Gender, War, and Militarism

Gender, War, and Militarism does not merely add “women’s experiences” to an established history of war. Across seventeen interdisciplinary essays, it argues that militarism becomes ordinary because states, armies, families, and media repeatedly manufacture the brave man, the protectable woman, and the expendable other. Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via bring security studies, politics, sociology, literature, and activism into one frame, making war visible not only as battlefield combat but as a gendered way of organizing social relations.

The collection is strongest when its cases speak to one another. Analyses of the European Union’s hard/soft power distinction, hegemonic masculinity among private soldiers, the support systems that keep militaries running, and Israeli women in combat all show why simply admitting women to armed forces does not undo military hierarchy. Chapters on girl soldiers in Sierra Leone and conflict in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains likewise refuse the picture of men as fighters and women only as victims: women can be survivors, combatants, perpetrators, and political organizers, often at the same time.

Its treatment of wartime sexual violence also resists a universal explanation. The contributors trace continuities between rape in war and everyday sexual coercion while asking why some armed groups use sexual violence systematically and others do not. This shifts attention away from myths of war releasing an innate male brutality and toward command structures, ethnic politics, discipline, impunity, and local norms. Feminist opposition to violence can therefore address the institutions that produce it rather than turning women’s bodies into symbolic wounds of the nation.

Later chapters move through disarmament, peacebuilding, and cultural memory: WILPF’s transnational organizing, reconstruction in El Salvador, Bosnia’s “war babies,” representations of the US war on terror, and queer experiences erased after 9/11. Together they show that a ceasefire is not demilitarization. Postwar welfare, family policy, and ideals of legitimate citizenship may continue to reward soldierly masculinity while privatizing care, trauma, and the lives of those who do not fit a national recovery story.

Everyday labor offers another route into this institutional analysis. The chapter on military spouses treats loyalty, emotional support, relocation, and family care as work on which military life depends, not as a natural private backdrop. The discussion of women’s “right to fight” exposes a tension: equal access can challenge gendered limits on citizenship, yet it can also make the right to become a soldier appear to be the test of full citizenship. Read beside the chapters on girls associated with armed forces, sexual violence, and postwar care, these cases widen the question beyond who may carry a weapon to who absorbs war’s daily costs and whose losses receive public recognition.

The Sierra Leone case also calls for care with the label “girl soldier.” The introduction notes that many girls were abducted or forcibly associated with armed groups; a definition based only on who carried a weapon can erase coercion, support labor, and exclusion from postwar reintegration. Recognizing their agency does not turn forced association into voluntary enlistment. That distinction shows why a feminist account must ask not only where violence occurs but who is recognized as a combatant, victim, or postwar citizen.

As a 2010 anthology, the chapters vary in theoretical density; some terminology remains binary, and newer decolonial, queer, trans, and disability scholarship is needed beside it. The essays should not be mistaken for a seamless collective manifesto: they emerge from different disciplines, locations, and political problems, and comparison matters precisely because war does not operate identically everywhere. For a companion route into feminist antiwar politics, read with Feminism and War, which approaches security, empire, and organizing from a different scale. Sources: Bloomsbury’s bibliographic page and full contents and the authorized book preview.