In her book, Marie Berry combines an impressive command of scholarly literature with 261 interviews to ask whether there is a relationship between war and the postwar mobilization of women, and, if so, what that relationship is. Women, War, and Power argues that “while war is destructive, it is also a period of rapid social change that reconfigures gendered power relations by precipitating interrelated demographic, economic, and cultural shifts” (pp. 1–2). It provides evidence for that argument using a historical-institutionalist approach to its two featured cases, conflicts in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Noting scholarly attention to women’s increased presence in war as combatants, Berry argues that women are also increasingly involved in protest and resistance movements (p. 3). She juxtaposes this argument with the finding that countries where there has been a recent war are more likely to have women well represented in legislative bodies (p. 4) in order to frame the puzzle: What is it about war that increases women’s political participation?

The answer to this question lies, Berry argues, in one of the less-studied features of war: its gender transformative potential (p. 6). She notes that while many scholars have studied war changing politics, very few have paid attention to gender as a factor in that process. The author proposes that war mobilizes women as women in both everyday politics and formal political structures. A useful Venn diagram (p. 13) shows the diverse political roles that Berry analyzes in postwar environments. The book then goes over the historical roots of mass violence in both Rwanda (Chap. 2) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Chap. 5), with attention to the demographic, economic, and cultural shifts in each place after the wars (Chaps. 3 and 6). These chapters provide both useful background information and a theoretical foundation on which original contributions about gender (Chaps. 4 and 7) are built. Berry explains (Chap.3, p. 76) that one cultural shift after the 1994 war in Rwanda was that women were able to “frame themselves as ‘more peaceful’ due to lower participation” in the violence, and were able to “use this idea to justify increased involvement” as “legitimate public actors.”

It is through this cultural shift that Women, War, and Power analyzes a wide variety of increases in different sorts of political participation for women postwar, including the transformation of everyday lives, the making and joining of grassroots organizations, resistance and defiance of problematic state political developments, the utilization of humanitarianism, and participation in a wide variety of formal political structures. After showing these dramatic increases, Berry turns (in Chap. 8) to ask if these mobilizations have been effective or enduring: What if any limits do postwar booms in women’s participation have? She argues that political settlements of conflicts often impede women’s political participation, that international humanitarian efforts often undermine local women’s nongovernmental organizations (even if accidentally), and that patriarchal norms and practices can be reinvigorated postwar (pp. 178–79). Berry concludes by exploring a wide variety of implications for thinking about the complexity of war for gender relations, the multiple layers of postwar political transformation, and how these things matter for policymaking.

There is much to be praised about this book. As I mentioned, the empirical work is of impressive depth and breadth. The interviews, document reviews, and contextualization in the literature are impeccable. The book also draws much-needed attention to the many different transformative effects of war on demographic, economic, and cultural compositions of postwar societies. It brings gender into those conversations in a sophisticated and important way. It both describes and analyzes postconflict political participation in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina with significant detail. Berry’s central argument is itself a significant contribution: While others have argued that women’s political positions can change significantly for the better postwar, the meticulous engagement with the ways in which that happens and the limits to that transformation are worth reading, even for specialists in gender and conflict. The book is well written, well organized, and easy to read—a virtue that few political science monographs have.

A smaller contribution, but probably what resonated with me most about the book, can be found in the last section of its conclusion. Called “an absence of war, still far from peace,” the section notes that “the end of violence . . . did not bring about a ‘positive’ peace or a ‘gender just’ one” (pp. 218, 219). This revisits Berry’s important critique of the war/not war dichotomy.

Still, I have some quibbles with the author’s theoretical analysis — three of which seem worth mentioning. First, at places in the book, it feels as though structural violence is a feature that the Other experiences (e.g., the discussion of the United States on p. 219)—a bias that dents the credibility of Berry’s perspective. Second, I think that the book oversimplifies the relationship between political participation and power. The title itself, when mapped onto the book’s central argument, loosely equates political participation with power. All forms of participation are lumped into this “power.” I believe that this framing takes inadequate advantage of a significant research program on gender and agency in global politics—one that shows a complex, rather than linear, relationship among gender, political participation, and power. The book could have made a more significant contribution by unpacking what (and when and how) political participation translates to power, and how the concepts of power and of political participation may themselves be gendered.

Third, I am concerned with the book’s conceptualization of war. While Berry (correctly) seeks to complicate the war/not war dichotomy, a discussion of the politics of naming (pp. 22–25) notes that the term genocide will not be used, justifying this choice based on concerns that “genocide” oversimplifies conflict and leads to an incorrect perception that conflict atrocities were one-sided. This section is, in my view, both empirically and normatively problematic, in itself and as it impacts the rest of the text. Empirically, it leads to awkward conversations about the unique scale of the conflicts in the book’s cases (p. 213), and to difficulty clearly accounting for the targeting of men in each genocide (e.g., p. 24). Normatively, there may be value in distinguishing genocide from nongenocide. Berry’s purpose could be accomplished by describing the conflicts with more detailed, rather than less specific, terms. For example, the Rwandan memorials around the conflict in 1994 describe both genocide and a brutal civil war, distinguishable in some ways but concurrent and overlapping. This description addresses the author’s concerns about oversimplifying responsibility, without abandoning the term “genocide.”

Overall, I enjoyed reading Women, War, and Power and highly recommend it. Its empirical work is very high quality, and it makes important theoretical contributions. I look forward to continuing the conversations that it has started.