Gender, War, and Conflict

Gender, War, and Conflict is a map for entering feminist security studies. Laura Sjoberg does not reduce “gender and war” to counting women victims or discussing women in uniform. She follows gender from explanations of why wars begin and who is authorized to fight through narratives of violence, displacement, and postwar reconstruction. Gender is not an extra variable added after conventional analysis; it organizes how states, armies, and enemies become imaginable.

The book dismantles the pairing of strong protector and vulnerable protected. States justify war through masculinized autonomy, reason, and toughness while turning endangered women and children into mobilizing symbols. Meanwhile, care, household survival, and labor-force reproduction are treated as background beyond war. The front and home front are not naturally separate: military operations depend on extensive feminized, undervalued, and sometimes coerced labor.

Sjoberg also refuses the story in which women can only be peaceful victims. Women may be soldiers, perpetrators, nationalist supporters, and resisters, yet public narratives explain them as manipulated mothers, deviant monsters, or sexualized exceptions. Analyzing women’s violence does not prove gender irrelevant. It reveals which violence passes as normal masculinity and which becomes scandal because of the actor’s gender.

As a teaching text, the book connects sexual violence, militarized masculinity, race and class, media representation, and postwar institutions in a usable framework. Its strength is shared vocabulary; its limitation is synthesis. Specific colonial histories can be compressed, and its binary gender language and early-2010s cases need supplementation from queer, trans, disability, and more recent decolonial scholarship.

For FemRes readers, the lasting exercise is to reframe every war question: who counts as a security subject, and whose death becomes collateral damage? Which masculinities does the state reward, and who restores everyday life? The book offers no single feminist cause of war; it makes supposedly gender-neutral accounts of conflict impossible to accept without scrutiny.