Gender, War, and Conflict E-Book

Laura Sjoberg

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hot Spots in Global Politics Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men. Women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, but only recently have they been allowed to join state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist organizations in unprecedented numbers.

This begs the question - how useful are traditional gendered categories in understanding the dynamics of war and conflict? And why are our stories of gender roles in war typically so narrow? Who benefits from them? In this illuminating book, Laura Sjoberg explores how gender matters in war-making and war-fighting today. Drawing on a rich range of examples from conflicts around the world, she shows that both women and men play many more diverse roles in wars than either media or scholarly accounts convey. Gender, she argues, can be found at every turn in the practice of war; it is crucial to understanding not only ‘what war is’, but equally how it is caused, fought and experienced.

With end of chapter questions for discussion and guides to further reading, this book provides the perfect introduction for students keen to understand the multi-faceted role of gender in warfare. Gender, War and Conflict will challenge and change the way we think about war and conflict in the modern world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgments

1: Introducing Gender, War, and Conflict

The (often genderless) study of war and conflict

Thinking about gender

Thinking about war and conflict

Thinking about gender, war, and conflict

Tools for thinking about gender, war, and conflict

2: Where Are the Women?

Limited women: gendered histories of war(s) and conflict(s)

Where are the women in wars?

Finding women in war and conflicts

3: Where Are the Men?

Seeing men: the importance of looking for men in war(s)

Where are the men in wars?

Thinking about the links between masculinities and war(s)

4: Why Men and Women Are Not Enough

The “other sexes” and wars: Queer and trans- images

When masculinities and femininities in war do not map onto men and women

Gender hierarchy as a cause of war(s)

Gender hierarchy as a consequence of war(s)

5: Redefining War, Understanding Gender

Thinking about war and conflict in the IR literature

Defining war and conflict using gender analysis

Sexism and the war system

6: War(s) As If Gender Mattered

Mainstreaming gender in thinking about war and conflict

Methods for mainstreaming gender in thinking about war and conflict

Mainstreaming gender in thinking about war and conflict empirically

Mainstreaming gender in theorizing about war and conflict

Looking forward: Mainstreaming gender in the practice of war and conflict

References

Index

Copyright © Laura Sjoberg 2014

The right of Laura Sjoberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2014 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6001-1

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8467-3 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8466-6 (mobi)

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Acknowledgments

This book is for the trans- woman whose ordeal with air­port security, which I witnessed, opens Chapter 4. I never knew her name and know nothing about her experience of the world, but I learned three things from watching a small part of her life: that sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism do not just occur, but are felt and experienced; that our theoretical accounts of experiences with sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism cannot possibly do the witnessing and feeling of them justice; and that I ought to have a constantly vigilant politics of both understanding my privilege and engaging others' experiences empathetically. I hope those commitments are evident on the pages of this book; they inspired me to write it.

If those commitments inspired the writing of the book, many sources of personal and institutional support made it possible. Chief among them is Louise Knight, my editor at Polity. Though this is now my ninth book project, Louise was my first editor. She has maintained an irrational faith in me through now five institutional homes and over eight years. A lesser editor would have given up, and I cannot express my gratitude to her sufficiently for refusing to do so. The University of Florida Department of Political Science and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences gave me the time to write this volume and the resources to support it. Recent conversations with Ann Tickner, Caron Gentry, Laura Shepherd, Cynthia Weber, Annick Wibben, Lauren Wilcox, and Jennifer Lobasz have shaped my thinking about what content is necessary to put in a book like this. The 2013 International Feminist Journal of Politics conference convinced me that a book on gender, war, and conflict needed to strongly represent queer theory and queer bodies – I hope I have accomplished that here. I edited this book on a trip to visit my International Studies Review co-editors, including but not limited to Janice Bially Mattern and Kelly Kadera. Their energy renewed mine. Conversations with, and the aid of, my graduate students – including but not limited to Anna Weissman and Catherine Jean – have also narrowed and sharpened this book's focus. Undergraduate research assistants Michelle Ascunsion, Devin Barrett, Christian Chessman, Alex Dehelan, and Naveed Jayazeri all did work that ended up on the pages of this book. As usual, I was happy to have, and reliant on, the support of my three chihuahuas: April, who models alpha male behavior; Gizmo, whose genderqueer presentations are fascinating; and Max, who makes war a part of his everyday life.

My thanks also go to Orhan Kemal Cengiz, for kind permission to reproduce a shortened version of his article “Our Fragile Manhood and Military Service” (Today's Zaman, November 28, 2010) as Box 3.1.

I usually end my acknowledgments with an anecdote from my professional experience that made me angry or indignant enough to finally finish a book project. I will end a little differently here. When all but the final touches were already made to this book, I had the privilege of listening to a dear friend and colleague give a keynote address at a conference. He used my work (in a positive light) as an example of a generational politics of the discipline of International Relations. In that discussion, however, my friend and colleague characterized my work as profoundly pessimistic. Rather than arguing, I have taken that assertion to heart. I hope, with the spirit of humility in the first paragraph here and the spirit of looking forward that I think my work has, that I can prove myself, or even become, an optimist.

1

Introducing Gender, War, and Conflict

Ayesha Farooq, at age 26, became the first female fighter pilot in the Pakistani Air Force on June 13, 2013. After having passed the final tests to allow her to fight in combat, Ayesha said that she did not feel any different from her male colleagues, because they performed the same job duties. “In our society most girls don't even think about doing such things as flying an aircraft,” she declared, but that had not stopped her (Reuters 2013a). Another Reuters report includes a description of an interview with Farooq:

With an olive green headscarf poking out from her helmet, Ayesha Farooq flashes a cheeky grin when asked if it is lonely being the only war-ready female fighter pilot in the Islamic republic of Pakistan. … Farooq, whose slim frame offers a study in contrast with her burly male colleagues, was at loggerheads with her widowed and uneducated mother seven years ago when she said she wanted to join the air force. (Reuters 2013b)

Although the Pakistani military has included women since it was founded following the country's independence in 1947, mostly in the Army, they have often been relegated to doing nursing and clerical work. Even women who are trained to do more traditional soldiering – like the other nineteen women who are air force pilots, five of whom fly fighter planes – often do not take the last tests to qualify to fight in combat. This makes them less visible than their male colleagues.

Still, women have served and continue to serve at every rank in the Pakistani military, including the highest rank, major general. Pakistan's first woman major general was Shahida Malik (Fair and Nawaz 2011). Malik joined the Pakistani Army Medical Corps in 1969, and worked both as a medic and as a field combat officer before becoming a deputy commander and surgeon general. She was the first female general not only in the Pakistani military but also in any military in a predominantly Islamic country. She retired in 2004 as Pakistan's most decorated female officer. Shahida has been described as someone who “just does not like coming in second” (Fair and Nawaz 2011). Her competitiveness was on display when she qualified for medical school even at a time when women were rarely admitted. She joined the Army looking to improve the quality of medical care in military and state hospitals, and kept working her way up the hierarchy for thirty-four years, before retiring near the top of the power structure.

Women like Ayesha and Shahida are pioneers – women who went places that no women had gone before in a military structure that had previously been reserved for, and assumed appropriate for, men only. There are stories about an Ayesha or a Shahida in most militaries around the world – women who were their militaries' first female fighters or female generals. While women have fought in wars, either as women or covertly dressed as men, throughout the history of warfare, they have recently been allowed to join (and are joining) state militaries, insurgent groups, and terrorist groups in unprecedented numbers, and with unprecedented visibility.

Thinking about Ayesha and Shahida, and women like them, can seem pretty straightforward: women are progressing to equality with men by being allowed to occupy (and actually occupying) positions from which they were previously excluded, all around the world. This is a victory to be celebrated and a marker of progress. Looking deeper, however, shows that many women's “victory” stories are not as simple as they initially appear, and the progressive stories of ending gender subordination by including women are partial at best. This is because the positions occupied by the newly “included” women used to be reserved for men not incidentally or coincidentally, but because of the masculine expectations of people filling them. War-making and war-fighting have been traditionally associated not only with men, but also with the traits that men are expected to have, or masculinities.

The association of war with masculinity, this book suggests, has many implications. It has implications for women like Ayesha and Shahida; indeed, for all women who experience wars. It has implications for men like the ones Ayesha and Shahida fight alongside and against; indeed, for all men who experience wars. It also has implications for war – the association between masculinity and war is a fundamental part of what war is and how it works. This book makes that argument by looking critically at the relationship be­tween gender, war, and conflict, and using contemporary examples from conflicts around the world to examine gender dynamics.

The (often genderless) study of war and conflict

Much of the scholarly work on war and conflict does not talk about women – much less gender – at all. When and if it does, it often frames women in some limited role (like helpless civilian) or discusses womanhood as a logistical problem (where, for example, some fighter plane cockpits are built for male bodies rather than female ones). In some of the major research projects on war and conflict, gender is relegated to the footnotes of the central analysis. Many if not most textbooks that teach students about war and conflict fail to deal with gender issues. Textbooks that do deal with gender issues frequently associate gender with, and reduce gender to, women and femininity – quietly implying that men do not have genders or matter to gender issues.

All of that neglect of gender issues might lead a scholar or a student to believe that gender is irrelevant to the study of war and conflict – and therefore neglected justly. That conclusion might be confounded, though, by the rising salience of gender issues in the policy world, particularly in the security sector. International organizations (like the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Interna­tional Labour Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, to name a few) and state governments are becoming increasingly attentive to gender as 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 their constituent governments have increasingly emphasized “mainstreaming” gender – including it as a crucial consideration when analyzing empirical situations and providing policy prescriptions. This “gender mainstreaming” is far from a panacea – claims to mainstream gender are often more propagandistic than genuine; there is debate about what gender means and what it would mean to mainstream it; and there are often a number of practitioners taking “mainstreaming” in different directions, or neglecting it entirely. That said, the policy world's interest in the relationship between gender, war, and conflict runs counter to the omission of gender dynamics in most scholarly studies of the same phenomena.

This book argues that the policy world, though it does not have all the answers, is on the right track: thinking through war and conflict completely requires consideration of gender dynamics therein. While this is not a book about policy or policy-makers, it uses real-world examples to try to help International Relations (IR) thinking about war and conflict “catch up with” or even surpass that in the policy world, and to provide students with tools to apply gender analysis to policy. Stories of war and conflict within IR often talk about political leaders, militaries, and states as if they are sexless and genderless – which I suggest not only is inaccurate, but also cripples accounts of of the ways that wars and conflicts work. This book makes a case that gender analysis is crucial to analyzing wars and conflicts. To make that case, it asks how different war and conflict would look if gender were “mainstreamed” in observation and analysis of them. It contends that seeing gender analysis as a key part of thinking about war is an important 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. Accordingly, I suggest that it is only possible to fully understand gender in the context of war and conflict, and that it is only possible to fully understand war and conflict considering their gendered aspects. In order to make that case, though, some discussion of what is meant by gender, war, and conflict is an important starting point, and this requires a firm conceptualization of the terms. It is those concepts that serve to introduce this book in the remainder of this chapter.

Thinking about gender

Like understanding Ayesha and Shahida's roles in the Pakistani military, the word “gender” initially seems pretty straightforward. Each person has a gender, and they have always known it. It is on a person's birth certificate, on his/her passport, and often reported for the purposes of enrollment in school, application for a job, visits to the doctor, and other minutiae in daily life. There are almost always two answers to the often-repeated survey question asking people to report a gender: male or female. People with penises are male; people with vaginas are female. There is no “other” choice on most surveys; no other option – a person is male, or a person is female, and that is his/her gender. Ayesha and Shahida are female – they must check (and remain in) that box, and hope that the expectations related to it become less constraining.

Though the last paragraph seems relatively straightforward, a closer reading of it reveals that there is very little accurate in it at all. First, it is important to distinguish “sex” from “gender,” where “sex” is biological maleness or femaleness, and “gender” is the social traits that we (often inaccurately) associate with these. Second, changing the question from “What is your gender?” to “What is your sex?” does not solve the problem, because there are not just two biological sexes, and everyone's biological sex is not clearly marked, identifiable at birth, unchangeable. Instead, there are actually a number of sex chromosome configurations that lead to different configurations of hormones and sex organs (Fausto-Sterling 2005). Gender theorists have started talking about sex as something which is “assigned at birth,” since most doctors choose a biological sex for people who have different chromosomal configurations than XX (traditional female) or XY (traditional male) – people who would otherwise be referred to as “intersex.” Even people who have the chromosomal configurations of XX or XY, however, often do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth. Many of them feel like their bodies are the wrong sex for them, and transition sex presentations (or even sex organs). This category is broadly referred to as “trans-” (see Stryker and Whittle 2006). Sex, then, is not as simple as “male” and “female” – there is a diverse group of sexes, though most people (and most surveys) assume that sex can be accounted for in a simple dichotomy.

Another problematic assumption that many people and many surveys make is that there are things that you can tell about who a person is depending on whether they are male or female. People assume that men are masculine and women are feminine. Masculine and feminine are genders – social characteristics that are associated with perceived membership in biological sex classes. People frequently associate certain traits with masculinity (and therefore men), such as strength, rationality, independence, aggression, autonomy, the ability to provide and protect, stoicism, virility, and risk-taking, to name a few (see Connell 2005). These traits exist in dichotomies with traits that are associated with femininities, such as physical weakness, emotion, interdependence, passivity, innocence, need for protection, care, maternity, and risk-aversion (see Chodorow 1994). There is not just one masculinity or one femininity, but multiple ones, dependent on time, location, and culture, as well as race, class, and sexuality dynamics. Still, throughout history, most societies have privileged particular traits associated with an ideal-typical, or hegemonic, masculinity over traits associated with femininities and/or other masculinities. Societies then come to expect men to display those privileged traits, and women to be their foils – therefore assuming both men and women will behave in gender-conforming ways, and often providing social rewards for conformity and social punishment for deviance.

Conforming to gender-specific expectations based on assigned sex, however, is not the only expectation that gender differentiation creates. Men are expected to behave as men, and women are expected to behave as women, but men and women who conform to those expectations are not held equal in social and political relations in global politics. Instead, many feminist scholars have suggested that gender is not only a way to differentiate between people, but also a power relation between people. If traits associated with masculinity are given more regard in social and political situations, and men's masculinity is assumed, then men and women are unequal in social and political situations. Of course, gender subordination, or inequality, is much more complicated than that, but that is the basic dynamic: that traits associated with masculinity are valued over traits associated with femininity. That dynamic is popularly identified as sexism: the preference for traits associated with one sex over the other. Feminist scholars have also called it gender inequality, gender subordi­nation, or gender discrimination. Looking for assumptions about people based on their sex, gender, gender identity, or sexual preference also reveals homophobia and transphobia: fear and maltreatment of people based on assumed homosexuality or transgender identity. Those dynamics are related to heterosexism (the preference for the heterosexual over the non-heterosexual and discrimination based on that preference) and cissexism (the preference for those whose gender identity matches the biological sex to which they were assigned at birth and discrimination based on that preference).

All of these axes (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, and cis-/trans-) are, of course, more complicated than simple choices between two options. Sex and/or gender is/are both fluid and differentiable but never fully separable. Even sexism, heterosexism, and cissexism have multiple directions and multiple dynamics. For that reason, scholars often characterize gender as intersubjective and socially constructed (e.g., Peterson and Runyan 2010). When they call gender “intersubjective,” scholars mean that assumptions about masculinities and femininities are both always related and always present, even when we do not see them. When they call gender “socially constructed,” they mean that it is built on assumptions about relationships between sex and personality traits which are not fundamental, natural, or even necessarily accurate. That said, “socially constructed” is not a fancy way to say that it is not real – socially constructed things (including but not limited to gender) are often incredibly salient not only in people's social and political lives, but also in their material well-being. People live gender expectations, gender-based incentive structures, and gender-based violence in everyday life, and, as this book argues, in wars.

It is because people live gender that scholars who self-identify as feminists in political science and IR ask questions about where gender is in the traditional subject matter of the work of their respective research and teaching areas. The word “feminist” has also been commonly misconstrued – it has been read as anti-man, or reliant on the idea that women need help defending themselves against men. Neither is the case, especially in relation to the way the word is used in reference to scholarship about gender and conflict. Feminist scholarship in that context has two common interests. First, it aims to understand where both women and gender are in war and conflict (and, relatedly, why they are often omitted from most traditional analyses of those phenomena). Second, it looks to draw attention to (and often redress) gender subordination both in war and conflict and in scholarship studying them. When I say that this book thinks about gender through feminist lenses, then, I mean that it is interested both in identifying how gender dynamics work in war and conflict, and in understanding the ways in which those gender dynamics can be seen as hierarchical – where the valuing of certain gender-based characteristics over others serves to cement axes of differentiation, discrimination, oppression, and violence. That is why feminist scholars have described gender as “first, fundamentally social; second, an expression of power; and third, an organizing principle” for war specifically, and politics more generally (Sjoberg 2013b: 47), and set out to study it empirically (or as it exists in global politics) and to criticize its normative impact (characterizing gender subordination as ethically wrong) (Tickner 1997). It is in that spirit that this book addresses gender in war and conflict from a feminist perspective.

Thinking about war and conflict

Thinking about gender in war and conflict from a feminist perspective, however, requires having a working understanding of what is meant by “war and conflict” themselves (for a discussion, see Vasquez 2010). War is another concept that seems straightforward – we think we know war when we see it. World War II, that was a war – in fact, one of the most brutal and destructive wars in human history. Ronald Reagan's “war on drugs,” on the other hand, was not a “real” war – Reagan was using the language of war to make the United States' objection to, and effort against, drug trafficking sound (and be) tough. Still, it's not clear if other conflicts are wars or not. Some suggest that wars must be declared – in which case, there has not been a major international war since the 1950s in Korea. Some suggest that wars must be between two or more states – in which case, some of the most brutal conflicts since the end of the Cold War (like the Rwandan genocide and the Sudanese Civil War) would not qualify as wars. Still others suggest that conflicts are not wars without a certain number of deaths in battle – raising questions about the nature of battle and warfare in a post-industrial age. It has been proposed that the label “war” be given only to conflicts in which both sides fight, rather than to conflicts where one side is unable to resist. In that formu­lation, it would be unclear whether Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait was actually a war, given the lack of Kuwaiti capacity to resist. Thinking about these complexities, it is possible to consider the Vietnam War not a war (it was not declared), the “global war on terror” not a war (since it is not between states), the Bosnian War not a war (because the states that it was between resulted from rather than preceded the war), and the Cold War not a war (because it did not have the requisite number of direct battle deaths).

The traditional literature on war and conflict includes a number of different interpretations of what counts as a war and what does not. For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the definitional discussion in Jack Levy and William Thompson's overview book, Causes of War (2010). In it, Levy and Thompson identify several characteristics that can be used to distinguish wars from events or relationships that are not wars. First, wars involve “the use of force to kill and injure people and destroy military and economic resources” and are, in that way, violent (2010: 5). Second, wars are between two or more political groups (2010: 6). Levy and Thompson use the words “political groups” intentionally to suggest that non-state actors can make and fight wars, but that they must be of sufficient size and cohesiveness to count as a group. Therefore, I as the writer of this book and you as the reader cannot make wars, but political groups that we are a part of might be able to do so. Third, by limiting war to “political groups,” Levy and Thompson intend to classify war as political. The association of war and politics is well rehearsed in the history of studies of war – in the early nineteenth century, Carl von Clausewitz (2007 [1832]) characterized war as being the extension of politics by other means. Some theorists consider wars' politics to be about actors' interests, others see them as about relative power, and still others see wars as about resources. Regardless of the particular politics that theorists emphasize, most of them understand war as inherently political (Levy and Thompson 2010: 8). Fourth, and finally, Levy and Thompson suggest that what distinguishes wars from not wars is that wars are sustained – understood as different from “organized violence that is more limited in magnitude or impact” (2010: 10). In this view, then, wars are violent, sustained encounters between two political groups over a political cause.

While this understanding is relatively universal, some of the details around the edges are not so clear. When do wars start? When do they end? Often, people at the margins of global politics, particularly women, are affected by the socially, politically, and materially destabilizing impacts of wars long before they are declared and long after the shooting stops. Who counts as party to the war? Is it only the people and/or states who choose to make wars, or everyone who is involved in or impacted by wars? Often, the people who choose to make wars are not the only ones, or even the primary ones, who are affected by the fighting of those wars. What factors that influence the onset of wars count as their causes? Do these include the causes that belligerents (war-fighting parties) articulate, or the unstated motivations as well? What causes are common to all wars and what causes are unique to particular wars? Often, the unstated causes of wars and the underlying logics of war-fighting are where gender is most likely to be found. What distinguishes war from the “more limited” organized violence that Levy and Thompson suggest does not add up to “war” proper? Scholars looking for gender in wars suggest that war is a continuum – where violence increases and decreases – rather than an event (Cuomo 1996). Who is the object of the study of war? Is it the states and non-state actors who make wars, or the individuals who fight wars and die in them? Seeing war as experienced rather than chosen or fought broadens whom it is important to study. How big does a political group have to be to make a war, or to have a war made against that group? Is thinking about asymmetric war different from thinking about war between relatively equal parties? Is it justifiable for a group to fight a war that it could never win? Sometimes, weak parties in global politics are neglected in the study of war. Is it possible to separate thinking about war empirically (what happens, how, and why) and normatively (whether or not it is ethically acceptable)? If it is possible, is it a good idea? Is there something wrong with thinking about war without constantly acknowledging its brutality? Often, it is wars' most vulnerable victims who disappear from sanitized and abstracted stories of those conflicts (Cohn 1987).

This book uses the term “ ‘war and conflict” rather than just “war” in order to make the argument that it is also important to consider violences that lead up to the things traditionally understood as wars, violences that happen around the things traditionally understood as wars, and violences that continue after the things traditionally understood as wars. Gender analysis helps demonstrate the importance of those often-invisible parts of war and conflict. The category “war and conflict” as used in this book is also meant to include violence traditionally left out of the definition of war by nature of its being inside a single state, not sustained, or defined out of the political sphere. In this spirit, the term “war and conflict” includes clashes of state militaries, but also links to domestic violence, structural violence, economic instability, unemployment, poverty, poor working conditions, the impending threat of war, and/or infrastructural damage. As feminist scholar Chris Cuomo suggests, “[T]he spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life” (1996: 31). This book looks, through feminist lenses, to explore not only the traditional landscapes of war, but also how that violence is linked to, and present in, normal human life.

Thinking about gender, war, and conflict

There is a lot of work in political science and IR theorizing war and conflict, both broadly and narrowly interpreted, that does not see fit to mention or think about gender in any sense – as biological sex, as social expectation, as a power relation, or as an organizing principle. This book will show that this omission is a grave error, because the existence, definition, causes, practices, and consequences of war cannot be fully understood without using gender as a category of analysis. Less abstractly, gender can be found at every turn in the practice of war, and therefore should be found at every turn in war theorizing. In this book, I look for gendered assumptions, gendered experiences, gendered power, gendered knowledge, and gendered values in war-making and war-fighting. In so doing, this book reveals gender in women's experiences of wars; in men's experiences of wars; in the constitution and causes of wars; and in how wars might be defined and conceptualized. Building on these realizations, it argues that war is gendered, and that gender constructions are built at least in part on the dynamics of war and conflict. As such, thinking about war without gender (or gender without war) is incomplete, empirically and normatively (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1    Gender and the Chechen Wars

The story of the Chechen Wars (1994–6 and 1999–2009) initially seems relatively straightforward, much like the concepts of gender and war. Chechens tried to break away from Russia, and Russia reacted militarily to enforce its understanding that Chechnya was a part of Russia. Though the Russian military had overwhelming conventional military force, Chechen guerrilla warfare proved difficult to defeat, and a peace treaty was signed in 1996 when the fighting was essentially at a stalemate, making Chechnya de facto, though not de jure, independent. The Russian military's inability to decisively defeat the Chechens, combined with the unpopularity of the war in Russia, made the war something of a symbol of Russian decline and disorder. In 1999, the peace treaty could not hold together the cease-fire after Chechen militants supported a separatist movement in neighboring Dagestan. Soon after, Russia invaded Chechnya. Battlefield conflict ensued for about a year before the Chechen resistance changed its tactics to insurgency and terrorism. The Chechen resistance movement slowly died down, and its leader declared it over in 2009.

That paragraph-long account of the Chechen Wars does not mention women. It does not mention men. It does not mention gender – the gender of people, the gender of states, or the gender of insurgent or terrorist organizations. It does not talk about the gendered dynamics of war and conflict, gendered wartime political economies, or gendered post-war reconstruction efforts. It tells the story of the Chechen wars without reference to gender. So war histories can be told without talking and thinking about gender.

But like the paragraph above, any history or analysis of any war is incomplete when gender is omitted. Maya Eichler's (2011) research into Russian soldiers in the Chechen Wars reveals that the shift of Russia from almost-omnipotent to having difficulty defeating Chechnya played out in changing expectations of, and understandings of, Russian soldiers' masculinity. While Russian soldiers had previously been hailed as warrior-heroes even in less successful military expeditions, their masculinities were questioned and impugned as they (and their country) struggled in Chechnya. Valerie Sperling's (2003) work on non-governmental organizations in the Chechen Wars discusses the crucial role that the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers had in bringing the first Chechen war to an end, as they argued that neither their sons nor Chechen mothers' sons should be killed in fighting for a cause that was dubious at best. A. G. Levinson's (2004) research suggests that the second Chechen war went on so much longer than the first because women dropped their radical opposition to it, though sex remained a factor in predicting approval or disapproval of the fighting. My work with Caron Gentry (Sjoberg and Gentry 2007, 2008) suggests that this shift in women's opinion might have been at least in part due to the increase in women's participation in insurgency and terrorism in Chechnya. Russian women felt less solidarity with Chechen women because they saw them as violent. The Russian government successfully capitalized on the fear aroused by Chechen women, labeling them the “Black Widows” in press releases and policy discussions around the world (see Sjoberg and Gentry 2007). The work of Alice Szczepanikova (2005) suggests that gender played a key role in wartime family structure, experiences of wartime political economies, and survival tactics in refugee camps for Chechens displaced by the war.

These may seem like inconsequential facts that are tangential to the primary story told above. Individually, perhaps, they might be. Together, though, feminist scholars argue that changing gender dynamics in Russia shaped willingness and ability to fight the war, changing gender dynamics between Russia and Chechnya affected when and how violently Russians fought Chechens, and changing gender dynamics among Chechens affected how Chechens were seen, both by their Russian opponents and by other countries that might support war efforts or take in refugees.

To start this discussion, the rest of this introduction gives a preview of the substantive contents of this book, as well as its structure and the tools it uses to think about how gender and war are related. Chapter 2 starts with one of the fundamental questions that feminist analysis of war and conflict has asked: where are the women? The chapter suggests that women are virtually invisible in histories and dramatizations of war, and often invisible in theorizing wars. It argues that the invisibility of women in war stories is not only inaccurate but normatively problematic. The invisibility of women is inaccurate because women play a wide variety of roles at every stage of wars – in war justifications, in war preparations, in war-fighting, and in peace-making and post-conflict reconstruction. That same invisibility is normatively problematic because it entrenches, and contributes to, limiting assumptions about women's capabilities, and about their proper roles in social and political life more generally as well as war specifically. The chapter demonstrates, through the use of examples, that limiting portrayals of women in war come not only from those who are being explicitly sexist, but also from those who are trying to do gender-neutral analysis and those who are interested in protecting women. Given this, and the consistency of stories that limit women's apparent roles in wars across time, location, and culture, this chapter asks who benefits from narratives that make the majority of women's roles in wars invisible. It suggests that notions of innocent, helpless women are a key part of the ways that both soldiers and states justify wars – and a key thing that war-making parties fight for and fight to protect. The chapter contends that understanding this dynamic helps reveal information both about how wars are possible and about how wars construct, and are constructed by, traditional notions of gender roles. It concludes by discussing strategies for seeing, understanding, and documenting the diversity of the roles that women really play in wars, and rethinking war in response.

Chapter 3 turns from looking for women in wars to looking for men. As I mentioned above, it is a common assumption that “gender” analyses are only about women. On the contrary, however, recent feminist work on war and conflict has demonstrated that understanding where men are and what happens to them is crucially important to understanding gender dynamics (e.g., Hutchings 2008). Unlike women, men are not frequently invisible in accounts, histories, and stories of war and conflict – war stories are often (if not always) all about men. Even though men are everywhere in how we think about who fights wars, who dies in wars, who makes wars, and who ends wars, however, this chapter suggests that stories about how men experience wars are problematic. Like stories that relegate women to traditional gender roles in wars, there are stories that confine men to traditional gender roles. This makes men who do not meet traditional notions of what men should do – masculinity – in war and conflict invisible in war stories, much like women who do not meet traditional notions of what women should do – femininity. While the limitations on men are much less stark than the limitations on women, Chapter 3 demonstrates that they both constrain how men behave in wars and which men's roles in, and experiences of, wars we are able to see. It argues that the ideal-typical masculinity in times of war and conflict is often a citizen-soldier masculinity – one which associates bravery in war; the ability to protect helpless, innocent others; and full citizenship in a state, nation, or ethnic group (see, e.g., Elshtain 1987). Using examples from contemporary conflicts, this chapter suggests that expectations of citizen-soldier masculinity motivate men to fight wars when they otherwise would not, and shape soldiers' conduct during combat. In addition to motivating fighting, Chapter 3 contends that gender differentiation is mapped onto differentiation among the parties that are fighting wars – where belligerents attempt to affirm their own masculinity while emasculating, or feminizing, their enemies. It argues that the logic of feminization can be seen in the intentional victimization of civilians in wars and conflicts. It then shows the ways that the underlying logic of sexual violence in war relies on differentiating “the good guys” and “the bad guys” on the basis of their relative masculinities. The chapter concludes by discussing some of the theoretical and empirical benefits of understanding the depth and breadth of the relationship between masculinities and conflict. It argues that revealing those relationships, as a part of understanding men in war stories as men, is crucially important to understanding war and conflict generally.

Chapter 4