Our relationships to the things we study are always problematic. Early in my career as a comparative politics specialist, I noticed that those academics who studied the politics of one of the “Great Powers,” France for instance, seemed to acquire more status among their peers than those who studied the politics of, say, Mali. By the very fact that they studied French politics, they seemed to be taken more seriously; that is, they appeared in the eyes of many of their academic colleagues to be more intellectually sophisticated, perhaps also more urbane. Occasionally, the hierarchy of reflected status can be upset. I confess, therefore, that now, when we suddenly need to make sense of the political events in Mali, I do chuckle.

Status, sophistication, seriousness, glory, and the proverbial brass ring, gravitas: These are rewards to be handed out sparingly, which makes their distributors and the aspiration to acquire these bestowed rewards all the more intriguing to track. Each one of these intellectual accolades is gendered; that is, all too often each is masculinized. By “masculinized,” I mean that each quality is imagined to attach itself most naturally to a person with seemingly manly qualities, even if the person perceived by political scientists as owning these apparently manly qualities is Hannah Arendt.

The field of international relations is not immune to these questionable dynamics of reflected topical glory and perceived gravitas. In fact, IR may be especially prone to these dynamics because it has been considered to be the academic field in which states (not mere voters, not low-level civil servants, not slum dwellers, not ethnic-minority communities) are presumed to be the chief actors. It is not surprising, therefore, that of all the fields of political science, IR has been perhaps the most resistant to taking feminist-informed gender analysis seriously.

As Laura Sjoberg notes in her ambitious, valuable new book, Gendering Global Conflict, those academic specialists who have focused specifically on war have wielded disproportionate influence in the wider field of IR. There are, of course, several possible causalities at work to explain this outsized influence. First, war (especially interstate war) might indeed be the most analytically important phenomenon for all of us to try to explain. That is, if we examined the full range of internationalized political relationships—human migrations, financial investments, trades in goods and services, flows of cultural influences, territorial expansions and contractions, international organizations, and international law—we might conclude that if we cannot explain the causes and consequences of interstate wars, we cannot explain any other of these international/interstate relationships. Thus, war studies deserve their intellectual primacy because war itself is so causally potent.

There is an alternative possibility, however: It could be that war is deemed the most aesthetically appealing (dare we say exciting?) phenomenon to study. The corollary: This common allure is what confers so much intellectual prestige on the students of war, especially if they set their sites on interstate wars, in which one of the state parties is considered a Great Power.

But this in turn depends, as Laura Sjoberg strongly implies, on studying wars at arm’s length, standing at a distance from war’s myriad actors, eschewing war’s messiness. Gendering Global Conflict succeeds, I think, in revealing how limited this conventional IR war studies perspective is. In doing so, Sjoberg takes up the challenge laid out persuasively by Ann Tickner. Repeatedly, Tickner has demonstrated that feminist-informed gender analysts of international politics can engage in meaningful conversations with their nonfeminist, gender-dismissive IR colleagues (most recently in A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, 2014). It is sometimes, admittedly, a slog. But Tickner, and now Sjoberg, show that it is a slog that reaps considerable intellectual rewards. First, such an explicit engagement shines a bright light on the often unspoken but consequential assumptions made by gender-dismissive war analysts. Second, such a conversation holds out the promise that IR’s war studies can become smarter. Moreover, since war studies have become so central to the whole field, such a conversation suggests that IR itself is redeemable. This latter point is not made sarcastically. Many of today’s serious gender analysts who have cast their academic lot with international relations not infrequently wonder aloud whether the field is redeemable. International relations—and political science as a whole—will be the poorer if these thoughtful, productive analysts answer in the negative.

Taking this optimistic (though not sanguine) approach, Sjoberg walks us carefully through the currently dominant theories of war (particularly those offered by political scientists). One by one, she weighs each theory’s (or cluster of theories’) explanatory value. After all, it is not “elegance” that is the proof of the theory pudding; it is explanatory value: How much of war’s reality does any given theory explain, and how reliable is that explanation?

Sjoberg gives each conventional war theory its due. There is nothing smug in her assessments. She concludes time and again that most of the explanations of war offered by gender-dismissive IR practitioners are inadequate. They underestimate how much—and what sorts of—power it takes to wage wars. They undercount the costs of war. They set their stopwatches on war’s ending prematurely. Each of the widely held gender-dismissive theories of war suffers from what Sjoberg calls an “explanatory deficit” (p. 289). This assessment sounds deceptively mild. It certainly is in a language that keeps the necessary conversation alive. Yet it is risky indeed to depend on an inadequate explanation, no matter how endowed it may presumably be with masculinized gravitas.

The alternative to relying on these inadequate explanations is mustering the intellectual stamina to plunge into war’s temporal porousness and its sociopolitical, sociocultural messiness. Messiness is, after all, just another term for a surprising degree of complexity. Plunging is precisely what Sjoberg shows feminist-informed analysts of war to have been doing. Together, they are less intent upon crafting an elegant, all-embracing high theory of war than they are in revealing patterns, discovering exactly a) what happens in the understudied buildups to war and why, b) what happens (to whom) in each of the several stages of any particular war and why, and c) why it has been so difficult to roll back the processes of militarization that perpetuate wars.

To shrug off this approach as “untheoretical” would be a serious misjudgment. Gender-curious war analysts are committed to exposing the prolonged, multilayered realities of war, no matter where or when they occur. Thus, they start looking earlier than most conventional war studies investigators. They stay attentive longer. They shine their lights on the remote corners of wars (where male soldiers have either homosexual or heterosexual sex, where the number of pockets in a woman soldier’s uniform is decided, where women displaced by armed conflict try to earn an income, where older men recruit younger men into armed groups).

Gendering Global Conflict invites us to join the conversation and, taking a deep breath, to stay in the conversation. I think it is worth the effort.