Gendering Global Conflict

Toward a Feminist Theory of War

Laura Sjoberg

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231520003
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

CHAPTER 1

The (Genderless) Study of War in International Relations

The observation quoted in the introduction that “much has been written about the causes of war; little has been learned about the subject,”¹ tells its readers something important about the study of war; perhaps even something more important than its author meant when he wrote it. In The War Puzzle, John Vasquez explored a number of important and previously neglected hypotheses about war.² In revisiting The War Puzzle more than a decade later, Vasquez notes that recent literature has contributed substantially to addressing these and other crucial variables and has accordingly increased the discipline’s explanatory leverage on war.³ Still, most work in war studies continues to assume the irrelevance of gender, which has rarely been taken seriously as constitutive or explanatory of the making and fighting of wars.⁴

This may be because, as feminist scholars have observed, gender is often invisible to scholars of global politics, despite its importance in shaping concepts and processes in the global political arena. As Kimberly Hutchings explains, “a key reason for the ongoing invisibility of women and gender in the theoretical frames through which post–Cold War international politics is grasped is the legitimizing function of masculinity discourses within these theories.”⁵ In contrast to the conventional wisdom, this book argues that gender is essential to studying war.⁶ This is because “the resilience of masculinity as a mode of making sense of global politics reflects the amount of analytics and normative work it accomplishes.”⁷ Gender, then, is not just in war and/or our theories of it, but fundamental to them, legitimating of them, and inseparable from them. Therefore, we have “learned little” about war until we learn about war and gender.⁸

This book makes the case that gender can link together scholarship on the meaning, causes, and consequences of war that emphasizes different causal factors, different levels of analysis, and different eras in history by showing the continuity of gender’s influence as a variable, as a constitutive force, and as an analytic category. Seeing gender in war would help us know war better. The first step in making this argument is to discuss the study of war as it currently is. This chapter, therefore, presents a critical review of current approaches to the “war puzzle” in international relations (IR), pointing out the systematic omission of gender in each theoretical perspective, despite its conceptual and empirical relevance to the issues each theory discusses. The theoretical perspectives laid out in this chapter will serve as the basis for the feminist engagements with, as well as critiques, reformulations, rebuttals, and rebuildings of, war studies throughout the rest of this book.

A literature review that demonstrates the omission of gender does only that, however. Critics of feminist work in IR have often argued that is a trivial observation and pressed questions such as—So what do we do now? And why does it matter? Assuming that gender is omitted and does matter, what transformations of the current orthodoxy on war could be envisioned? After all, the (genderless) study of war in IR often reflects the “real world,” which is “primarily engaged by men, and governed by the norms of masculinity,” while appearing gender neutral.⁹ Rather than demonstrating war theories’ omission of gender for its own sake, this book argues that the omission of gender means that these theories, individually and collectively, neglect important parts of the story of the causes, fighting, and experience of war(s).

It is with these goals in mind that this chapter discusses current “mainstream” scholarship in “war studies” defining war, understanding the causes of war, and analyzing the fighting of war(s), as well as the contributions of critical approaches to theorizing war(s). The closing section of this chapter links to the next, by relating the war studies literature’s gender blindness to silences and misconceptions in its theoretical and empirical work on the nature of war.

WAR STUDIES¹⁰

The question of what is in a name is an important one. I call war studies what many (especially in the United States) call security studies. This is not a coincidence. Though war studies is a term more frequently used in the United Kingdom and Europe, in the United States, many scholars equate the study of war and the study of security. While the two are intrinsically interlinked (war impacts security, which in turn impacts war), the narrow study of war is not the same as the broad study of security.¹¹ I, therefore, use the term war studies to signify that, though concerns outside “war” proper (whatever that is) are relevant, the literature addressing (the nature, causes, and consequences of) war specifically will be the main target of engagement in this discussion (and in the book more broadly).¹²

As I mentioned in the introduction, the literature on the nature, causes, and consequences of war is vast, but diverse and without a sense of consensus. In this literature, “scholars disagree not only on the specific causes of war, but also on how to approach the study of war.”¹³ Evaluations of war are divided on paradigmatic,¹⁴ disciplinary,¹⁵ and geographic¹⁶ lines, and different sorts of wars are often studied differently (e.g., great power wars, interstate wars, intrastate wars, and irregular wars).¹⁷ Recently, Jack Levy and William Thompson tried to find a unified definition of war, seeing it as “sustained, coordinated violence between political organizations,”¹⁸ but that definition is as vague as it is controversial.¹⁹ Still, in Cynthia Enloe’s terms, “making feminist sense”²⁰ of war studies requires making sense of war studies, which the remainder of this section tries to do. Following Levy and Thompson,²¹ I do so by discussing different broad approaches to the study of war(s) by their commonalities. The rest of this section discusses traditional approaches to defining war, explaining war, and understanding war-fighting.

Defining War

Levy and Thompson discuss the definition of war at length in The Causes of War.²² In their account, there are a number of elements of war definitions common to most of the war studies literature; these elements are a good starting point for thinking about how war has been traditionally defined. First, war is violent, where violence is understood as “the use of force to kill and injure people and destroy military and economic resources.”²³ Since Carl von Clausewitz noted that this violence had “no logical limit,” many scholars have understood war as not only violent, but violent with a magnitude different than what we might consider everyday violence.²⁴

It is also commonly understood that wars are between two or more political groups. Levy and Thompson distinguish two important features of this sentence—“between” and “political groups.”²⁵ Between, in war studies’ understanding, means that there must be two parties fighting—not just one party that attacks and another party that concedes. In these terms, then, invasions that are not militarily resisted are not wars while invasions that are militarily resisted are wars. The second important feature of this part of the definition is that wars are fought by political groups (as opposed to individuals). While individuals fight in wars, the actors of those wars are the political groups on whose behalf those individuals fight. Therefore, I (Laura Sjoberg) cannot make a war; but “my” state (the United States) can make a war, which I can participate in (or not) on its behalf.

Most work on war very recently saw war as only between states.²⁶ Contemporary work, though, has recognized that many wars occur within states or across states rather than between them.²⁷ This realization has been coupled with historical research demonstrating that the idea of the modern nation-state is very new, and most events we call wars across history were not fought by discretely identifiable nation-states against one another.²⁸ As a result, there has been a gradual broadening of the political groups capable of fighting wars in the war studies literature.²⁹ Still, the scope of what actors are included in those capable of fighting wars and what actors fall outside is less than clear.

Inherent in the idea that it is political groups who fight wars is the understanding that war is inherently political. This idea was initially articulated by Clausewitz, who called war “politics by other means.”³⁰ Levy and Thompson quote Frederick the Great arguing that “diplomacy without force is like music without instruments,” implying that the use of force is the natural extension of politics and political negotiation—and ever-present even in successful peaceful negotiations.³¹ What causes count in this politics, and what causes are primary, however, remain a subject of significant debate. Some talk about the politics of war(s) in terms of interests, others in terms of resources, and still others in terms of relative power.³²

The final element of the definition that Levy and Thompson supply that bears mention is the idea that war is sustained—that is, that it needs to be differentiated from “organized violence that is more limited in magnitude or impact.”³³ Both scholarly writing on and data sets operationalizing war usually read “sustained” in terms of a particular number of battle deaths³⁴ or formal declarations of war.³⁵ Still, the number of battle deaths and/or the form of declaration remain up for debate.

Defining war is usually associated with identifying wars. By most accounts, wars have been a fairly consistent feature of human history. However consistent the presence of war is, its practice has changed significantly over time and is constantly evolving.³⁶ Those looking at the trends in war see several: battle-related deaths per war are increasing;³⁷ the number and frequency of wars between “great powers” is declining, while the number and frequency of wars generally is increasing;³⁸ the epicenter for war(s) is shifting outside of Europe;³⁹ and war is increasingly “asymmetric.”⁴⁰ This has led to a significant literature on “new wars”⁴¹ that attempts to understand what war has become or is becoming.

Understanding the Causes of War(s)

Despite some definitional uncertainty about what war is, many war studies scholars focus on what causes wars to happen. There are number of different approaches to studying what causes war generally and what causes individual wars. This section discusses them brief...