Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War
Laura Sjoberg
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 0231148615
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Laura Sjoberg positions gender and gender subordination as key factors in the making and fighting of global conflict. Through the lens ofgender, she 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, Sjoberg's feminist perspective elevates a number of causal variables in war decision-making. 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, Sjoberg 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.
intentional civilian victimization that targets women as a center of gravity for states is often carried out using explicitly gendered tactics, particularly wartime rape. In contrast to many analyses of wartime rape which separate it, in theory and in practice, from other “conventional” tactics of war, I argue that wartime rape is a key war tactic because of the symbolic function it serves of attacking (and corrupting the purity of) women as a way to communicate dominance over the enemy state
trends, many theorists think that the crucial causal factors for war are in individuals’ and organizations’ decision-making processes.187 Some decision-making theories of war focus on how decisions ought to be made, while others focus on how they are made. The former are largely rationalist approaches to decision-making, in which (often game-theoretic) models are proposed to evaluate how leaders would act in their own and their states’ interest, were they able to do so perfectly and with
feminist readings. 301. Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics”; Steele, Ontological Security in Internatonal Relations. 302. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations. 303. James Der Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (London: Blackwell, 1992). 304. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009). 305. Ibid., relying on Baudrillard’s idea of unreality and simulacra. See,
singular in discourses that isolate their decisions from others’ decisions. By contrast, men’s war decisions are often characterized as rationally chosen or approximating rationality, as if men and women were different and rationality is gender neutral. Neither is accurate—there is nothing inherent making women different than men, and our readings of both decision-making processes are gendered. Looking at agency in war(s) from a gender-critical perspective, the “whys” and “hows” are the next
environmental damage,20 the suffering of children born of war rape,21 and the care labor necessary to sustain seriously injured soldiers over the course of a lifetime.22 These costs (and many others) are omitted because cost–benefit analysis in strategizing is not only state-centric but elite-centric in gendered ways. Feminists have also interrogated how rational cost–benefit analysis works in different arenas (from microeconomics to grand strategy), arguing that it assumes actors have full and