Gendering Global Conflict

Laura Sjoberg’s ambition in Gendering Global Conflict goes beyond “adding women” to war studies: she wants to reconstruct war theory itself. When international relations imagines autonomous, rational, competing states while setting households, emotion, and bodies outside the analysis, its apparently neutral model already presupposes a masculinized political subject. The book therefore engages realism, liberalism, constructivism, and other mainstream approaches to show that gender is not a variable inserted after war has been explained; it helps determine what can count as war or security in the first place.

The argument moves among the international system, states, substate organizations, and individuals. Sjoberg traces how structural inequality shapes perceptions of threat and how states perform masculinity through protection, honor, and postures of toughness. The supposedly unitary, autonomous state depends on reproductive labor in homes, discipline at work, racialized control at borders, and emotions declared politically inferior. Bedrooms, offices, and relations of care are not metaphors for the battlefield; they are material sites that make armies, economies, and political decisions possible.

This framework also changes the meaning of strategy and tactics. Appeals to protect “women and children” can mobilize war while excluding those who do not fit the image of the protected. Civilian targeting, sexual violence, recruitment, logistics, and evacuation are not merely technical choices; they are organized by judgments about which lives deserve preservation and which bodies may be risked. The book does not claim that every conflict uses gender identically. It demands instead that causal explanations name their gendered mechanisms rather than hiding them beneath “culture” or military necessity.

Its central insight is that war both reflects an existing gender order and remakes it through violence. Soldier, mother, refugee, hero, and victim are redistributed during conflict and then carried into postwar citizenship, recognition of trauma, and access to resources. Compared with Sjoberg’s introductory work on gender and war, this volume is more abstract and theoretically ambitious. It does not simply survey topics; it tests whether theories of war still make sense when gender is removed. Again and again, they do not.

That ambition has costs. Cross-level theorizing can flatten colonial histories and regional specificity, while parts of the vocabulary remain organized around a male/female binary. Work on empire, racial capitalism, queer and trans life, disability, and ecological destruction must extend it. The most productive reading therefore treats “gendering” not as a universal answer but as a test for every security claim: who appears as a political subject, whose labor disappears, why emotion is devalued, and which forms of life a theory must exclude in order to describe war as rational choice.