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.

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. Its enduring value is therefore less a single seamless theory than a comparative method. It teaches FemRes readers to ask who is authorized to protect, who performs the labor behind an army, which injuries become publicly recognizable, and whose social order “peace” restores. Read this way, it is not a tidy women-and-war survey but a map for dismantling militarism’s everyday machinery.