Globalization and Militarism

In Globalization and Militarism, Cynthia Enloe asks readers to practice “feminist curiosity”: whenever an institution appears unrelated to the military, investigate how armed forces, policing, national security, and masculinity may sustain it. Militarism is not a condition that begins when war is declared. It is a social process that makes armed power appear necessary and obedience and sacrifice seem natural. Because it enters families, sports, fashion, tourism, and corporate management, globalization cannot be explained through trade and capital flows alone.

The athletic-shoe supply chain provides one of the book’s sharpest entrances. Brands such as Nike and Adidas depend on feminized, undervalued, supposedly replaceable factory labor, while low wages are not simply market outcomes. Governments, police, militaries, and export policy constrain organizing and secure shop-floor discipline. Enloe links an ordinary consumer product to distant security regimes: a shoe’s price contains not only labor but also state management of strikes, migration, and assumptions about women’s docility.

The book also dismantles the national-security story of protector and protected. States elevate soldierly masculinity as a model of citizenship while asking women to support war as military wives, mothers, service workers, or soldiers. Joining the military may bring some women income and rights, yet their presence can be used to certify equality without changing harassment, rank, or the purposes of war. The feminizing humiliation of male prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo shows how misogyny and homophobia become weapons: degrading a man as “womanly” already depends on imagining women as inferior.

Camouflage entering everyday fashion can look like harmless style while making signs of war casual, youthful, and consumable. Japanese women’s locations within global labor, marriage, and base politics likewise show states, corporations, and the US military jointly reshaping gendered choices. Enloe is not claiming that a secret army controls every commodity. Her method follows relations: who receives security, who must remain flexible, whose care maintains deployment, and whose fear becomes a reason for governing.

The book builds this method through accessible cases, trading exhaustive detail for breadth; even its updated edition needs extension through research on platform economies, border technology, and climate security. Crucially, it resists reducing responsibility to ethical shopping. Better purchasing cannot substitute for labor organization, state accountability, or corporate reform. For FemRes readers, demilitarization means more than opposing a declared war: it means undoing the global connections that make low wages, gendered obedience, and coercive security look like separate problems.