Gendering Global Conflict: Towards a Feminist Theory of War
Within the growing discipline of feminist security studies and given the increased attention awarded to mainstream security studies, in what is a geo politically unstable period for many areas of the globe, Laura Sjoberg's Gendering Global Conflict offers a welcome intervention into both feminist and mainstream international relations/ security scholarship. Indeed, the overall argument she offers joins a chorus of other feminist security and international relations voices namely that war cannot be understood without considering gender as a primary unit of analysis. This, Laura Sjoberg goes on to contend, is due to the co constitution of gender and war, in other words, how gender produces war and war produces gender. Indeed, this argument echoes other feminist works, such as that of Cynthia Cockburn and Laura Shepherd. Where Laura Sjoberg contributes to this debate is in her comprehensive and sustained exploration of this contention across, between, and in multiple sites from the international to the personal. Moreover, although the piece is focused on international relations in a broad sense, Laura Sjoberg's work draws from a number of historical and country specific examples of war. As such, the work offers some thoughtful and insightful illustrative accounts of various global and historical conflicts, giving it a comparative feel. In addition, the author has managed to address issues associated with identity intersections other than gender, such as class and ethnicity. In pursuit of its ultimate contention that gender has a continuous influence, both empirically through gendered bodies and analytically, through gendered concepts, on security, and that, therefore, a focus on gender is imperative to war studies the book is separated into the following chapters. Chapter One offers a review of the mainstream literature in the field of security and war studies to highlight how gender has been omitted. Chapter Two examines the various feminist approaches to understanding war and security in order to demonstrate the diverse range of feminisms, and what their contribution to security studies has been. This chapter sets up the conceptual framework for the book, arguing that the differences between feminisms should not be considered a weakness in feminist war studies but rather, a strength. Following on from Chapter Two, Chapter Three makes a case for the focus of feminist security studies to be narrowed, so as to investigate war rather than security more generally. Concentrating primarily on the causes of war, in the following two chapters Laura Sjoberg applies gender lenses to look directly at the main focus of war studies, namely dyadic level causes of war and statelevel causes of war, respectively. In other words, she discusses the causes of war as they Book reviews