Feminism and War

Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism emerged from a political moment shaped by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The collection edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt seizes upon a dangerous contradiction: the United States claimed military intervention would rescue Muslim women while bombing, occupation, sanctions, detention, and diverted public resources made many women’s lives less secure. Women’s rights are not an issue added to war; they are a central language through which war acquires moral legitimacy.

The opening sections construct a “feminist geopolitics.” War cannot be understood only through interstate conflict or battlefield victory; military power moves through race, class, sexuality, nation, and empire. Contributors including Angela Davis, Zillah Eisenstein, and Jasbir Puar examine how the War on Terror produced divisions between civilization and barbarism and recruited some feminist and queer-rights discourses into national exceptionalism. Once equality is represented as a uniquely Western achievement, those targeted can be cast as backward subjects requiring violent modernization.

Critiquing rescue does not deny the patriarchal violence faced by Afghan or Iraqi women. It refuses to reduce them to victims waiting for US troops. The authors restore histories before and after invasion, local organizing and resistance, colonial borders, religion, and economic conditions. Women’s voices are not evidence to decorate an already decided foreign policy. Solidarity must respect their political judgments, including simultaneous opposition to occupation, fundamentalism, and domestic elites.

Chapters on Abu Ghraib, military detention, and war reporting show gendered and racialized humiliation not as the deviation of a few soldiers but as a way imperial power produces violable bodies. The collection also links bombs to budgets: military expenditure, sanctions, privatization, and urban gentrification redirect the resources of survival, making “economic war” felt across Latin America, Harlem, and war zones in connected but unequal ways. War enters housing, health, employment, and care; it is never only elsewhere.

The final section turns to organizing, including feminist direct action, conversations among women of color veterans, anti-occupation movements, and transnational coalitions. These cases reject both the assumption that women are naturally peaceful and the idea that equal entry into the military is sufficient progress. Antimilitarist feminism asks not how more women can participate in violent institutions, but how security is defined, who may manufacture threat, and how peace movements confront their own racial and class inequalities.

Because the volume responds closely to the George W. Bush era, some policy conditions and organizational landscapes have changed; drone warfare, AI weapons, militarized borders, and climate security require further analysis. Its focus on US empire is necessary for assigning hegemonic responsibility but should be read beside work on Russian, Chinese, regional-power, and nonstate militarisms. Anti-imperialism must not become an excuse to minimize local patriarchy, religious nationalism, or state repression.

The book remains urgent because the protection of women and minorities still divides supposedly rescuing civilizations from societies rendered warable. It gives FemRes readers a demanding test: does a foreign or security policy expand local people’s material autonomy and political voice, or merely use their suffering to authorize military force? Only by placing war on the same map as racial capitalism, sexual politics, care, and grassroots organizing can feminism oppose patriarchal violence without becoming the moral uniform of empire.