding when and how civilians come to be targeted in wars, and how that targeting can be reduced. 

(with J. Samuel Barkin) International Relations’ Last Synthesis? (Oxford University Press, 2019). We argue that IR theory is currently stuck in a rut much like the neo-neo synthesis of the 1980s, built out of a similarly limiting alliance of the neo-neo synthesis’ opponents. Like the ‘wall’ of the neo-neo synthesis, we argue that the constructivist-critical theory synthesis is (intentionally or not) a political agreement which distracts attention from the ‘big questions’ about global politics which theorizing in IR could and should address. The underspecification and overreached application of genericized constructivisms and critical theorizing in IR make efforts to address these kinds of questions more fraught and less effective. We contend that these implications make it necessary to critically reevaluate figurations of constructivist/critical IR to correct for the failure of clarity in constructivist and critical IR.

“Failure and Critique in Critical Security Studies.” Security Dialogue 50(1)(2019): 77-94.

In this article, I argue that debate imitates scholarship, which imitates debate. Using perspectives from both my policy debate career and my research career, this article argues that the enterprise of critique, whether in critical security studies or elsewhere, is always and already failing and failed. It proceeds in four sections. The first section sets up my entry into the problems of/with critique. The second section analyzes the types of dissonances inherent in the production of critical security studies scholarship. The third section theorizes those dissonances as failures – arguing that failure itself is a part of in and of critical security studies. The conclusion discusses where to go from, during, and in a world of failed critique in critical security studies.

“Bearing Peace and War: Sex, Motherhood, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees,” in Troubling Motherhood: Maternality in Global Politics, eds. Lucy B. Hall, Anna L. Weissman, and Laura J. Shepherd (2019)

This chapter engages a feminist analysis of marriage and family generally, and motherhood specifically, in (causing and resolving) conflicts between Spain and France in the 1635-1660 Franco-Spanish War and its aftermath. In so doing, it hopes to gain both empirical and theoretical insight into the ways that marriage, marriage consummation, and motherhood made the state, both territorially and representationally. Suggesting that, quite literally, ‘making state is making sex’ (Peterson 2013, 57), this chapter argues that 17th century Spain and France were in part made in the (imaginaries of and then the physical instantiation of) the uterus of Maria Teresa, Hapsburg princess of Spain and Archduchess of Austria until her marriage in 1660 to Louis XIV of France (Fraser 2010). It begins with a brief discussion of the historical context of the conflict, and the circumstances of the marriage (and peace). A second section theorizes the relationship between marriage, sexuality, motherhood, territory, and sovereignty evidenced in the politics around Maria Teresa’s marriage, her sexual relationship with Louis XIV, and in (political concerns about) her (actual and potential) offspring. A third section links the representations of Maria Teresa’s motherhood to the later wars of Spanish succession, tying sovereignty to motherhood in dynastic marriage. The chapter concludes with a theoretical exploration of consummation and reproduction as relates to the the making of the state.

(with Helen Kinsella) “Family Values? Sexism and Heteronormativity in Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) Research,” Review of International Studies 45(2) (2018): 260-279. 

In this article, we critique the subset of evolutionary theorizing in IR self-identified as Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) in four sections. First, we go over FEA’s main argument that reproductive interests are the original and key cause of violence in global politics. Second, we break down the definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality used in FEA, demonstrating a lack of complexity in this analysis which causes many problems, including but not limited to sex essentialist and heteronormative characterizations. Third, we argue that FEA’s failure to reflect on the history and context of evolutionary theorizing, much less contemporary feminist critiques, facilitates its mistaken endorsement of the state as a vehicle to stop male violence. We conclude by outlining the stakes of failure to correct for FEA’s mistakes for feminist, IR, and security research, as well as international security policy practice.

(with Caron E. Gentry and Laura J. Shepherd) The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Security (Routledge, 2018) 
The volume is based on the core argument that gender is conceptually necessary to thinking about central questions of security; analytically important for thinking about cause and effect in security; and politically important for considering possibilities of making the world better in the future. Contributions to the volume look at various aspects of studying gender and security through diverse lenses that engage diverse feminisms, with diverse policy concerns, and working with diverse theoretical contributions from scholars of security more broadly. It is grouped into four thematic sections:

  • Gendered approaches to security (including theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches);
  • Gendered insecurities in global politics (including the ways insecurity in global politics is distributed and read on the basis of gender);
  • Gendered practices of security (including how policy practice and theory work together, or do not);
  • Gendered security institutions (across a wide variety of spaces and places in global politics).

“Jihadi Brides and Female Volunteers,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 35(3) (2018): 296-311.
Decades ago, Cynthia Enloe called for a research agenda looking for where women are in war and conflict. Enloe recognized that women play active roles in and are affected by wars and conflicts, but are often ignored in news coverage, policy analysis, and scholarship. The current conflict in Syria and Iraq appears as a counterexample: hundreds of millions of Google results mention women and the Islamic State (IS). Subjects vary widely: the stories cover female victims of Daesh, female recruits to Daesh, and women who fight Daesh. This article explores the hypervisibility of women in this conflict, looking for lessons about sex, gender, and conflict. The first part analyses discourses in sample of major news reports, evaluating how different women around IS are represented. It finds that agency is removed from both female victims and female IS partisans, while it is exaggerated for women who fight against IS. This corresponds with emphasis on different gendered traits for differently positioned women. After tracing how gendered representations, the article applies theories of gender and conflict to understand how women have become central to the fighting and coverage of the conflict in  Syria and Iraq. It concludes that paying attention both to the empirical presence of women and to the co-constitution of gender, war, and conflict augment understanding for this war, and across conflicts.

(with Kelly Kadera and Cameron Thies) “Reevaluating Gender and IR Scholarship: Moving Beyond Reiter’s Dichotomies to Effective Synergies,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(4) (2018): 848-870.
We seek a more accurate review of, and reflection on the gender and international relations (IR) literature than that offered by Reiter. Our evaluation corrects misunderstandings related to key dichotomies (mis)used in analyzing scholarship: sex/gender, positivism/nonpositivism, and epistemology/ontology. It also underscores the comparative strengths and weaknesses of different types of research in order to identify more fruitful possibilities for synthesis. We make the pluralist case that gender and IR research is at its best when it is multimethod, epistemologically pluralist, multisited, and carefully navigates the differences between feminist analyses and large-n statistical studies. The potential payoff of careful, synergistic engagement is worth any risks.

(with J. Samuel Barkin) Interpretive Quantification (University of Michigan Press, 2017)
Countering the growing divide between positivists who embrace quantitative, numerical approaches and post-positivist scholars who favor qualitative, interpretive approaches, Interpretive Quantification argues that both methods are more widely adaptable than is commonly assumed by either camp. In Interpretive Quantification, ten authors apply quantitative methods and formal models to specific constructivist and critical research questions. In this way, each chapter serves not only as evidence that methods can productively be applied across paradigms, but also as a guide as to how this may be done. In sum, the contributors make a compelling case that when researchers cordon off particular methods for merely ideological reasons, they circumscribe their own paradigms and hinder their own research agenda.

“Invisible Structures of Anarchy,” Journal of International Political Theory 13(3) (2017): 325-340.
This article argues anarchy is undertheorized in international relations, and that the undertheorization of the concept of anarchy in international relations is rooted in Waltz’s original discussion of the concept as equal to the invisibility of structure, where the lack of exogenous authority is not just a feature of the international political system but the salient feature. This article recognizes the international system as anarchical but looks to theorize its contours—to see the invisible structures that are overlaid within international anarchy, and then to consider what those structures mean for theorizing anarchy itself. It uses as an example the various (invisible) ways that gender orders global political relations to suggest that anarchy in the international arena is a place of multiple orders rather than of disorder. It therefore begins by theorizing anarchy with orders in global politics, rather than anarchy as necessarily substantively lacking orders. It then argues that gender orders global politics in various ways. It concludes with a framework for theorizing order within anarchy in global politics.

Women as Wartime Rapists (New York University Press, 2016) 
This book explores specific historical case studies, such as Nazi Germany, Serbia, the contemporary case of ISIS, and others, to understand how and why women participate in rape during war and conflict. It examines the contrast between the visibility of female victims and the invisibility of female perpetrators, as well as the distinction between rape and genocidal rape, which is used as a weapon against a particular ethnic or national group. Further, it explores women’s engagement with genocidal rape and how some orchestrated the ethnic cleansing of entire regions. A provocative approach to a sensationalized topic, Women as Wartime Rapists offers important insights into not only the topic of female perpetrators of wartime sexual violence, but to larger notions of gender and violence with crucial cultural, legal, and political implications.

“Revealing Hierarchies Through Gender Lenses,” in Hierarchies in World Politics, ed. Ayse Zarakol (2017)
This chapter explores the utility of the terminology of “gender hierarchy” for thinking about Daesh/ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while using that situation as an example to demonstrate the different ways in which it is important to use gender lenses to study hierarchy in global politics. The central contention of this chapter is that gender is implicated in and implicates all hierarchies in global politics. To substantiate that claim, the chapter explores three key relationships between gender and hierarchy in global politics. First, it explores gender hierarchies, which explicitly order actors on the basis of associations with sex and gender, which are hierarchies. Second, it engages hierarchies as gendered, which deploy associations with sex and gender to signify organization of actors along other distinctions, including but not limited to race, class, religion, culture, and nationality. Third, it investigates hierarchies in global politics as gendered institutions. In deploying the typologies of gender hierarchies, hierarchies as gendered, and hierarchies as gendered institutions, the chapter looks to make the argument that a deep structure of gender stratification manifests and is manifest in other kinds of hierarchical systems in global politics. In so doing, it uses a broad but structural understanding of hierarchy to explore gender as a foundation for hierarchies in global politics, which are, through gendered power, productive of both outcomes and significations in the global political arena. The chapter looks to make this contribution through explicative sections dealing with gender hierarchies, hierarchies as gendered, and hierarchies as gendered institutions, concluding with an exploration of what a feminist approach to hierarchy in global politics might look like.

“Undisciplined IR: Thinking without a Net,” in What’s the Point of IR?, eds. Synne L. Dyvik, Jan Selby, Rorden Wilkinson (2017) 
This piece, then, explores IR as an un-discipline – suggesting that the comparative advantage of IR, or the potential comparative advantage of IR – is its lack of disciplinarity, and the accompanying lack of foundation, which brings about a lack of clear rules for thought, knowledge production, and research. The disciplinary borrowing, or tool-shopping, that has become characteristic of IR would be impossible were IR a proper ‘discipline’ as such – and, with Hayward, I find that to be one of IR’s greatest strengths. The remainder of this piece looks to explore that attraction – the draw of undisciplined IR – and discuss some of the potential advantages of IR-as-undiscipline for the (loose) intellectual community of IR scholars and their corresponding body of scholarship. After a brief engagement of what undisciplined scholarship is/could be, this piece explores two potential draws of such work: putting exploration before coherence and diverse sampling of paths towards claiming contribution in IR.

“Centering Security Studies Around Felt, Gendered Insecurities,” Journal of Global Security Studies 1(1) (2016): 51-63.
This article draws on two decades of work in feminist security studies, which has argued that gender is necessary, conceptually, for understanding the concepts of war and security; important, empirically, for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes in the field of security; and essential to finding solutions to insecurity in global politics. The work of feminist security studies suggests that one of the most persistent features of the global political arena is gender hierarchy, which plays a role in defining and distributing security. The argument in this article moves from talking about the security of gender to discussing the gendered sources of insecurity across global politics. It then builds on existing work in Feminist Security Studies to suggest a felt, sensed, and experiential notion of the security/insecurity dichotomy as a new way to think about global security (studies). A (feminist) view of “security as felt” could transform the shape of a number of research programs in security studies.

“What, and Where, Is Feminist Security Studies?” Journal of Regional Security 11(2)(2016): 143-161.

This piece looks to backwards and forwards to what feminist work in security was, is,
and could be, pairing a historical sociology with a forward-looking view of the future(s) of the
field. It begins with thinking about feminist studies of security before FSS as a foundation for
the discussion, then traces different claims to core identities of FSS. It then looks at divergent
strands of FSS, as well as omissions and critiques. Rather than looking to reconcile those different accounts, it asks what can be taken from them to engage potential futures for FSS, and its
contribution to feminisms and/or studies of security.

“Witnessing the Protection Racket: Rethinking Justice in/of Wars through Gendered Lenses,” International Politics, 53(3)(2016): 361-384.

Using as a starting point both feminist critiques of just war theorizing and feminist reconstructions of traditional theoretical approaches to the concept, causes and consequences of war(s), this article looks to outline a feminist approach to re-theorizing war ethics that explicitly accounts for and rejects the current gender biases it creates and reifies. It begins by suggesting that the just war tradition is conceptually and empirically inseparable from gendered notions of warfare, which are gender security and to securitize gender. Therefore, it suggests, war ethics through gender lenses need to be rebuilt from the ground up, paying attention to the heretofore gendered nature not only of war ethics, but also of war justificatory narratives, war practices and war experiences.The article suggests a dialectical hermeneutic framework for feminist war ethics as a basis for theorizing forward from the longstanding feminist recognition that the very concept of warfare is gendered, relying on Robin Schott’s (2008) work on witness as a theoretical basis. After outlining this approach generally, the article concludes by sketching out an example of the potential for a feminist approach to war ethics in action, examining the use whole-body image scanners in airport security assemblages.

“Trans* America,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(1)(2016): 91-97. Part of a special section on the intellectual importance of Cynthia Weber’s Faking It (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), this brief piece argues that the US reading of Cuba’s gender presentations has changed again to a different, genderqueer form; that the US today deals its non-normative desire very differently than the US in 1975 or 1995, and that Weber’s analysis shows a number of crucial, but crucially neglected, dimensions of US-Cuba rapprochement.

(with Caron Gentry) Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. London: Zed Books and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (2015)

Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores takes the suggestion in Mothers, Monsters, Whores that it is important to see genderings in characterizations of violent women, and to use critique of those genderings to retheorize individual violence in global politics. It begins by demonstrating the interdependence of the personal and international levels of global politics in violent women’s lives, but then shows that this interdependence is inaccurately depicted in gender-subordinating narratives of women’s violence. Such narratives, the authors argue, are not only normatively problematic on the surface but also intersect with other identifiers, such as race, religion, and geopolitical location.

“The Terror of Everyday Counterterrorism,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 8(3)(2015): 383-400.

This article looks at the implications of the “domestic/everyday violence” = “war/terrorism” homology for thinking about “domestic/everyday” violence. Particularly, it contends that the normalisation of war/terror discourse in intimate/everyday violence brings with it intimate/everyday counterterror. It suggests that any benefits of naming everyday violence as terror are erased, subsumed or outweighed by the disadvantages of importing counterterrorism to the sphere of the intimate. Beyond the securitisation of the bedroom and the terror of intimate counterterror, this article contends that feminist and queer theorising provide insights about the nature of terror that show intimate terrorism in counterterrorism and make intimate/everyday counterterrorism doubly dangerous. As such, the equation of “everyday/intimate violence” = “war/terrorism” is counterproductive because of its bidirectional co-constitution. While the intimate plays a role in the constitution of war/terrorism, the re-direction of war/terrorism to the intimate/everyday is likely to accentuate the “terror” of intimate violation rather than temper it.

(with Jonathon Whooley) “The Arab Spring for Women? Representations of Women in Middle East Politics in 2011,” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy 36(3)(2015): 261-284.

This article explores the complex, liminal, and difficult space in which stories of women in “the Arab Spring” were wielded as parts of political narratives of gender, race, class, religion, democracy, and Westernization in Western media as the Arab Spring unfolded. It examines those stories by using the tools of postcolonial feminism. After briefly describing what is meant by (gender and) the Arab Spring, the article outlines a method for evaluating the significations of the media narratives surrounding it. We find two dissonant narratives (of gender as emancipatory and of gender as problematic) and ask what assumptions about gender (and sex and race and culture) have to be made to produce these particular representations. We argue that the dissonant narratives have in common using the situation of women as a barometer for the success of Westernization, liberalization, and democratization. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these findings.

“Seeing Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in International Security,” International Journal 70(3)(2015): 434-453.

This essay examines the roles that sex, gender, and sexuality can play in the study of international security. It makes the argument that “hard” security pressing questions like wars, genocides, and terrorist attacks and issues of gender, sex, and sexuality are linked. It begins by providing information about the recent and ongoing conflict in Libya as a case study. Then, it explores some of the questions that feminist and queer scholars have asked about international security in turn: where are the “women” in global politics? Where is “gender” and what does it matter? How do gender dynamics influence war and conflict? Do issues of sex and sexuality matter to war and conflict? If so, how? What tools are available to study these questions and produce answers in any given political situation?

(with J. Samuel Barkin) “Calculating Critique: Seeing Outside the Methods Matching Game,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43(3)(2015): 852-871.

This article suggests to quantitative methodologists that the tools that they use (and often others they do not) are more broadly applicable than is often assumed; to reflexivist researchers that there are many more tools available to their research than are often seen as appropriate; and to the IR discipline writ large that most of the disciplinary thinking about the relationships between research, ontology, epistemology, methodology and methods is unnecessarily narrow. Our core goal is to reveal the problematically inaccurate nature of both the qualitative/quantitative and the positivist/post-positivist divides, as well as of traditional methods training. We suggest that the ability to pair, and the utility of pairing, quantitative (traditionally neopositivist) methods with critical (traditionally non-neopositivist) theorising makes this intervention. To this end, the article begins with discussions of the relationships between epistemology and method in IR research. We continue on to frame a disunity of social science in the quantitative/qualitative divide, which lays the groundwork for a section rethinking traditional understandings of how methods, methodology, and epistemology relate. We then make the case for the utility of methods traditionally classified as ‘quantitative’ for critical research in IR. The article concludes by discussing the transformative implications of this understanding for critical theorising, and for theorising knowledge within disciplinary IR.

“Gender/Violence in a Gendered/Violent World,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 42(2)(2014): 532-542.

This review article reads four key books in Feminist Security Studies to argue for the need for reflexivity at three levels – evaluating gender/violence in a gendered/violent world, looking at gender/violence in the scholarship accounting for that world, and seeing gender/violence not only in the scholarship but also in the field. These gazes, though, must be matched with the critical action of navigating those three levels of gender/violence to create a condition of possibility of achieving recognisability. Thinking about the constitution of feminist scholarship in IR and the relationship of feminist scholarship to IR in terms of the politics of recognition makes it possible to imagine both maintaining a specifically feminist politics (and therefore specifically feminist epistemologies and methods) and looking for engagement with the ‘mainstream’ of the discipline. This task is fraught with obstacles but essential.

“Queering the ‘Territorial Peace’? Queer Theory Conversing with Mainstream International Relations,” International Studies Review 16(4)(2014): 608-612.

This contribution to a forum on the research and possibilities of queer IR scholarship looks at what it might mean to engage with the so-called mainstream of the field of IR. With others in this forum, I see queer theorizing as having multiple logics—both within each approach to queer theorizing and across queer approaches (see Weber, this forum). In this view, queer is unsettleable, intersectional, uncaging, multiple (and multiplied), both/and (Weber 1999), and engaged in projects of (the productivity of) failure and maybe even destruction (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2011). Many instantiations of queer might (appropriately) reject conversations with “mainstream” IR. I contend that queer theorizing can be fruitfully applied, not only as rejection and/or transformation, but in conversation with the research agendas of “mainstream” IR (Sjoberg 2012, 2013). Along these lines, this piece uses a brief example of engaging the logics of the materiality of sex in Judith Butler’s (1993) Bodies That Matter with the “mainstream” IR research agenda addressing the “territorial peace” (Gibler 2007, 2012; Gibler and Tir 2010; Gibler and Braithwaite 2013). Rather than being representative or totalizing, this engagement is meant to pair one queer theory work with one IR research endeavor to suggest the potential productivity of such engagements.

Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)

This book positions gender and gender subordination as key factors in the making and fighting of global conflict. Through the lens of gender, it examines the meaning, causes, practices, and experiences of war, building a more inclusive approach to the analysis of violent conflict between states. Considering war at the international, state, substate, and individual levels, a feminist perspective brings factors that traditional war analysis does not take into account to the forefront. These include structural gender inequality, cycles of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the often overlooked role of emotion in political interactions, gendered understandings of power, and states’ mistaken perception of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gendering Global Conflict also calls attention to understudied spaces that can be sites of war, such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Her findings show gender to be a linchpin of even the most tedious and seemingly bland tactical and logistical decisions in violent conflict. Armed with that information, this book undertakes the task of redefining and reintroducing critical readings of war’s political, economic, and humanitarian dimensions, developing the beginnings of a feminist theory of war.

“Viewing Peace through Gender Lenses,” Ethics and International Affairs 27(2) (2013): 1-13.

Feminist work in International Relations, Security Studies, and Peace Studies has encouraged us to see war as fought through and in the lives of ordinary people, and to understand that those experiences differ on the basis of sex. As I have stated elsewhere, “gender analysis is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international security, important for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm.” In this essay I argue that feminist theorizing of peace suggests a number of transformative observations. First, feminist perspectives focus a critical lens on the meaning of peace, often making invisible violence visible. Second, feminist perspectives help to critically interrogate the role of the United States in furthering “peace” in the international arena. Finally, feminist perspectives make different theoretical and policy prescriptions than perspectives that omit gender from their analyses.

“Towards Transgendering International Relations?,” International Political Sociology 6(4)(2012): 337-354.

This article engages with trans-theorizing to show how International Relations (IR) is currently blind to gender diversity, and the conceptual contributions trans-theorizing could make. To do so, it asks what insights trans-theorizing might provide for the study of global politics generally, and for feminist theorizing about gender in global politics specifically. After briefly introducing the terminology of trans-theorizing, the article addresses the potential for (and potential hazards of) an alliance between trans-theorizing and feminist theorizing in IR. The article then discusses several potential contributions of trans-theorizing—including hyper- and in-visibility, liminality, crossing, and disidentification—which provide explanatory leverage for IR. The article concludes with some suggestions for further collaboration between trans-theorizing and (feminist) IR to deepen and widen IR’s work on gender specifically, and global politics generally.

(with Laura J. Shepherd) “Trans- Bodies in/of Wars: Cis-privilege and Contemporary Security Strategies,” Feminist Review, 101(2012): 5-23.

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice.

“Gender, Structure, and War: What Waltz Couldn’t See,” International Theory 4(1)(2012): 1-38.

This article theorizes Waltz’s ‘third image,’ international system structure, through feminist lenses. After briefly reviewing International Relations (IR) analysis of the relationship between anarchy, structure, and war, it introduces gender analysis in IR with a focus on its theorizing of war(s). From this work, it sketches an approach to theorizing international structure through gendered lenses and provides 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 which consistently govern unit interaction. It outlines the implications of an account of the international system as gender-hierarchical for theorizing the causes of war generally and wars specifically, with a focus on potentially testable hypotheses. The article concludes with some ideas about the potential significance of a theorizing gender from a structural perspective and of theorizing structure from through gendered lenses.

(with Jessica Peet) “A(nother) Dark Side of the Protection Racket: Targeting Women in Wars,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 13(2)(2011): 163-82.

This article builds on feminist readings of war and conflict generally and of the civilian immunity principle specifically to argue that gender is crucial to the story of how and why civilians are intentionally targeted by belligerents. It demonstrates that civilian victimization is directly linked to the gendered logic of the immunity principle. Particularly, we contend that civilian victimization is a logical extension of wars justified by protecting women and children, and that ‘civilian’ in ‘civilian victimization’ is a proxy for women. We make this argument in several steps. First, we introduce the literature about civilian victimization, acknowledging both its insights and its blindness to gender analysis. Second, we use feminist work on gender, war and militarism to present the case that civilian victimization in war is a product of gendered elements of the justificatory logics of war. We then provide examples of the gendered nature of civilian victimization (specifically targeting women in wars). The article concludes by arguing that seeing civilian victimization as a gendered phenomenon has important implications for theorizing war and conflict.

(with Caron Gentry, eds). Women, Gender, and Terrorism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011)

In the first section of this volume, contributors offer an overview of women’s participation in and relationships with contemporary terrorism, and a historical chapter traces their involvement in the politics and conflicts of Islamic societies. The next section includes empirical and theoretical analysis of terrorist movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, and Sri Lanka. The third section turns to women’s involvement in al Qaeda and includes critical interrogations of the gendered media and the scholarly presentations of those women. The conclusion offers ways to further explore the subject of gender and terrorism based on the contributions made to the volume.

“Gender, the State, and War Redux: Feminist International Relations Across the ‘Levels of Analysis’,” International Relations 25(1)(2011): 108-134.

In her article, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ in a special issue of this journal honoring Kenneth Waltz, Jean Elshtain explores the question of what if anything it does to ‘put gender in’ to analysis of Waltz’s three ‘images’ of International Relations, and determines that gender is not definitive or causal in war theorizing. This article suggests that, while the question is an important and appropriate one to ask, the evidence that Elshtain brings to bear and the tools she uses to answer the question are inadequate to the task and not reflective of the current ‘state of the field’ of feminist International Relations. Addressing the question of if gender ‘alters in significant ways’ ‘man, the state, and war,’ this article provides theoretical and empirical examples from the young but rich field of feminist International Relations to present readers with the substance of feminist claims and the warrants behind feminist arguments. It urges International Relations to decide on the question of the relevance of gender by taking work in the area seriously, and suggests that the discipline might be convinced that acknowledging gender is crucial if scholars engage with the literature that sees ‘man, the state, and war’ as gendered.

(with J. Ann Tickner, eds) Feminism and International Relations: Conversations about the Past, Present, and Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2011)

Feminist International Relations scholarship in the United States recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Over those years, feminist researchers have made substantial progress concerning the question of how gender matters in global politics, global economics, and global culture. The progress has been noted both in the academic field of international relations and, increasingly, in the policy world.

Celebrating these achievements, this book constructs conversations about the history, present state of, and future of feminist International Relations as a field across subfields of IR, continents, and generations of scholars. Providing an overview and assessment of what it means to “gender” IR in the 21st century, the volume has a unique format: it features a series of intellectual conversations, presenting cutting-edge research in the field, with provocative comments from senior scholars. It examines issues including global governance, the United Nations, war, peace, security, science, beauty, and human rights and addresses key questions.

(with Sandra Via, eds) Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International, 2010)

Feminist scholars have long contended that war and militarism are fundamentally gendered. Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives provides empirical evidence, theoretical innovation, and interdisciplinary conversation on the topic, while explicitly—and uniquely—considering the links between gender, war, and militarism. Essentially an interdisciplinary conversation between scholars studying gender in political science, anthropology, and sociology, the essays here all turn their attention to the same questions. How are war and militarism gendered?

Seventeen innovative explanations of different intersections of the gendering of global politics and global conflict examine the theoretical relationship between gender, militarization, and security; the deployment of gender and sexuality in times of conflict; sexual violence in war and conflict; post-conflict reconstruction; and gender and militarism in media and literary accounts of war. Together, these essays make a coherent argument that reveals that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of 21st-century militarism.

(ed.) Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2010).

This book looks at relationships between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective. Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), 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 for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve 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.

The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security.  They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses.  Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics.

“Women Fighters and the ‘Beautiful Soul’ Narrative,” International Review of the Red Cross 92(877)(2010): 53-68.

This article explores women’s presence in military forces around the world, looking both at women’s service as soldiers and at the gendered dimensions of their soldiering particularly, and soldiering generally. It uses the ‘beautiful soul’ narrative to describe women’s relationship with war throughout its history, and explores how this image of women’s innocence of and abstention from war has often contrasted with women’s actual experiences as soldiers and fighters.

“Security Studies: Feminist Contributions,” Security Studies 18(2) (2009):183-213.

This piece is the introduction to a special issue was assembled with the 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. The articles included in this special issue not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, feminists argue 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.

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 the introduction of new or previously neglected Security Studies issues that resulted from taking gender seriously.

“Scaling IR Theory: Geography’s Contribution to Where IR Takes Place,” International Studies Review 10(3)(2008): 471-499.

This article re-engages international relations’ (IR) 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 international relations 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.

(with Caron Gentry) “Reduced to Bad Sex: Narratives of Violent Women from the Bible to the War on Terror,” International Relations, 22(1)(2008): 5-23. Reprinted in Kvinder, Kon, & Forskning 2 (2013): 64-81.

Whenever stories of women’s violence in global politics are presented in mainstream media, their authors explain away the possibility that women make a conscious choice to kill or injure. Violent women interrupt gender stereotypes: they are not the helpless and peaceful women that soldiers need to protect from enemies in traditional war tales. Instead of acknowledging the falseness of the underlying gender assumptions, public and publicized stories emphasize the singularity and sexual depravity of violent women, an account we call the `whore’ narrative. This article considers two types of whore narrative: stories of violent women’s erotomania, and of violent women as sexually dysfunctional. Though the whore narrative has been consistently employed historically and cross-culturally, this article identifies a culture-based dimension unique to the war on terror. It argues that analysis of these narratives have important implications for the study of gender in global politics.

“Why Just War Needs Feminism Now More Than Ever,” International Politics 45(1)(2008): 1-18.

This article notes the just war tradition’s difficulty adapting to 21st century warfare, its susceptibility to political appropriation, its lack of conceptual clarity, and its blindness to the gender subordination inherent in its theoretical assumptions. Still, just war theory cannot be discarded — it is a ‘necessary evil,’ due to both its popularity in political discourse and the necessity of having a framework for ethical analysis of war. This article proposes a feminist reinterpretation of just war theory as the revitalization that just war theory needs. It explains this feminist just war theory based on relational autonomy, political marginality, empathy, and care. It introduces some feminist ‘standards’ for considering the morality of war. After brief applicatory explorations into the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it concludes by arguing that the added normative strength and explanatory power coming from a feminist perspective is something just war theory sorely needs, now more than ever.

(with Caron Gentry) Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics. (London: Zed Books, 2007)

Mothers, Monsters, Whores provides an empirical study of women’s violence in global politics. The book looks at military women who engage in torture; the Chechen ‘Black Widows’; Middle Eastern suicide bombers; and the women who directed and participated in genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. Sjoberg & Gentry analyse the biological, psychological and sexualized stereotypes through which these women are conventionally depicted, arguing that these are rooted in assumptions about what is ‘appropriate’ female behaviour. What these stereotypes have in common is that they all perceive women as having no agency in any sphere of life, from everyday choices to global political events.

“Agency, Militarized Femininity, and Enemy Others,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9(1)(2007): 82-101.

In this era of the increasing importance of gender, many conflicting images of women populate news headlines and political discourses. In the 2003 war in Iraq, Americans saw images of a teenage woman as a war hero, of a female general in charge of a military prison where torture took place, of women who committed those abuses, of male victims of wartime sexual abuse and of the absence of gender in official government reactions to the torture at Abu Ghraib. I contend that several gendered stories from the 2003 war in Iraq demonstrate three major developments in militarized femininity in the United States: increasing sophistication of the ideal image of the woman soldier; stories of militarized femininity constructed in opposition to the gendered enemy; and evident tension between popular ideas of femininity and women’s agency in violence. I use the publicized stories of American women prisoners of war and American women prison guards to substantiate these observed developments.

“The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism,” International Studies Quarterly 50(4)(2006): 889-910.

The discipline of international relations has had different reactions to the increased salience of gender advocacy in international politics; some have reacted by asking feminist questions about IR, while others have encouraged the study of gender as a variable disengaged from feminist advocacy. This article takes up this debate simultaneously with current debate on gender and the noncombatant immunity principle. Through a causal analysis of the ineffectiveness of the immunity principle, it argues that feminism is an indispensable empirical and theoretical tool for the study of gender in global politics. Concurrently, it demonstrates that gender stereotypes in the immunity principle are a natural part of the gendered just war narrative, rather than a deviation from normal immunity advocacy. It concludes by arguing that the gendered immunity principle fails to afford any civilians protection, and by suggesting a more effective, feminist reformulation based on empathy.

Gender, Justice, and Wars in Iraq (New York: Lexington Books, 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.