Gendering Global Conflict

In Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War, Laura Sjoberg asks what changes when gender is treated not as a topic to add to war studies, but as a force that helps organize war’s meanings and practices. International relations often describes states as self-contained, rational actors while locating emotion, care, and household life outside serious politics. Sjoberg’s intervention is to show that these boundaries are part of the explanation: they shape who can appear as a credible political actor, what counts as security, and which forms of violence become legible as war. Gender is not a final variable attached to an otherwise complete account; it helps constitute the account itself.

The book builds this case through a deliberate progression. It first interrogates the supposedly genderless study of war, then brings feminist lenses into conversation with international-relations theory, including debates about anarchy, structure, states, people, and political choice. Its later chapters turn to gendered strategy, tactics, and lived experience. That architecture matters: the argument moves from the categories through which scholars explain war, to the decisions made in its name, and finally to the lives through which it is experienced. Sjoberg does not present feminism as one uniform alternative school. The project is dialogical—engaging multiple feminist traditions while challenging mainstream war studies to account for what its customary frames leave out.

These levels are not separate boxes for causes. Assumptions about anarchy and autonomy shape which state actions appear rational; ideas of unity and protection at the state level are not neutral descriptions; and individual choices become intelligible through gendered expectations. Read together, the chapters trace relations between these scales. A state may present itself as self-contained while depending on household and workplace relations omitted from its official self-image. The analytical gain is not simply to add domestic life to an international-relations syllabus, but to show how the boundary between “private” and “political” helps produce the object called the state.

The chapters on strategy and tactics make the argument especially concrete. The familiar history of war often casts men as the strategists and soldiers while leaving women as background, victims, or symbols. Sjoberg asks what that narrative does to analysis: it can make masculine-coded conduct seem like the unmarked norm and hide the gendered assumptions shaping military choices. Her discussion of tactics examines how women can be targeted as markers of an opposing nation or community, while the claim to protect women and other feminized figures can help legitimize war. This is not an argument that women are merely symbols or passive recipients of violence. It is a way to trace how political actors mobilize gendered meanings—and how those meanings affect real bodies and choices.

A reading question follows: gender here is not reducible to counting women and men. It concerns how institutions mark some conduct as rational and strong, other conduct as emotional or dependent, then attach those values to states, political actors, and people said to need protection. The question is not whether care is genuine or merely propaganda. Ask who gains authority by defining danger, whether those being protected can name their own security needs, and what room the protective story leaves them to act. That distinction keeps analysis from replacing one simplified image—women as passive victims—with another.

“Living gendered wars” then widens the frame beyond the decision to begin fighting or the conduct of battles. The household, workplace, and intimate life are not automatically outside international politics: labor, care, emotion, and vulnerability help sustain states and shape how conflict is lived. In a 2016 H-Diplo/ISSF roundtable, reviewers emphasize the book’s challenge to treating war as an exceptional, self-contained event; its later chapters connect lived conflict with wider forms of violence and insecurity. The result is a feminist security question broader than “who is present in the military?”: whose experiences count as evidence about war, and which harms disappear when analysis stops at the battlefield or ceasefire?

The book’s ambition also invites disagreement. Jessica Trisko Darden’s roundtable response questions whether demonstrating that gender matters across war studies is enough to provide clear guidance for integrating that insight into different theories of conflict; Lauren Wilcox, by contrast, stresses the book’s value as a bridge between feminist and conventional scholarship. Sjoberg’s own response clarifies an important limit: the finished book narrowed from a plan that paired theoretical chapters with empirical studies and treated peace studies separately. Its focus is war theorizing, with interstate war receiving more attention than other forms of conflict. That is not a reason to dismiss the project; it is a reason to take the subtitle Toward seriously. The book offers a far-reaching intellectual architecture, not a final, universally applicable model or a comprehensive survey of every kind of political violence.

For readers, a useful exercise is to take a conventional account of a conflict and ask, at each stage: who is allowed to make decisions, who is cast as a protector or protected person, what labor makes state power possible, and which experiences are excluded from the record? The questions keep “gender” from becoming a decorative synonym for women and turn it into a method for examining power. Sjoberg’s more introductory Gender, War, and Conflict offers a concise companion route; this volume is the more sustained intervention into how war itself is theorized.

Sources and critical discussion: Columbia University Press description and contents, JSTOR book record and chapter previews, and the H-Diplo/ISSF roundtable, including Sjoberg’s response.