Gender State War

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Gender, the State, and War Redux : Feminist International Relations across
the 'Levels of Analysis'
Laura Sjoberg
International Relations 2011 25: 108
DOI: 10.1177/0047117810396990
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Article
International Relations
25(1) 108–134
Gender, the State, and © The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117810396990
International Relations ire.sagepub.com
across the ‘Levels of Analysis’
Laura Sjoberg
University of Florida
Abstract
In her recent article, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ in a special issue of this journal honoring
Kenneth Waltz, Jean Elshtain explores the question of what if anything it does to ‘put gender in’
to analysis of Waltz’s three ‘images’ of International Relations, and determines that gender is not
definitive or causal in war theorizing. This article suggests that, while the question is an important
and appropriate one to ask, the evidence that Elshtain brings to bear and the tools she uses to
answer the question are inadequate to the task and not reflective of the current ‘state of the field’
of feminist International Relations. Addressing the question of if gender ‘alters in significant ways’
‘man, the state, and war,’ this article provides theoretical and empirical examples from the young
but rich field of feminist International Relations to present readers with the substance of feminist
claims and the warrants behind feminist arguments. It urges International Relations to decide on
the question of the relevance of gender by taking work in the area seriously, and suggests that
the discipline might be convinced that acknowledging gender is crucial if scholars engage with the
literature that sees ‘man, the state, and war’ as gendered.
Keywords
feminism, gender, Waltz
Introduction
In her recent article, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ in a special issue of this journal discuss-
ing the thought of Kenneth Waltz, Jean Elshtain asserts that she was ‘never entirely con-
vinced that defining the state as a gendered category helped us to account for very much
Corresponding author:
Laura Sjoberg, University of Florida, 203 Anderson Hall, Gainsville, FL 32608, USA.
Email: sjoberg@ufl.edu

Sjoberg 109
where statecraft and war were concerned,’ and concludes that, across Waltz’s three levels
of analysis, ‘there is no compelling evidence of gender determination.’1 While acknowl-
edging that feminist work has contributed to understanding the empirical realities of wom-
en’s subordination, including but not limited to sexual exploitation, wartime rape, and
sex-selective abortion, Elshtain distinguishes the usefulness of that analysis from the less
useful identification of ‘man, the state, and war’ as gendered.2 She asks: ‘Does “gender”
as a category of analysis or as the central feature of a logic of explanation alter in signifi-
cant ways Kenneth Waltz’s famous “levels of analysis”?’ and answers in the negative.3
Though feminist scholars have critiqued the gender-exclusivity of using the ‘levels of
analysis’ to frame International Relations (IR) theorizing,4 this article takes as a starting
point Elshtain’s assertion that they can provide leverage on the question of whether (and
how) gender analysis significantly changes IR theorizing. However, I use very different
tools to think about this question, and (perhaps relatedly, though not necessarily) come
up with a different answer. Particularly, the account of gender as a category of analysis
in the article omits (both in substance and in citation) the great majority of feminist work
in IR and (likely as a result) does not reflect that work’s complicated understandings of
the meaning of gender and its role in global politics.5 This article looks to evaluate the
utility of using gender to think about global politics at Waltz’s three levels of analysis,
acknowledging the contributions of feminist work in IR.6 After introducing gender as a
category of analysis, this article looks at people, the state, and the international system,
in Elshtain’s terms, ‘What does “putting gender in” do, if anything?’7
Genderings
Elshtain defines feminist analysis as work that ‘pushes a feminist agenda of one sort or
the other.’8 After defining feminist scholarship in terms of itself, she describes feminist
work in three categories: work linking gender subordination with human nature, work
taking universalist approaches to women’s rights, and work that rejects universalism for
radical relativism.9 Elshtain translates this to her perception of feminist arguments in IR:
Feminist thinkers, with few exceptions, hold that either increasing the number of women in
positions of power will alter the world of politics, domestic and foreign, or that states that have
undergone what might be called a ‘feminist transformation’ will engage one another in ways
that are visibly different from the ‘male dominant’ state; or, finally, that transformed states will
then encounter one another in a different sort of global arena, one in which ‘soft power’, said
to be favored overwhelmingly by women, pertains, and all ‘militarism’ has been eradicated.10
Elshtain explains that all positions agree that ‘all pre-feminist IR theory is suspect
because of its systematic gender bias.’11 While she acknowledges that discrimination
against women is ‘overdetermined’ in global social life, Elshtain does not see it as being
‘determinative’ in either the structure or practice of international politics.12
In order to evaluate whether gender is ‘substantial’ or even ‘determinative’ in global
politics,13 it is important to have a fuller understanding of the meaning of gender and the
focus of feminist scholarship in IR than what Elshtain’s article provides. Though Elshtain
is correct that feminist theorizing in IR is not limited to what she calls the ‘empirical
realities of women in political life, national or international,’14 her article largely ignores

110 International Relations 25(1)
the contemporary subject matter and approaches of most feminist IR. This problem man-
ifests in three main ways. First, Elshtain uses ‘gender’ as a synonym either for
‘women’/‘femininity’ or the differences between ‘women’ and ‘men,’ rather than explor-
ing, as much feminist scholarship has, the difference between sex and gender, the com-
plicated construction of gender, and the multiple and interacting layers of gendering in
global politics. Second, the understanding of feminism in the article, despite being refer-
enced as current, is outdated, focuses on anomalous or radical examples, and presents
oversimplified versions of complex theoretical traditions. Third, Elshtain argues that
gender can matter in ‘empirical realities of women’s lives’, but not in the constitution of
the state and the international system; implying that gender can be determinative for
women’s lives, but not for statecraft and warcraft. This treatment (improperly, as many
feminists understand it) assumes that ‘the state’ and ‘war’ can be conceptually or empiri-
cally separated from women’s lives.
Even early feminist IR treated gender as more than the differences between men and
women at the individual level or the discrimination against women at the state level. In
the introduction to their 1991 book, Grant and Newland (citing feminist philosopher of
science Sandra Harding) describe gender as ‘a systematic social construction of mascu-
linity and femininity that is little, if at all, constrained by biology.’15 In her 1992 mono-
graph, Gender in International Relations, Ann Tickner (citing feminist theorist Joan
Scott) explains gender as ‘a constitutive element of social relationships based on per-
ceived differences between the sexes.’16 Following this early work, many feminists artic-
ulated sophisticated definitions of gender that include elements of post-structural
theorizing, socio-biological understandings, and social construction, emphasizing power,
interdependence, and relationality.17
There are several elements common to most feminist IR understandings of gender. The
first is that ‘gender’ is distinguishable from ‘sex.’ If ‘sex’ refers to the perceived member-
ship in Elshtain’s categories of ‘male’ or ‘female,’18 gender is ‘a system of symbolic
meanings that creates social hierarchies based on perceived association with masculine
and feminine characteristics.’19 The study of gender in political life is not the study of
what men do and what women do and how they might be similar or different. Instead, it
is the study of how social structures select for and value characteristics associated with
masculinity and femininity, and how those selections and values influence the lives not
only of ‘men’ and ‘women’, but of society more generally. Being ‘female’ is not a (or the)
indicator of gender, instead, masculinities and femininities are genders and produce gen-
derings. Individuals can be ‘gendered,’ but so can institutions, organizations, and even
states. Gendering is about the distribution of power and regard based on perceived asso-
ciation with sex-based characteristics, rather than possession of certain sex organs a pri-
ori. In these understandings, gender is first, fundamentally social; second, an expression
of power; and, third, an organizing principle for politics and political thought.20
It is gender as an organizing principle for politics and political thought that interests
feminists in IR. As Marysia Zalewski explains:
The driving force of feminism is its attention to gender and not simply women. To be sure, for
many feminists, the injustices done to women because of their sex is paramount, but the
concept, nature, and practice of gender are key.21

Sjoberg 111
Elshtain’s characterization of feminists as interested in either adding women to the power

structures of world politics or feminizing the current leaders, then, is unrepresentative.
Instead, feminist scholars see themselves as looking at IR through ‘gendered lenses.’22
Scholarship through gendered lenses looks for gender in policy formulations, military
decisions, the distribution of resources, social and economic status, leadership, and other
areas of the international arena.23 Elshtain’s definition of ‘feminist scholarship’ as
‘advancing a feminist agenda’ implies that feminist work is political while (some or all)
other work is not. Feminists in IR would accept that their work commits to ending gender
subordination and to seeing global politics from the margins, but Elshtain wrongly char-
acterizes other work as apolitical.24 Feminists have argued that the difference between
the epistemology of feminist work and other work in IR is not that feminism has a poli-
tics, but that it acknowledges its political content. More to the point, ignoring relation-
ships between the knower and the known generally and of gender specifically does not
make IR scholarship gender-neutral or objective.
Feminist scholars’ engagement with the relationship between the knower and the
known reveals the third misunderstanding in Elshtain’s explanation of the field. While
Elshtain concedes that gender discrimination impacts women’s lives, she distinguishes
the importance of gender to women’s lives from the question of whether global politics
is gendered. In making this claim, Elshtain asserts that gender discrimination which
impacts women’s lives can be separated from the nature of the state and international
system, and from the determinants and causes of war therein. Feminists in IR have con-
sistently argued both that women’s lives are not just lived in global politics, but of global
politics, and that the discrimination women experience is interlinked with the existence
and causes of structural and physical violence in the international arena. Particularly,
feminists have argued that patriarchal social organization25 in global politics is a princi-
pal cause not only of women’s subordination, but also empire-building and globalization,
among other international processes.26 These approaches see that the gendering of wom-
en’s lives cannot be separated from the gendering of ‘man, the state, and war,’ generally
or in terms of the meanings and causes of war specifically.
Feminist scholarship in IR, then, does not pursue a line of research arguing that the dif-
ferences between ‘women’ and ‘men’ are significant at all three ‘levels’ of analysis. Instead,
feminists have argued that the power relations between gendered constructions and institu-
tions ‘significantly alter’ all three levels of analysis and their interaction. Gender is a ‘struc-
tural feature of social and political life’ that ‘profoundly shapes our place in, and view of,
the world.’27 Feminist scholars characterize gender as ‘necessary, conceptually, for under-
standing international relations; important in analyzing causes and predicting outcomes;
and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change.’28 Contrary to
Elshtain’s claim, this means that pre-feminist (or non-feminist) scholarship is not ‘suspect’
or valueless, but necessarily incomplete. This clearer, updated, and more complex under-
standing of the meaning of gender and the mission of feminist work is certainly suited to
evaluating contributions to the study of IR at Waltz’s three levels. Still, it remains impor-
tant not to assume feminists’ belief that ‘putting gender in’ produces ‘new insights, theo-
retical advances, and conceptual categories’ for ‘man, the state, and war’ makes it so.29 The
rest of this article turns to the theoretical and empirical evidence behind feminist claims to
evaluate the relevance of gender analysis at each ‘image’ of Waltzian theorizing.

‘Man’30
Elshtain starts by analyzing Waltz’s ‘first image’: man. Waltz saw human nature as the
least important of the three images, arguing that its continuity makes it less interesting
to study than the state or the system. Elshtain, however, sees that Waltz had difficulty
dispensing with first-image pessimists such as Freud, Niehbur, and Augustine, whose
work she finds compelling in its own right and suggestive of the first image’s
importance.
Elshtain asks whether gender analysis contributes to first-image theorizing. She starts
by criticizing feminists’ lack of engagement with first-image pessimists, because she
knows ‘of no first-image feminist analysis that approaches Freud, Niebuhr, and Augustine
in its comprehensiveness or coherence.’31 Elshtain also critiques the substance she sees
in feminist first-image arguments. She provides a few examples that she calls ‘reduction-
ist,’ including ‘emphasis on wombs as a way to peace,’ ‘pleas for the reduction of the
number of males in the population,’ and ‘claims that “all men are rapist in situ.”’32
Elshtain expresses horror that, in her view, ‘those were not marginal arguments – they
were at the heart of the dominant radical feminist position in the 70s/80s.’33
Given that Elshtain sees these arguments as intellectually bankrupt, she finds it
‘unsurprising that serious students of gender and international relations often go to con-
siderable pains to avoid first-image arguments.’34 When feminists do make first-image
arguments, Elshtain finds them problematic, as she explains:
Each time a gender analyst suggests that should women take over the reins of government it
would lead to a substantive alteration in how a state behaves, she laces together Waltz’s first
and third image in a construction that is less than persuasive.35
Elshtain perceives that feminists are arguing that the difference between men’s nature
and women’s nature affects the way that human nature impacts international politics. She
is not persuaded, seeing as:
the case has not been made that between ‘maleness’ and the international system there is a one-
way line of absolute causation … [and] whatever the differences that pertain between men and
women as embodied beings – and we know there are some – they are not decisive, finally, for
how states behave, particularly in the international arena, Waltz’s central concern.36
If Elshtain is unconvinced that sex matters in human nature’s effect on IR, she is also
unconvinced that changes in either the sex of leadership or the gender-based characteris-
tics we value in leaders will change the world. She characterizes feminist scholars as
advancing ‘naïve if well-meaning … simplistic formulations about changes of heart.’37
Contrary to Elshtain’s portrayal, feminist IR does not avoid first-image theorizing,
either about human nature or about the role of individuals in global politics. Feminists in
IR have consistently claimed the gender lenses offer a unique understanding of the first
image.38 Further, feminist arguments for ‘first-image’ significance do not rely on inte-
grating women into leadership. Instead, some feminists in IR have understood accounts
of human nature that disregard gender as incomplete.39 Feminist scholars also contend
that gender affects first-image scholars’ choice of subject when they study ‘man’ or ‘the
individual.’40 Finally, feminists provide a link between ‘people’ and ‘the system’ that,

Sjoberg 113
instead of relying on adding more women to leadership, understands the international

system as interdependent with its most vulnerable members.41 The remainder of this sec-
tion goes over each of these contributions to first-image theorizing.
The first dimension of first-image theorizing is the question of the role of human
nature in global politics. Even the earliest work in feminist IR argued that gender analy-
sis matters in the study of human nature in global politics. Tickner, in her 1988 critique
of Hans Morgenthau’s principles of political realism, argued that the pessimist view of
human nature was ‘rooted in assumption about human nature and morality that, in mod-
ern Western culture, are associated with masculinity.’42 Particularly, feminists see the
gendered dichotomies of our understandings of human capacities, where masculine–
feminine is related to strong–weak, autonomous–interdependent, rational–emotional,
competitive–cooperative, and public–private. Feminists observe that, often, realists’ con-
ceptions of human nature privilege the side of these dichotomies associated with mascu-
linity while discounting the characteristics associated with femininity, relying on ‘the
social construction of hegemonic masculinity and its opposition to devalued feminin-
ity.’43 Tickner explains that, at best, a concept of human nature that privileges traits
associated with masculinity only tells a partial story:
A feminist perspective believes that objectivity, as it is culturally defined, is associated with

masculinity. Therefore, supposedly ‘objective’ laws of human nature are based on a partial
masculine view of human nature. Human nature is both masculine and feminine; it contains
elements of social reproduction and development as well as political domination.44
Criticisms of first-image pessimism, however, have not led feminist IR to adopt a liberal
individualistic understanding of human nature. Sarah Brown, in another early contribu-
tion to feminist IR, argued that such an approach relies on the gendered dichotomy of
reason and emotion, awarding individuals political agency and rights on the basis of their
ability to reason.45 As a result, liberal approaches to gender are left to ‘roam confusedly
between the pursuit of liberty and the pursuit of justice, juggling with incoherent strate-
gies which simultaneously assert women’s sameness to and difference from men.’46
Rejecting both negative and individualistic approaches to human nature, feminist theo-
rists have drawn on women’s experiences and gender analysis to sketch alternative visions.
Starting with evidence that sometimes women are assigned obligations that they do not
freely assume (contra social contract theorizing), Nancy Hirschmann sees humans as rela-
tionally, rather than radically, autonomous, where people maintain individual identity but
make choices within the constraints of partial autonomy and human interdependence.47
Tickner proposes a hybrid approach that sees human nature as a combination of character-
istics traditionally associated with masculinity and the characteristics associated with femi-
ninity that they often overshadow.48 Other feminist scholars, combining these understandings,
opt to see human behavior as fluidly connected to dominant (gendered) social norms rather
than stabilized by some sort of constant nature.49 Each of these approaches has obvious and
potentially important implications for the role of ‘man’ in statecraft and warcraft.
The second dimension of feminist contributions to first-image theorizing is dialogues
with and criticism of traditional first-image scholarship that looks at the role of individu-
als in global politics.50 Looking through gendered lenses, feminists have argued that
most first-image work in IR:

Look[s] only at the individual with elite power to explain international relations, and even then
they look only at the male individual with elite power. While this perspective widens the
international relations spectrum to include individuals, the narrowness of the individuals that it
includes limits its effectiveness as an interpretive framework and reproduces the gender, class,
and race biases in system-level international relations scholarship. Further, while ‘individuals’
matter … [to some IR scholars], their interdependence and relationships do not – they appear
to act alone, without reliance on each other, and with a complete set of choices.51
Feminist scholars have suggested that the spectrum of individuals seen to ‘matter’ in
global politics should be expanded. Feminist work often starts from theorizing even the
most dispossessed women’s lives from the ‘bottom up,’ and theorizing the other levels of
analysis through the lenses of what they learn from those women’s lives.52
This work, however, is not, as Elshtain assumes, primarily about how gender subor-
dination influences women’s lives. Instead, feminists have provided empirical evidence
that the gendered experiences of marginalized people, particularly women, in global
politics impact global politics more broadly. For example, Katherine Moon pointed out
that the United States’ military aid to South Korea was once conditioned on the avail-
ability of legal, disease-tested prostitutes.53 Feminist scholars have demonstrated the
importance both of actual Afghan women’s lives and public representations of their
experiences in shaping the United States’ military deployment in Afghanistan.54 That is,
feminists in IR have provided evidence not just that Afghan women live in gendered
worlds, but also that those gendered worlds are bound up in why the war in Afghanistan
happened. They make this argument not as a unique causality argument for ‘the war’ in
Afghanistan, but as a structural argument for the cause of war generally. Feminist work
has shown that women combatants impact both understandings and outcomes of con-
flicts as diverse as those in Northern Ireland and Rwanda.55 These case studies show that
first-image theorizing’s relevance to global politics should not be limited to focusing on
human nature. Instead, feminists have argued that war theorizing should recognize the
myriad ways that people generally, and people at the margins specifically, influence
global politics.
The third contribution that feminist theorists have made to first-image theorizing is
problematizing the very distinctions made between ‘man, the state, and war’ in IR. While
Elshtain accuses feminists of mixing the first and third levels by arguing that adding
women to state leadership will improve the world, feminist theorists’ actual arguments
about the relationships between images have had a different focus, contending that:
Read forward, ‘the personal is international’ insofar as ideas about what it means to be a
‘respectable’ woman or an ‘honorable’ man have been shaped by colonizing policies, trading
strategies, and military doctrines … the implications of a feminist understanding of international
politics are thrown into sharper relief when one reads ‘the personal is international’ the other
way round: the international is personal. This calls for a radical new imagining of what it takes
for governments to ally with each other, compete with, and wage war with each other.56
In other words, the state and international system impact and shape individuals’ lives,
while individuals themselves play an essential role in the content and activities of the
state and the international system. In Moon’s work, for example, it is not only that
Korean prostitutes’ bodies were the subject of negotiations about the United States’

Sjoberg 115
willingness to defend South Korea, but also that negotiations between the two govern-
ments dictated when those were forced to undergo sexually transmitted disease testing
and whether they would work in racially segregated or integrated brothels.57 Feminist
scholars have argued that such examples demonstrate that the individual, state, and
international ‘images’ of international politics are not only linked, but ontologically
interdependent.
Returning to Elshtain’s framework, then, there are two questions to be addressed: is
first-image theorizing important? And is gender important to first-image theorizing?
Feminist work in IR provides additional evidence for Elshtain’s contention that the first
image is an important piece of the puzzle of global politics. Where I disagree with
Elshtain is in answering the second question. Elshtain argues that feminists have avoided
first-image theorizing and engaged the ‘individual’ in the meaning and causes of war
only unconvincingly. Evidence from 20 years of feminist work in IR, however, I argue,
makes a different case. Feminist work shows that there are importantly gendered ele-
ments to both pessimistic and liberal understandings of human nature used in thinking
about how wars are made and prevented, and proposes more comprehensive accounts
inspired by gender analysis. Feminist work in IR has shown, both theoretically and
empirically, that many of the field’s representations of the individuals that impact global
politics are gendered. Gender lenses have uniquely demonstrated that it is not only elite
men who impact the making and outcomes of conflicts, but also people (particularly
women) at the margins of the global power structures.58 Further, feminist scholarship has
deconstructed the divide between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ in the state and war, demon-
strating that the ‘first image’ and the other ‘levels’ are not only interlinked, as Elshtain
proposes, but intersubjective, where ‘not only subjects (women and marginalized men),
but also concepts, desires, tastes … can be feminized – with the effect of reducing their
[ideological and material] legitimacy, status, and value’.59 Without ‘gendering’ ‘man,’
these insights would be unavailable to improve the breadth and depth of first-image
theorizing.
The state
Elshtain next addresses the importance of the second level to understanding war and
statecraft. Particularly, Elshtain is interested in the proposition that ‘good’ states are less
likely to war with one another, thus reducing the flash points that erupt into violence.
When she asks if gender impacts the characteristics of states that cause their war-making
to vary, Elshtain concludes that ‘there is no compelling evidence of gender determina-
tion.’60 She reaches this conclusion by exploring the flaws she sees in feminist theorizing
of the state, which she characterizes as:
woefully inadequate in its consideration of state systems because the overriding assumption
was that all states are patriarchal, ergo oppressive of women, and liberal democratic states
might be the worst of all because they somehow disguise this fact.61
Elshtain follows this oversimplification of feminist theorizing about the state by criticiz-
ing the support of some Marxist feminists for the Soviet system during the Cold War.
Again (mis)representing radical and Marxist feminism as evil and nihilistic, Elshtain

returns to ‘an earlier generation of women activists’ to see if feminist theorizing about
the state can be salvaged.62 What follows is an interesting, if vague, discussion of women
Progressives in the World War I era who argued that either women should control legis-
latures or men should engage in the activities (such as mothering) that make women
more peaceful. Elshtain is particularly interested in Jane Addams’ ‘far more sophisti-
cated’ version of this argument, which claimed that ‘certain practices women engage in
are essential to forming the sort of state that will refrain from war.’63 Still, Elshtain
rejects Addams’ argument, criticizing its reliance on an analogy to immigration that
requires a higher governmental authority between states.
By discarding the feminist arguments about the state in 1970s’ and 1980s’ radical and
Marxist feminism, and exploring and then rejecting earlier work, Elshtain concludes
that, though ‘the second image cannot be dispensed with all together,’ gender is irrele-
vant to the question of what makes a ‘good state’ that is less likely to make war.64 While
I think that Elshtain dispenses too quickly with Marxist feminist approaches as well as
Addams’ argument, the remainder of this section makes an easier case for the relevance
of gender to second-image theorizing by exploring post-Cold War feminist thought in IR,
which Elshtain does not engage.
Elshtain rejects feminist IR’s claim that the state is ‘gendered.’ I argue that, in evalu-
ating the question of whether or not the state is ‘gendered,’ it is crucial to explore the
reasoning behind the claim in order to evaluate if and how gender matters to second-
image theorizing. Some feminists in IR have presented compelling statistical evidence
that domestic gender equality is an independently significant variable in predicting
which (‘good’) states refrain from wars, controlling for democracy, trade, and cultural
similarity.65 Still, most feminists have resisted reducing second-image theorizing about
war to the question of ‘good states’ responsible for peace and ‘bad states’ as sources of
danger. Instead, many feminist theorists have studied both the nature of the state and the
range of its behaviors toward other states. Neither, feminists have argued, can be fully
understood without reference to gender. As R. W. Connell has observed, ‘there is a
gendered configuring of recruitment and promotion, a gendered configuring of the
internal division of labor, a gendered configuring of policymaking, of practical rou-
tines, and of ways of mobilizing pleasure and consent’ in the structure and function of
states.66 This evidence has led feminists to wonder if the ‘state’ is necessarily gendered
and its meanings are necessarily embedded in the gendered experiences of male theo-
rists and practitioners.67 Particularly, various feminist scholars see gender as ‘altering in
significant ways’ the philosophical warrants for the state, the leadership of the state, the
portrayal of the state in IR theory as a rational and unitary actor, state militarism, and
state nationalism.
Feminists have argued that gender is salient in the philosophical basis of the state. As
Carole Pateman has noted, many social contract theorists allocated women different
roles than men while failing to deal with the ways that reproduction would have inter-
rupted the operations of their visions of un-governed society.68 Both explicitly and as a
result of their partial views of the social, social contract theorists often excluded women
and femininity from explanations of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.69 The
impacts of gendering citizenship include women’s actual exclusion from political life
and the construction of the gendered public–private dichotomy.70 There, the ‘public

Sjoberg 117
realm … where power and authority are exercised, is regarded as the natural province of
men; while the private world is seen as the appropriate domain of women.’71 As a result,
‘the things that happen in private spaces (such as domestic violence or marital rape) have
been treated as private matters beyond the control or authority of the state,’ and therefore
received less attention.72 The gendered nature of the philosophical foundation of the state
influences states’ policy priorities and the allocation of states’ resources among their citi-
zens, both of which have a bearing not only on states’ individual decisions to make wars,
but also on the existence of states of war more generally.
Feminists have also noted that states’ leaders are mainly men and mainly mascu-
line.73 Women have been and remain under-represented in political leadership in every
state in the world throughout human history. Despite current, record-high representa-
tion, women remain less than 20 percent of the world’s parliamentarians, and less than
15 percent of the world’s holders of executive office, cabinet posts, and judicial seats.
State masculinity, however, is not reducible to men’s leadership of states. Instead, men
continue to lead states because states and their citizens select for characteristics associ-
ated with masculinity (assertiveness, coarseness, toughness, aggressiveness, sternness,
activeness, rationality, and confidence) over characteristics associated with femininity
(warmth, gentleness, sensitivity, emotion, interconnectivity, and cautiousness) when
they select their leaders. Men and women privilege masculinity regardless of the physi-
cal sex of leaders.74 As a result, feminists explain, the institutional structures of the
state manifest gender subordination and ‘state identity often depends on the manipula-
tion of gender.’75 There are two impacts of this observation: the ‘empirical reality’ (in
Elshtain’s terms) of the exclusion of women and femininity from control (and spoils)
of the state, and states’ propensities to act according to the masculine traits that influ-
ence leadership selections. The latter would have serious implications for interstate
relations, even if the former did not.
A third way that feminists have seen gender in the ‘state’ is in Waltzian neorealists’
tendencies to portray states as ‘abstract unitary actors whose actions are explained …
according to some higher rationality presented as independent of human agency.’76
However, feminists have observed that ‘characterizations of state behavior in terms of
self-help, autonomy, and power seeking privilege characteristics associated … with
masculinity.’77 This means that ‘models of IR [and the causes of war] have been built on
assumptions of a rigid boundary between inside and outside, anarchy and order, foreign
and domestic.’78 These models portray the ‘outside’ as a dangerous space. Even as these
models have been deconstructed in some IR work, characteristics associated with femi-
ninity have not been recognized in more complex views of the state, and analysis of the
influence of gender remains marginal.79 Instead, feminist work has revealed rationality
as a partial, stereotypically masculine view of state decision-making that ignores (the
feminine characteristic of) emotion and shown that states’ interests are far from unitary.
Characterizing states as rational, unitary actors reifies understandings of state identity
and interest that represent only narrow portions of states’ populations. Particularly, femi-
nists suggest that ‘the boundaries between inside and outside, order and anarchy evoke
gendered constructions of self and other that privilege hegemonic constructions of mas-
culinity.’80 Feminists have criticized the implications of these arguments for understand-
ing individual subjectivity. Particularly:

Feminists’ concern for the political margins inspires the insight that states are not monolithic
entities, but diverse amalgamations of people and experiences … the state is not an agent but a
compilation of agents. Some agents within a state are represented in the state’s political
decisions while others are not.81
While some theorists disregard the insecure people inside of secure states either by
presuming order ‘inside’ the state or by arguing for a utilitarian approach to security
and resource provision, feminists argue that this instrumentalizes individuals, particu-
larly at the margins of global politics.82 If, for example, as feminists have argued,
states and state structures (sometimes) benefit from wars, but women are dispropor-
tionately negatively affected, than the interests of women in a state can be different
from the interests of the state ‘as a whole’ should such a thing exist.83 Arguing that
state interests are not only diverse but sometimes internally contradictory, feminists
contend that failure to understand the state as gendered allows those in power to adju-
dicate these conflicts in their interests to maintain the appearance of state unity. This
feminist argument has two potential implications: that the state is more complicated,
less unified, and less representative than it is often portrayed in neorealist theory, and
that states’ decisions and interactions can be understood with reference to the gen-
dered identities implicit in the framing of state behavior as rational and unified.84 It is
important to understand that this critique is different from the criticism that Waltzian
neorealism does not explain specific wars (which Waltz rejects because he explicitly
states that his approach is systemic, rather than being a theory of foreign policy). The
feminist argument that gender hierarchy impacts state behavior is an argument not
about individual state choices, but about the nature of states doing the choosing; there-
fore, it is a theory of the state’s role in the system, rather than a (here, irrelevant) the-
ory of foreign policy.
Feminists have argued that state militarism is more evidence that the state and its war
decisions (generally and specifically) are both gendered and gender-constitutive.
Militarism is ‘the processes by which characteristically military practices are extended
into the civilian arena’ by extension of war-related, war-preparatory, and war-based
meanings and activities into political life.85 Feminists have argued that state militarism is
not gender-neutral, natural, or automatic.86 Instead, gender-differentiated roles are both
demanded and reified by militarization, as:
Men are under constant pressure to prove their manhood by being tough, adversarial, and
aggressive … in one highly legitimated and organized institution within most societies, men not
only can, but – to be successful – must prove their masculinity … women must be properly
subservient to meet the needs of militaries.87
Because militarism requires men to be willing to kill and die on behalf of their state (and
the innocent women inside it) while women simultaneously serve as the feminized other
in need of protection and the reproducers of masculine soldiers, many IR feminists see it
as impossible to understand state militarism without conceptualizing it as gendered, and
see it as impossible to understand war and/or wars without understanding state milita-
rism.88 The gendered nature of militarism has implications for the gendered nature of the
state, since militaries and their signifiers are among the few features that are pervasive

Sjoberg 119
across states.89 As such, failing to understand the state as gendered means losing explana-
tory power in terms of state identities and behaviors.
Understanding gendered militarism is even more important, feminists argue, because
of its links to state nationalism, which:
is a set of discourses about who ‘we’ are and who belongs in the political community.…
Nationalism therefore depends upon ‘national chauvinism’ such that members of other nations
as well as racial, sexual, or ideological others inside the nation are constructed in terms of
femininity or subordinate masculinity. These others are weak and inferior, or they are
hypermasculine.… [N]ationalist discourses that constitute the identity of the nation are
predicated upon discourses of gender that reproduce traditional gender roles.90
Particularly, feminists see that ‘gender difference between women and men serves to
symbolically define the limits of national difference [my emphasis].’91 In other words,
gender differentiation among states is a cause of war. Gendered nationalism shapes
state identity and differentiates among states in the international arena through wom-
en’s bodies, as they are constructed as biological and cultural reproducers of the
nation.92 In these nationalist discourses, it is crucial that women serve as women (par-
ticularly as mothers) to insure national security and pride. The observation of gendered
nationalism, then, might have two implications for second-image theorizing of war.
First, it provides evidence that the state identity is tied to state gender identity, and
therefore identity-based state war decisions are tied to state gender identities. Second,
if feminist scholars are right that states use gender metaphors (or, as Spike Peterson
recently called it, ‘feminization as devalorization’)93 in their nationalist contests, gen-
der accounts for how states’ identities influence their interaction and even their propen-
sity to make wars.
Evidence about the significance of gender for second-image theorizing, then, looks
substantially different when one looks beyond Elshtain’s narrow formulation to consider
feminist work on gender in nationalism, militarism, citizenship and individual subjectiv-
ity, leadership, and the philosophy of the state in theory and practice. Twenty years of
feminist IR work makes a strong case for both the accuracy and usefulness of calling the
state ‘gendered,’ both for better analysis of global politics and for theorizing the causes
of war. If feminists are (even partly) right that gender is a key part in how states form
political communities, choose leaders, determine their political interests, see and pre-
pare for war, and compare themselves to other states, then it is theorizing the second
image without reference to gender that appears to be problematic in accounting for when
and how war is made.
‘War’
Elshtain is skeptical of Waltz’s emphasis on the systemic level, arguing that war cannot
happen without the consideration of the other two levels.94 Elshtain expresses concern
both that system-level analysis cannot account for change and that it risks giving states
moral equivalence, which ‘shuns consideration of the issue of justice, liberty, and equal-
ity.’95 Still, Elshtain acknowledges that systemic theorizing is not entirely irrelevant
because of anarchy.96

Having established the role of third-image theorizing, Elshtain asks if gender matters
to systemic analysis. She inquires, specifically, about the utility of gender in light of
anarchy, asking, ‘on the level of the state as an actor in an allegedly “anarchic” realm,
what does “putting gender in” do, if anything?’97 While reiterating that ‘“putting gender
in” helps us to focus on all sorts of empirical data and to look at issues “on the ground”
in a way we might not otherwise,’ she argues that:
Feminists who argue that gender is determinative in the causal sense in ‘why war?’ have failed
to make their case, even as studies of gender internationally and domestically have enhanced
our knowledge in salutary ways.98
The line Elshtain is implicitly drawing is between knowing about women’s lives and
knowing about the causes of war generally and/or wars specifically. Elshtain’s claim
addresses two elements of systemic theorizing: the relationship between gender and the
international system generally, and the role (or lack thereof) of gender in the causal story
that leads to the making and fighting of war. While Elshtain does not elaborate on which
feminist work has failed to make the case, the remainder of this section engages her
claim by exploring feminist work in IR that argues that gender ‘alters in significant ways’
thinking about Waltz’s ‘third image.’ Feminist IR has argued that ‘putting gender in’
impacts how we understand war by arguing that war is gendered, by critiquing system-
focused theorizing, by claiming that gender hierarchy is a structural element of global
politics, and by hypothesizing that gender hierarchy is international structure in the
Waltzian sense.
Feminists have explored the links between masculinity, femininity, and war. Feminists
have argued that gender inequality is a predictor of war, that gender is key to war’s jus-
tificatory narratives, that war planning and preparation is fundamentally gendered, that
war’s impacts are consistently gender-disproportionate, and that gender analysis recon-
ceptualizes war. First, as I mentioned earlier, feminist theorists have presented evidence
that domestic gender equality is a predictor of states’ likelihood to make wars, suggesting
that states that treat women fairly are more likely to be able to settle international dis-
putes peacefully.99
Second, feminists have pointed out how justificatory narratives for wars tell stories
of the ‘good guys’ defeating the ‘bad guys’ with demonstrable bravery and suffering to win
the ‘good fight’ for those innocent persons ‘back home.’100 These war stories emphasize
the duty of a ‘just warrior’ who sacrifices himself for the good of ‘women, children, and
other vulnerable groups’ back home.101 Given this, a number of scholars see that gender-
based expectations of human behavior have long been central to narratives justifying or
explaining wars.102 Feminists have suggested that war cannot be understood without the
gendered notion of protection used to inspire male soldiers to fight wars.103 Particularly,
feminists have identified gender as a fundamental element in Just War theorizing gener-
ally,104 and in the specific justificatory stories states used for the First World War,105 the
Cold War,106 the First Gulf War,107 the conflict in the former Yugoslavia,108 the conflict
between Russia and Chechnya,109 and the ‘War on Terror’ in Afghanistan110 and Iraq.111
Feminists have further provided evidence that these gendered impacts are not coinci-
dental, but intrinsically linked to war’s possibility. The gender stereotypes that justify

Sjoberg 121
war also persuade people (mostly men) to fight in those wars. Feminists have observed
that cultural ideal-types often link masculinity, virility, and violence. Militaries have
used explicitly sexist chants and challenges to train soldiers for generations. Several
feminists have observed that, rather than just being incidental, this sexist language and
behavior is endemic, because ‘militaries must work hard to turn men into soldiers, using
misogynist training that it thought necessary to teach men to fight.’112 This training
depends on establishing quality soldiering in opposition to femininity. It is not just that
fighting wars is perceived as masculine, but that soldiering and protection becomes
expected of men in order to maintain masculinity. While some men are actual protectors,
and others remain potential protectors, the links between masculinity, citizenship, sol-
diering, and war remain strong.113 While Elshtain’s earlier work notes these links, recent
feminist work notes how they are not incidental to or impacts of war, but instead funda-
mental to the justificatory logic of war generally.
Feminists in IR have also pointed out that war’s impacts are consistently gendered.
Specifically, there are a number of ways that militarism and war affect women that both
provide evidence that it is gendered and cannot be accounted for without gendered analy-
sis. A number of wartime atrocities specifically affect women, including sexual violence,
wartime rape, and genocidal rape.114 Women consistently constitute the majority of civil-
ian casualties in wars.115 Infrastructural damage caused by war-fighting often results in
shortages in electricity, lack of access to clean water, halting of goods deliveries,
decreased availability of essential household items, lower-quality health care, less law
enforcement at the neighborhood level, lower availability of jobs and lower pay for them,
and other impacts that affect women in their roles as runners of households differently,
and often more severely, than men.116 While Elshtain might see these observations as part
of the empirical contribution of gender analysis and not ‘altering in substantial ways’ the
third image, feminists have argued that these impacts are not merely reflective of pre-
existing gender inequalities in society, but also productive of them and intrinsically inter-
linked. In other words, from this perspective, instead of gender inequality making war
gender-unequal, it is gender inequality that makes war that makes gender inequality.117
In addition to arguing that ‘war’ is gendered, feminists have engaged with structural
theorizing about the international system writ large. Feminists have critiqued neorealist
scholars’ focus on the ‘system,’ questioning the foundational metaphor of (neo)realist
understandings of international anarchy. Ann Tickner recounts that ‘realists have applied
his [Hobbes’] description of individuals’ behavior in a hypothetical pre-contractual state
of nature, which Hobbes termed the war of everyman against everyman, to the behavior
of states in the international system,’118 but argues that this is a flawed metaphor, because:
Feminists have argued that such behavior could be applicable only to adult males, for if life was
to go on for more than one generation in the state of nature, women must have been involved
in activities such as reproduction and child rearing rather than in warfare. Reproductive
activities require an environment that can provide for the survival of infants and behavior that
is interactive and nurturing.119
As such, the ‘state of nature’ can only be a war of everyman against everyman if it is
timeless, without context, sexed male, and gendered masculine. Further, feminists have

argued that fear of anarchy and gender hierarchy are intrinsically linked, and that ‘the
dominance of men over women was based on the effort of men – as leaders of human
society – to dominate nature.’120 In other words, if the international system is an anarchy
that is inherently conflictual, gender hierarchy is implicated both in the existence of that
system and in states’ performance of its mandates. Tickner has also noted that IR theo-
rists are often selective in where they recognize anarchy, arguing that there is another
(perhaps more significant) anarchy–order distinction in global politics, ‘the boundary
between a public domestic place protected, at least theoretically, by the rule of law, and
the private space of the family where, in many cases, no such legal protection exists.’121
Christine Sylvester contends that this selective pairing of anarchy–order and outside–
inside may hide some patterns of patriarchy while revealing others.122 At the systemic
level, then, this line of argument suggests that gender is a hidden part of the Waltzian
story about the third image.
The most prominent feminist critique of system-level theorizing, however, has not
focused on the potential that realist theorizing is wrong about the content of the interna-
tional system per se, but instead that it is importantly and insidiously incomplete. As
Jacqui True explains, theorizing from the margins of global politics, gender lenses see
that ‘relationships between domestic and international, masculine and feminine agents
are mystified by the levels-of-analysis schema that separates the individual, the state, and
the international system.’123 While other theoretical perspectives have critiqued the
incompleteness of system-level theorizing,124 those approaches have mainly focused on
the incompleteness of systemic theorizing. The feminist critique is different: feminists
argue that the ‘levels’ are relational rather than discrete, and that gender hierarchy is
entrenched by delineating the levels as separable. In this way, feminist theorizing pro-
vides a more accurate understanding of the contingency of international structures as
well as a more inclusive picture of their contents, as ‘feminist alternatives … do not
promote more universal abstractions, but demand greater context in order to map more
adequately the complexity and indeterminacy between agent and structure.’125
While feminists have not explicitly theorized the ‘third image’ as independent from
the others (largely, I believe, because of doubts concerning the intellectual and normative
value of doing so), feminist work in IR has discussed the potential promise of under-
standing gender as structural in global politics, both generally and as it relates to theoriz-
ing war. As I mentioned earlier, a number of feminists provide definitions of gender that
characterize it as a structural feature of social and political life. In fact, specific articula-
tions of gender and gender discourses differ according to context; many feminists in IR
have made the argument that gendering itself is a universal feature of global politics.
Feminist theorists have characterized gender as ‘a particular kind of power relation …
central to understanding international processes,’126 and ‘a socially constructed relation-
ship of inequality’ that permeates global politics.127 Cynthia Enloe has explicitly
described the international system as patriarchal, understanding that the international
system privileges traits associated with masculinity in its units (states) and subunits (sub-
state actors) in much the same way that Waltz characterizes anarchy as selecting for
power and survival instincts/skills.128 If these observations that gender is a (or the) struc-
tural factor in global politics have merit, then theorizing the third image without refer-
ence to gender creates an explanatory deficit.

Sjoberg 123
Though it has yet to be directly articulated, feminist theorizing also provides evidence
that the (Waltzian) structure of the ‘system’ is gender-hierarchical. Waltz once observed
that ‘in looking for international structure, one is brought face to face with the invisible,
an uncomfortable position to be in.’129 Waltz read the invisibility of international struc-
ture to mean it was ‘the null set,’ and therefore concluded that the international system is
‘decentralized and anarchic.’130 Gender analysis suggests an alternative: that gender
hierarchy is (an invisible) structure in the international system.131 If feminists do not ask
the question ‘Is the international structure gendered?,’ they implicitly either argue that
there is no international structure or that the international structure is gender-neutral,
neither of which seems consonant with the theoretical and empirical innovations of femi-
nist IR.
Instead, feminist work in the sociology of organizations has suggested a framework
for understanding gender as structural, which would mean that ‘advantage and disadvan-
tage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned
through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and femi-
nine.’132 Using this framework, the international system would be structurally gender-
hierarchical if advantage, disadvantage, exploitation, control, action, emotion, meaning,
and identity among states were distributed on the basis of perceived association with
masculinity and femininity. Evidence of state identity having gendered components,
interstate interaction being premised on gendered hierarchy between states, and states’
positions and power being distributed on the basis of perceived gender characteristics
supports a claim that, rather than being (or in addition to) anarchical, the international
system is shaped by gender hierarchy.
Such an argument has potentially important theoretical implications for how IR views
the third image and how third-image theory accounts for war. First, if gender hierarchy is
a structural feature of the international system and a key organizing principle in dictating
state identity, interaction, and relative position, then conflicts between states can be char-
acterized as least in part as conflicts within/about the gendered order of international
structure rather than conflicts over relative power and survival (exclusively). Second, and
following, gender hierarchy can be seen as a/the permissive cause of war in global poli-
tics, replacing (or complicating) Waltz’s understanding of anarchy as a permissive cause
of war. Third, and following, a gendered international structure can be seen as not only a
permissive cause of war, but a direct cause of war. This is because, while gender hierarchy
is structural, the masculinities and femininities that are a part of that hierarchy change both
in content and in relative position over time, context, and culture. Therefore, it is possible
to see that gender hierarchy as a structural feature of the international system predicts state
behavior differently (and potentially more precisely) than neorealist accounts of anar-
chy.133 Particularly, this understanding of gender hierarchy as international structure has
two comparative advantages over the Waltzian conception of anarchy as structure: it could
account for both war generally (a permissive cause) and wars specifically (a direct cause),
and it could account for changes in the frequency and severity of war over time.134
Whether or not the argument that the international system is gender-hierarchical devel-
ops into a feasible line of feminist inquiry and research, feminists have argued that gender
analysis demonstrates the gendered nature of war, the conceptual inappropriateness (as
well as empirical incompleteness) of systemic-focused analysis, and gender-based

problems with the neorealist understanding of the international system as anarchical.

These observations suggest that, far from adding nothing to third-image theorizing of war,
‘putting gender in’ is a crucial part of theorizing the international structure and its role in
causing war.
Gender, the state, and war: Concluding thoughts

Feminist IR remains relatively young, only recently entering its third decade. This new-
ness, combined with the complexity of global politics, means that substantial work
remains to be done to fully address questions of when and how gender alters the levels
of analysis and/or is causal or determinative of war. Still, feminist IR has already pro-
vided a number of ‘new insights, theoretical advances, [and] conceptual categories’, as
well as data compilations and case studies to serve as evidence that gender subordination
is not merely a feature of the ‘empirical realities’ of women’s lives or a part of the socio-
political fabric of global politics, as Elshtain would suppose, but instead a feature that
permeates every level of global social and political life. Therefore, gender analysis is (at
the very least) relevant to and (likely) transformative of ‘man, the state, and war.’
While Elshtain or our mutual readers may still not find convincing the feminist case that
gender ‘alters in significant ways’ theorizing about war, at the end of this article, and with
a fuller accounting of the arguments that feminists in IR make, they may engage with the
arguments that feminists in IR actually make, rather than being required to evaluate the
contributions of feminist IR to war theorizing on the basis of (partial) evaluations of femi-
nist work that is not current and outside of the discipline of IR. Still, Elshtain’s appraisal of
the relevance of gender to IR is not wrong only because it provides an incomplete picture
of the evidence or an oversimplified understanding of the arguments.
Instead, the question of ‘What does “putting gender in” do, if anything?’ is for IR
scholars to evaluate, whether through the lenses of Waltz’s ‘three images’ or some other
framework. As I have presented here, feminists provide evidence at the ‘first image’ that
IR’s understandings of human nature are partial and gendered, that gender analysis
changes which individuals IR should pay attention to when studying ‘man,’ and that the
international is personal and the personal is international. These observations suggest a
different relationship between the first image and war then either Waltz or Elshtain. At
the ‘second image,’ in addition to suggesting that domestic gender equality is actually a
predictor of states’ likelihood to go to war, feminists understand that gender matters to
the philosophical foundations of the state, the leadership of the state, the characterization
of the state as rational and unitary, the state’s militarism, and the state’s nationalism.
Together, these observations lead feminists to see states (as actors in wars and as units in
the international system) very differently than Waltz characterizes them in Man, the
State, and War. Feminists have also presented evidence that gender influences war at the
‘third image,’ as an important causal and constitutive factor in the making and fighting
of wars, a crucial critique of traditional theorizations of the international system, and a
(perhaps the) structural feature of global politics that influences and determines war. It is
on these contributions (and others that I have inevitably left out) that the substantive
value of feminist theorizing in IR in addressing the question ‘Why war?’ should be eval-
uated, if it is to be measured in relationship to Waltz’s images of global politics at all.

Sjoberg 125
Still, even if gender ‘alters in significant ways’ our understanding of Waltz’s three
levels of analysis, Elshtain remains unconvinced by the corrective value of feminist theo-
rizing, criticizing feminists for naively assuming that if any level of analysis is gendered,
‘somehow we can de-gender or womanize it and it will behave differently.’135 Elshtain
‘cannot imagine what on earth that would mean.’136 First, it is important to note that
requiring feminism to ‘solve’ the problems of global conflict would be a double standard,
considering that a number of paradigmatic approaches to theorizing war (including
Waltzian neorealism) either explicitly resist ‘solving’ problems and/or present an imprac-
tical or theoretical problematic. Many would find that feminist theorizing ‘helped us
account for’ war if gender were necessary, conceptually, to understanding the causes of
war, or important, empirically, to understandings causes and effects in the international
political arena, and, certainly, with evidence of both.
That said, the alternatives that feminist theorizing in IR has presented to realist con-
ceptions of international conflict and competition have largely been more complicated
than ‘de-gendering’ or ‘womanizing’ IR and expecting immediate transformation.137
Feminists have suggested several theoretical alternatives to studying IR conventionally,
including but not limited to gender lenses to look at global politics;138 theorizing, instead
of ‘international relations,’ ‘relations international’ to signify the roles of characteristics
associated with femininity such as relationality, interdependence, care, and emotion;139
increasing scholarly attention to the margins of global politics;140 analyzing the violent
reproduction of gender and international relations;141 and representatively reformulating
theories at all levels of IR that were produced as if global politics was devoid of women
and femininity.142 Feminist theorists have also made a number of suggestions for inte-
grating the insights of their research into the security sector, including but not limited to
gender mainstreaming;143 integrating empathetic cooperation into global politics;144
increasing attention to values associated with femininity;145 and looking for international
legal protection for women battling gender subordination.146
I hope that, at the end of this article, it is not impossible to imagine what it would look
like for gender to be ‘put in’ to the practice of global politics or the study of that practice
and ‘alter in significant ways’ current theorizing. As hundreds of feminist scholars have
contributed thousands of insightful articles, books, reviews, panels, and discussions about
how and why gender hierarchy not only impacts women’s lives but also constitutes global
politics, perhaps feminist work in the discipline will someday be greeted with substantive
engagement. Wherever one falls on the question of the ultimate level of importance of
gender and the ultimate ways in which it may (or may not) be ‘determinative or causal’ in
statecraft and war, certainly, feminists’ 20-plus years of scholarship in IR merit it being
taken seriously as more than an empirical recounting of what happens to women at the
margins of global politics. I argue that, taken seriously, gender not only ‘alters’ the
Waltzian levels of analysis and their impact on theorizing war, but transforms them in
ways that the cutting edge of feminist scholarship in IR is only beginning to unpack.
Notes
1 Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ International Relations 23(2), 2009, pp.
289–303, 289, 300.
2 Ibid., pp. 290, 300.

3 Ibid., p. 289. She also asks this question a couple of other ways: ‘Is gender a definitive
or causal factor in international relations beyond those empirical considerations?’ (p. 290);
‘what new insights, theoretical advances, conceptual categories does “gendering” the state
offer?’ (p. 289); ‘if we were to substitute “woman” for “man” in Waltz’s title, do states and
wars, as part of an overall explanatory framework, alter substantially?’ (p. 290); and ‘So on
the level of the state as an actor in an allegedly “anarchic” realm, what does “putting gender
in” do, if anything?’ (p. 300). Each of these can be interpreted slightly differently; I chose the
version in the text because it is a clear way to organize a serious engagement and response to
both Elshtain and the Waltzian work she reads.
4 There are many feminists, perhaps myself among them, who would object to this as a
‘measuring stick’ for feminist theorizing, either because of feminist critiques of the sepa-
ration of the levels of analysis (e.g. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics [New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001]; Jacqui True, ‘Feminism,’ in Scott Burchill and Andrew
Linklaters [eds], Theories of International Relations [London: MacMillan, 1996], p. 227),
doubts about the fruitfulness of conversations between feminist IR and ‘mainstream’ IR
(e.g. Marysia Zalewski, ‘Do We Understand Each Other Yet? Troubling Feminist Encoun-
ters With[in] International Relations,’ British Journal of Politics and International Rela-
tions 9, 2007, pp. 302–12), or epistemological critiques of the causal or positive reasoning
required to make the sort of arguments that relating gender directly to the ‘levels of analy-
sis’ requires (e.g. Maria Stern and Marysia Zalewski, ‘Feminist Fatigues: Reflections on
Feminisms and Familiar Fables of Militarization,’ Review of International Studies 35,
2009, pp. 611–30.
5 Elshtain’s reference to Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland (eds), Gender and Interna-
tional Relations (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991) was the most recent citation
to gender-based scholarship in her article ostensibly evaluating the field, which she also
claims experience with by her attendance at a 1988 conference at the University of Southern
California on ‘Gender and IR’. While this work was pioneering and foundational, it served
as a starting point for a much more extensive and complex research program (now 20 years
old) in feminist IR which often addresses the problems Elshtain raised.
6 This is not to say that there are not debates within feminist IR. Here, though, I am more inter-
ested in the contributions of (diverse) feminist perspectives to the specific debates with/in IR
that Elshtain discusses.
7 Elshtain, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ p. 300.
8 Elshtain, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ p. 290. In Elshtain’s article, the feminist literature
is discussed without a particular distinction between feminist IR and gender studies more
generally.
9 Ibid., p. 292. While, in the late 1980s, such an understanding of the differences among
feminist approaches was more accurate, a number of more nuanced approaches to the
universalist–relativist debate have since been articulated, including post-colonial work (e.g.
Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations:
Reading Race, Gender, and Class [New York: Routledge, 2002]), work emphasizing multi-
sited theorizing (e.g. Brooke A. Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001]), work emphasizing empathy (e.g. Christine
Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994]), and standpoint-based understandings (e.g. Sandra
Harding, Is Science Multicultural? [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998]).
10 Ibid., p. 293.
11 Ibid., p. 292.
12 Ibid.

Sjoberg 127
13 Ibid., pp. 289, 290.

14 Ibid., p. 289.
15 Grant and Newland, Gender and International Relations, p. 5, citing Sandra Harding, ‘Intro-
duction: Is There a Feminist Methodology,’ in Sandra Harding (ed.), Feminism and Method-
ology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1987), p. 6.
16 J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations (New York, Columbia University Press,
1992), p. 7, citing Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1988), p. 42.
17 For post-structuralist approaches, see Charlotte Hooper, Manly States (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000) and Laura J. Shepherd, Gender, Violence, and Security (London: Zed
Books, 2008). For socio-biological work, see Anne Fausto-Sterling, ‘Bare Bones of Sex:
Part 1, Sex and Gender,’ Signs: A Journal of Women in Society and Culture 20(2), 1995, pp.
1491–528. For constructivist work, see, for example, Elisabeth Prugl, The Global Construc-
tion of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
18 While I do not directly address this in the text here for the purposes of parsimony, it is impor-
tant to note the existence of (at least) one more sex category: persons who are ‘intersex,’
born neither biologically male nor female, which some scientists note accounts for up to one
percent of the population.
19 Laura Sjoberg, ‘Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist Contributions,’ Security Studies
18(2), 2009, pp. 183–213, 186.
20 The most coherent statement of this understanding of gender that I have read is Lauren
Wilcox’s (in ‘Gendering the Cult of the Offensive,’ Security Studies 18[2], 2009, pp.
214–40). Wilcox explains, in relevant part: ‘gender symbolism describes the way in which
masculine/feminine are assigned to various dichotomies that organized Western thought’
where ‘both men and women tend to place a higher value on the term which is associated
with masculinity.’
21 Marysia Zalewski, ‘Well, What is the Feminist Perspective on Bosnia?’ International Affairs
71(2), April 1995, pp. 339–56.
22 V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues, 1st edn (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1991), p. 2. See also Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations: An
Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), p. 5.
23 This means that feminist scholarship shares a common purpose, though there are many dif-
ferent ways to advance that purpose, methodologically, epistemologically, and even ontologi-
cally. Feminist IR (like all other ‘paradigms’ of IR) also has some normative, methodological,
epistemological, and even ontological commonalities with other schools of thought. This
article focuses on the unique elements that feminist approaches have in common as the most
parsimonious way to address Elshtain’s question of whether gender analysis ‘alters in signifi-
cant ways’ the levels of analysis.
24 Sarah Brown called feminist scholarship ‘fundamentally a political act of commitment to
understanding the world from the perspective of the socially subjugated’ (in ‘Feminism,
International Theory, and International Relations of Gender Inequality,’ Millennium: Journal
of International Studies 17[3], 1988, pp. 461–75, 472). Ann Tickner evinced a similar under-
standing, explaining that feminist IR scholars have a political commitment to illuminate the
world from the point of view of marginalized people or actors (in Gendering World Politics).
Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True have explained feminism as an attempt to make IR better
at global justice (in ‘Studying the Struggles and Wishes of the Age: Feminist Theoretical
Methodology and Feminist Theoretical Methods,’ in Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and
Jacqui True [eds], Feminist Methodologies for International Relations [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006], pp. 245–26).

25 Defined by Cynthia Enloe as ‘the structural and ideological system that perpetuates the
privileging of masculinity,’ where ‘patriarchal systems are notable for marginalizing the
feminine. That is, insofar as any society or group in the world is patriarchal, it is there that it
is comfortable – unquestioned – to infantilize, ignore, trivialize, or even actively cast scorn
upon what is thought the be feminized’ (in The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a
New Age of Empire [Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004], pp. 4, 5).
26 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, p. 6.
27 Wilcox, ‘Gendering the Cult of the Offensive.’
28 Citation to author’s work omitted to protect the anonymity of the author.
29 Elshtain, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ pp. 300, 289.
30 Elshtain claims to find this connotation gender-neutral, despite the fact that most leaders in
the world have been and remain men. Most feminist scholars find that the use of the mascu-
line term is no coincidence, and not only because most influential figures in ‘high’ politics
have been men, but also because Morgenthau and Waltz’s vision of human nature is one that
feminists would characterize as partial, and privileging masculinity (see e.g. Tickner, Gender
in International Relations). For the purposes of this article, though, I have decided to focus
on the content rather than the language of these discussions, for the purpose of brevity and
coherence.
31 Elshtain, ‘Women, the State, and War,’ p. 296. Elshtain, however, does not discuss the fact
that Niebuhr and Augustine ignore gender while using gendered constructions and content,
while Freud holds a very similar foundationalist notion of gender to the one that Elshtain
understands as ‘not determinative’ in international politics.
32 Ibid., p. 296. This is framed as a quote in Elshtain’s article, but there is no source listed, and
the author of this article was unable to find what this might be referring to.
33 Ibid., pp. 296–7. I do not think one needs to defend either radical or Marxist feminism to
defend feminism in IR, considering that feminism in IR departs from both. Still, it is impor-
tant to set the record straight. While it is true that radical feminism in the 1970s/1980s did
make some of these arguments, Elshtain mischaracterizes them. The argument referred
to in that sentence is actually that masculinity as existing under male supremacy is con-
stituted by sexual oppression (and its primary method, rape), rather then that all men are
rapists. There was (is) also more to radical feminism, which argues that ‘adding women’
to the structures of power in business or politics is insufficient, since those institutions are
structured in ways that valorize masculinity (even when found in women) and devalue
femininity (even when found in men) (see e.g. Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodi-
fied: Discourses in Life and Law [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987]).
Elshtain’s treatment of Marxist feminism similarly chooses to focus on some fairly nar-
row arguments about the former Soviet Union while much of Marxist feminism asked
questions about women’s over-representation among the world’s desperately poor and the
gendered distribution of material resources. A good example of this is Annette Kuhn and
AnnMarie Wolpe (eds), Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production
(London: Routledge, 1978).
35 Ibid, p. 297. It is important to note here that most feminists in IR actually do not make the
argument that the world would be a different place if women ‘ran it.’ Instead, their arguments
revolve largely around the relative power of ideas, characteristics, and policy choices asso-
ciated with masculinity and those ideas, characteristics, and policy choices associated with
femininity.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.

Sjoberg 129
38 See, for example, Linda Basch, ‘Human Security, Globalization, and Feminist Visions,’
Peace Review 16(1), 2004, pp. 5–12; Heidi Hudson, ‘“Doing” Security as though Humans
Matter: A Feminist Perspective on Gender and the Politics of Human Security,’ Security Dia-
logue 36(2), 2005, pp. 155–74; Georgina Waylen, ‘Gender, Feminism, and Political Econ-
omy,’ New Political Economy 2(2), 1997, pp. 205–20.
39 See J. Ann Tickner, ‘Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Refor-
mulation,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(3), 1988, pp. 429–40.
40 See Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in
Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007).
41 See Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).
42 J. Ann Tickner, ‘Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism.’
43 Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 37. Christine Sylvester (in Feminist Theory
and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, p. 81) argued that gendered views of
human nature can be found in the philosophical foundations of modern IR theory as well,
whether it be in Hobbes’ assignment of state of nature roles on the basis of gender, or
Machiavelli’s writings on women ruining polities.
44 Tickner, ‘Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism.’
45 Brown, ‘Feminism, International Theory, and International Relations of Gender Inequality,’
p. 462.
46 Ibid., p. 463.
47 Nancy Hirschmann, ‘Freedom, Recognition, and Obligation: A Feminist Approach to Polit-
ical Theory,’ The American Political Science Review 83(4), 1989, pp. 1277–314; Christine
Sylvester, ‘Feminists and Realists on Autonomy and Obligation in International Relations,’
in V. Spike Peterson (ed.), Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions on International Rela-
tions Theory (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992); Nancy J. Hirschmann, The Subject
of Liberty: Towards a Feminist Theory of Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
48 Tickner, in the conclusion to Gender in International Relations.
49 For example, Hilary Charlesworth, ‘Are Women Peaceful? Reflections on the Role of Women
in Peacebuilding,’ Feminist Legal Studies 16(3), 2008, pp. 347–61.
50 This argument was best articulated by Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack in ‘Let Us
Now Praise Great Men: Bring the Statesman Back In,’ International Security 25(4), 2000,
pp.107-46.
51 Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global
Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007), pp.199–200.
52 Tickner, Gender in International Relations.
53 Katherine Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in US–Korea Relations (New York,
Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 52.
54 For example, Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, ‘Securing Afghan Women: Neocolo-
nialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,’ NWSA Journal 17(3), 2005, pp.
112–33; Jan Jindy Pettman, ‘Feminist International Relations After 9/11,’ Brown Journal of
World Affairs 10(2), 2004, pp. 85–102.
55 For example, Sandra McEvoy, ‘Women Loyalist Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland: Begin-
ning a Feminist Conversation about Conflict Resolution,’ Security Studies 18(2), 2009, pp.
262–86; Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores.
56 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Poli-
tics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 196.
57 Moon, Sex among Allies.

58 I do not mean to suggest, of course, that feminists are the only scholars who have recognized
that individuals impact the making and fighting of wars (see e.g. Byman and Pollack, ‘Let Us
Now Praise Great Men’), or the only scholars who have recognized that marginal individu-
als’ security is either normatively or empirically important (see e.g. Johann Galtung and Tord
Hoivik, ‘Structural and Direct Violence,’ Journal of Peace Research 8[1], 1971, pp. 73–6;
or Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin
America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979]). I mean to suggest instead both
that feminists are unique to combine them, and unique in their understanding of the logic that
makes the combination impactful for the questions Elshtain is interested in answering.
59 Spike Peterson, ‘Gendered Identities, Ideologies and Practices in Contexts of War and Mili-
tarism,’ in Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (eds), Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Per-
spectives (New York: Prager Security International, 2010).
61 Ibid., p. 298.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., pp. 299–300.
64 Ibid., p. 300.
65 For example, Mary Caprioli, ‘Gendered Conflict,’ Journal of Peace Research 37(1), 2000,
pp. 51–68; Mary Caprioli and Mark A. Boyer, ‘Gender, Violence, and International Crisis,’
Journal of Conflict Resolution 45(4), 2001, pp. 503–19; Valerie M. Hudson, Mary Caprioli,
Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Rose McDermott, and Chad F. Emmett, ‘The Heart of the Matter: The
Security of Women and the Security of States,’ International Security 33(3), 2009, pp. 7–45.
66 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 73.
67 Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations in a Postmodern Era, p. 34.
68 Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
69 J. Ann Tickner, ‘Feminism Meets International Relations: Some Methodological Issues,’ in
Ackerly, Stern, and True, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, pp. 39–40.
70 Susan B. Boyd, Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law, and Public Policy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Rebecca Grant sees the historical development
of the public–private divide as even more extensive, explaining that ‘the emergence of the
polis also brought into play a notion of citizenship that relegated women into the private
sphere of domestic life,’ a trend she sees as continuing its influence in present-day politics (in
‘Sources of Gender Bias in International Relations Theory,’ in Grant and Newland, Gender
and International Relations, p. 11).
71 Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright, ‘Feminist Approaches to Inter-
national Law,’ American Journal of International Law 85(4), 1991, p. 626.
72 Amy Eckert, ‘Just War Theory and War in the Private Sphere: The Re-Privatization of Force
and the Ethics of War,’ paper prepared for presentation at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the
International Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, 26–9 March 2008.
73 Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 43.
74 See Leonie Huddy and Nayda Terkildsen, ‘The Consequences of Gender Stereotypes for
Women Candidates at Different Levels and Types of Office,’ Political Research Quarterly
46(3), 1993, pp. 503–25. This does not ‘level’ the playing field for masculine women, how-
ever, as feminists have pointed out that the burden of proof is higher on a woman (who is
assumed to be feminine until proven otherwise) than a man (whose masculinity is assumed
until it is questioned). See Francine D’Amico and Peter Beckman, Women in World Politics:
An Introduction (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995).
75 R. W. Connell, ‘The State, Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal,’ Theory
and Society 41, 1990, pp. 507–44; R. Pringle and S. Watson, ‘Women’s Interests and the

Sjoberg 131
Post-Structuralist State,’ in Michael Barnett (ed.), Destabilizing Theory (London: Polity

Press, 1992); Tickner, Gendering World Politics, p. 54.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., p. 133.
79 See, for example, Richard K. Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of
the Anarchy Problematique,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17(2), 1988, pp.
227–62; Thomas Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, State Sovereignty as a Social Construct
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
80 Tickner, Gendering World Politics, p. 21.
81 Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq, pp. 65–6.
82 Eric Blanchard,‘Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security
Theory,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3), 2003, pp. 1289–313.
83 See, for example, Jeanne Vickers, Women and War (London: Zed Books, 1993); the particu-
lars of this argument can be found in many other feminist works, but are left out here for
reasons of space. Others have argued that states’ war victories come at the expense of their
lower classes or racial minorities as well.
84 Though it will not be discussed here, feminists have put forward a compelling case that the
characterization of states as ‘rational’ implicates feminist critiques of the partiality and insidi-
ousness of reason as gender-subordinating and exclusive of women and minorities. See, for
example, Louise M. Antony and Charlotte Witt, A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on
Reason and Objectivity, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).
85 Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 258.
86 Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1993), p. 246. Instead, Enloe argued that ‘militarization
occurs because some people’s fears are allowed to be heard, while other people’s fears are
trivialized and silenced.’
87 Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, p. 118.
88 Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq; Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The
Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pandora Press, 1989). Joshua Goldstein (in War
and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001]) points out that this system is oppressive of both sexes, where men
need to be convinced of the need to protect women to compel them to fight and risk death,
and women are subordinated as passive potential victims in need of protection.
89 Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, p. 204.
90 Wilcox, ‘Gendering the Cult of the Offensive,’ p. 233.
91 Anne McClintock, ‘Family Feuds, Gender, Nationalism, and the Family, Feminist Review 44,
Summer 1993, p. 62.
92 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997).
93 V. SpiKe Peterson, ‘Interactive and Intersectional Analytics of Globalization,’ Frontiers: A
Journal of Women’s Studies 30(1), 2009, pp. 31–40.
95 Ibid., p. 300.
96 Ibid., p. 301.
97 Ibid., p. 300.
98 Ibid., p. 302.
99 See Hudson et al., The Heart of the Matter.
100 Nancy Huston, ‘Tales of War and Tears of Women,’ in Judith Stiehm (ed.), Women and Men’s
Wars (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1983).

101 Jean Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987) as cited in: Laura Sjoberg,
‘The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle,’ International Studies Quarterly 50(4),
2006, pp. 889–910.
102 Huston, ‘Tales of War and Tears of Women.’
103 Tickner, Gendering World Politics; Laura Sjoberg, ‘Why Just War Needs Feminism Now
More than Ever,’ International Politics 45(1), 2008, pp. 1–18; Helen Kinsella, ‘Securing the
Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War,’ in Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (eds),
Power in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 249–72.
104 Kinsella, ‘Securing the Civilian’; Sjoberg, ‘The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle.’
105 Elshtain, Women and War, p. 6.
106 Enloe, The Morning After.
107 Ibid.; Tickner, Gender in International Relations.
108 Marysia Zalewski, ‘Well, What is the Feminist Perspective on Bosnia?’ International Affairs
71(2), 1995, pp. 339–56.
109 Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores.
110 Carol A. Stabile and Deepa Kumar, ‘Unveiling Imperialism: Media, Gender, and War in
Afghanistan,’ Media, Culture, and Society 27(5), 2005, pp. 765–82; Krista Hunt, ‘The Stra-
tegic Co-optation of Women’s Rights: Discourse in the “War on Terrorism,”’ International
Feminist Journal of Politics 4(1), 2002, pp. 116–21.
111 Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racisms, and the West (London: Zed Books,
2004).
112 Tickner, Gendering World Politics, p. 57; Goldstein, War and Gender.
113 For elaborations, see Meghana Nayak and Jennier Suchland, ‘Gender Violence and Hege-
monic Projects,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 8(4), 2006, pp. 467–85; J. Ann
Tickner, ‘Feminist Responses to International Security Studies,’ Peace Review 16(1), 2004,
pp. 43–8; Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?
114 Claudia Card, ‘Rape as a Weapon of War,’ Hypatia 11(4), 1996, pp. 5–17.
115 R. Charli Carpenter, ‘“Women, Children, and Other Vulnerable Groups”: Gender, Strategic
Frames, and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue,’ International Studies Quar-
terly 49(2), 2005, pp. 295–335.
116 Vickers, Women and War.
117 A reviewer pointed out that this sentence could be read two different ways. The way I mean it
is that gender inequality is constitutive/determinative of wars. The way it could be read that I
do not mean is that gender inequality causes specific wars. This may also be accurate, but is not
the focus of this section, which engages ‘war’/‘the international system’ as a level of analysis.
119 Ibid.
120 Grant, ‘Sources of Gender Bias,’ p. 17.
122 Sylvester, Feminist International Relations in the Postmodern Era, p. 113.
123 True, ‘Feminism.’
124 For example, see Peter Gourevitch, ‘The Second Image Reversed: The International Sources
of Domestic Politics,’ International Organization 32(4), 1978, pp. 889–912; Robert Keohane
and Helen Milner, Internationalization and Domestic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996); Byman and Pollack, ‘Let Us Now Praise Great Men.’
125 Ibid., p. 229.
126 Steans, Gender and International Relations, p. 6.
127 D’Amico and Beckman, Women in World Politics, p. 5.
128 Enloe, The Curious Feminist, p. 6.

Sjoberg 133
129 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1979), p. 89.
130 Ibid., p. 88. Of course, to Waltz, the decentralized and anarchic structure of international
politics does not mean that the structure is weakly causal; in Waltz’s view, the weak structure
is strongly causal.
131 Or perhaps even visible but not recognized as structural, particularly by those with a vested
interest in not recognizing it.
132 Joan Acker, ‘Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,’ Gender and
Society 4(2), 1990, pp.146–7.
133 For now, a (somewhat reductionist) introductory hypothesis can serve as a placeholder: vari-
ation in the existence and severity of military conflict in the international arena can be read
through variation in the relative positions of states in the gender hierarchy among states and
the salience of position in that hierarchy in defining state identity.
134 Put differently, one of the fundamental problems with anarchy as a structural explanation for
war is that it is only a structural explanation and only a permissive cause. Therefore, other
causes are necessary to explain why war occurs, when it does, given that sometimes war does
not occur, while at others it does. Gender hierarchy as structure could possibly be seen as
both a permissive and proximate cause of war, and provide a capacity to account for change.
135 Elshtain, Women, the State, and War, p. 301.
136 Ibid.
137 This is not to say that some feminist IR work, particularly the only feminist IR work that
Elshtain cites, does not present de-gendering IR as a theoretical possibility and/or advocate
increasing the visibility of women in global politics; it is only to say that this is but one of
many feminist approaches in IR, and represents a minority of feminist scholars in number
and a rather early proposition in terms of feminist theoretical development.
138 For example, Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues; Steans, Gender and International
Relations.
139 For example, Sylvester, Feminist International Relations in the Postmodern Era.
140 For example, Brown, ‘Feminism, International Theory, and International Relations of Gen-
der Inequality’; Tickner, Gender in International Relations; V. Spike Peterson, ‘Transgress-
ing Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender, and International Relations,’ Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 21(2), 1992, pp. 183–206.
141 Shepherd, Gender, Violence, and Security; Johanna Kantola, ‘The Gendered Reproduction of
the State in International Relations,’ British Journal of Politics and International Relations
9, 2007, pp. 270–83.
142 For example, Tickner, ‘Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of International Relations’; John Hoffman,
Gender and Sovereignty (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001); Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and
the Wars in Iraq; Wilcox, ‘Gendering the Cult of the Offensive.’
143 For example, Jacqui True, ‘Gender Mainstreaming in Global Public Policy,’ International
Feminist Journal of Politics 5(3), 2003, pp. 368–96; Jacqui True and Michael Mintrom,
‘Transnational Networks and Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming,’ Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 45(1), 2001, pp. 27–57.
144 For example, Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
145 For example, Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999).
146 For example, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright, ‘Feminist
Approaches to International Law,’ American Journal of International Law 85, 1991, p. 613;
Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida,

where she holds a courtesy affiliation in Women’s Studies. Her research interests lie in
feminist international relations and security studies. Among her books are Gender,
Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence
in Global Politics (with Caron Gentry, 2007). She is presently working on: ‘Gendering
Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War’.

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across the ‘Levels of Analysis’

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Elshtain’s characterization of feminists as interested in either adding women to the power

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instead of relying on adding more women to leadership, understands the international

A feminist perspective believes that objectivity, as it is culturally defined, is associated with

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problems with the neorealist understanding of the international system as anarchical.

Gender, the state, and war: Concluding thoughts

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13 Ibid., pp. 289, 290.

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Post-Structuralist State,’ in Michael Barnett (ed.), Destabilizing Theory (London: Polity

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Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida,

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