The Continuum of Violence: A Gender Perspective on War and Peace

Cynthia Cockburn’s chapter is a key text for feminist peace research and feminist security studies. It refuses to treat war as an exceptional realm outside ordinary life, and it refuses to isolate domestic violence, street violence, nationalist mobilization, military rape, and postwar exclusion as unrelated events. Instead, Cockburn analyzes them as connected sites on a continuum of violence.

The chapter matters because it shows how gender power travels across scales, from private life to international politics. Peacetime is not automatically safe, and wartime violence does not appear from nowhere. Household domination, state appeals to masculinity, military discipline of bodies, and postwar institutions that silence women all sustain and transform one another.

For FemRes, this chapter links Cohn’s critique of nuclear strategy language, Tickner’s feminist rewriting of international relations realism, and resources on anti-sexual violence and transformative justice. It reminds readers that feminist peace is not only a ceasefire; it requires asking which everyday structures keep producing violence that can be militarized.