Both of these edited volumes ask what attentiveness to gender suggests about how we should do politics. They incorporate multiple perspectives, answering the question in ways that contrast and yet complement each other. To cut to the chase, both are well worth reading—but worth more when considered in light of the contribution offered by the other. Gender and Global Justice, edited by Alison M. Jaggar, sets out some of the crucial stakes involved and suggests ways to improve the sometimes grim conditions to which gender inequalities contribute. Dialogue, Politics and Gender, edited by Jude Browne, makes important arguments about the complexities of engaging in the political dialogue that would be necessary to get agreement about these types of issues—and some of its contributors would see the attempt to reach agreement as itself a dangerous goal.

The main contribution of the essays in Gender and Global Justice collectively is to argue that scholars and activists need to pay careful attention to gender, and they need to do so by looking globally, as opposed to just locally or even internationally. By this they mean that these gendered concerns are best approached by looking at local conditions and how they are embedded in a global context beyond merely relationships between nation-states. In “Transnational Cycles of Gendered Vulnerability: A Prologue to a Theory of Global Gender Justice,” Jaggar builds on the work of Susan Okin and Iris Marion Young and shows the intersection of gendered vulnerabilities and transnationalism. By using specific examples like domestic work, Jaggar explores how such work is underpaid in the receiving countries, leaving women and girls in the sending countries with heavier burdens of unpaid care work. The women left behind take on the care work of those who migrate. Jaggar convinces the reader that “gendered institutions make many women, especially poorer women in less developed countries, systematically and unequally vulnerable both to natural calamities and to social domination” (p. 35), and that “when transnational and local cycles interact, they may reinforce some gendered vulnerabilities but they may also provide opportunities for resisting them” (p. 36). The compounding of both gendered vulnerabilities and opportunities for resistance because of globalization is the underlying argument that ties the essays in this volume together.

Dealing with deeply entrenched political problems like those set out in Gender and Global Justice requires dialogue or, more acutely, contestation. After the deliberative turn in political science, spurred by the work of James Fishkin, Amy Gutmann, and John Dryzek, among others, many political scientists have treated dialogue and deliberation as straightforward goods. The contributors to Dialogue, Politics and Gender focus on gender to challenge this claim. For example, Martin Leet and Roland Bleiker, in making the case for an aesthetic approach to dialogue, raise questions about how the recognition of plural selves affects political dialogue, and whether listening carefully to different views within our own selves make us more open to hearing different views from other people (p. 140). Diana Coole explores reactions to and uses of the Muslim veil to examine the ways in which being not only embodied but also clothed and gendered are part of communication in politics. Clare Chambers and Phil Parvin, while critiquing the idea that dialogue allows us to come to consensus on foundational principles of politics, nevertheless make a case for valuing dialogue for its transformative powers. They conclude their chapter with the claim that, “since gender is to a large extent internalised, a transformative dialogue about gender is in itself a part of transforming gender” (p. 225).

Although both volumes have “gender” in the title, they tend to use the concept differently. While men and masculinity are mentioned in Gender and Global Justice a few times, for the most part “gender” implicitly means “disproportionately affects women”: Women’s experiences are understood to be quantifiable, measurably different from men’s, despite noted differences based on race, nationality, migrant status, and wealth. Gendered vulnerabilities, therefore, are usually treated as calculable, tangible problems for which there are specific, if difficult to achieve, potential solutions. This understanding of gender contrasts with that of most of the pieces in the Browne volume, which treat gender as an iterative process rather than a stable characteristic of individuals.

The authors in Gender and Global Justice all share a commitment to diagnosing harms that tend to cluster along gender lines. These range from the effects of transnational sex work to the disproportionate harms to women from authoritarianism in resource-rich countries. Throughout the volume, the authors make concerted and careful efforts to be attentive to structures and institutions, as well as to individual and collective choices, all embedded within histories that created systemic patterns of poverty and wealth, violence and domination.

Many go beyond diagnosis to making specific suggestions. Hye-Ryoung Kang argues, for example, that providing more space for transnational women’s collectivities will better allow us to achieve global justice. She provides examples to show that neither individual-based nor national-based activism can deal effectively with transnational labor or environmental justice issues. In a similar vein, Gillian Brock suggests ways to reform the tax system, showing the disproportionate harm to women caused by tax evasion. Women are more likely to depend on government services because of their higher levels of poverty and greater likelihood of providing unpaid labor in the form of care for other people.

While the contributors to Dialogue, Politics and Gender would undoubtedly value the scholarship found in Gender and Global Justice, I believe that they would also have three main critiques of the conceptualization of gender on which it is based. First, if gender is a social process rather than a stable characteristic of individuals, gender inequality immediately becomes more difficult to measure. It is no longer viable to assume that all people are either “men” or “women,” for one thing. (As just one example of this perspective on gender in Dialogue, see Terrell Carver’s chapter.) Second, as Kimberly Hutchings argues, “One cannot address questions about transnational distributive justice, the ethics of war or other kinds of cross-border intervention without addressing the issue of whether answers to such questions can be meaningful and/or authoritative transnationally, across boundaries of culture and power” (p. 81). In other words, given vastly different experiences and histories, it is dangerous to tacitly assume that others, including those one would like to help, necessarily share your view of what help would be best. Such questions are, for the most part, set to the side in the Jaggar volume. Third, some Dialogue contributors, such as Leet and Bleiker, would ask whether setting out the problem of global gender justice in terms that tacitly assume a consensus is an attempt to shut down politics by ultimately delegitimizing difference.

Despite the difference in focus, Gender and Global Justice’s contributors offer hints regarding their likely response to such concerns. On the first point, some of the authors in the volume do note processes of gender socialization. For example, in “Global Gender Injustice and Mental Disorders,” Abigail Gosselin examines mental health within various contexts, including the need to negotiate global gender norms one sees in the media while simultaneously negotiating local gender norms. And in the first chapter, Jaggar calls attention to the common problem of treating gender differences as natural, and notes that “biological sex differences can hardly be investigated independently of their gendered contexts” (p. 21). Still, as a broad statement, it is fair to say that the volume as a whole assumes that gender is self-evident.

On the second point, Rachel Silvey, in “Transnational Rights and Wrongs,” argues that one response to the supposed tension between universal moral values and cultural differences is to point out how intertwined, in practice, “local” and “global” are. She also notes that the cultural experiences of people are not always obviously based on where they currently live, given the movement of people across the globe (p. 86). The attempts of the authors in Jaggar’s volume to account for structural and institutional inequalities and to pay attention to the effects of history also partially, but not fully, address the sorts of concerns raised by Hutchings.

A more central connection between the perspectives offered in these two volumes can be seen in Leet and Bleiker’s contribution to Dialogue, Politics, and Gender. They argue that dialogue is motivated by concerns other than conversation itself (p. 140). And the interests that motivate dialogue about gender and politics are precisely the sort raised in Gender and Global Justice. Brutal exploitation, sexual violence, domination—these concerns are urgent, and dialogue matters enough to have deep effects on the participants when it addresses them.

If the contributors to Dialogue, Politics, and Gender would probably critique the other volume for undertheorizing some crucial questions, the contributors to Gender and Global Justice might counter that Dialogue is taking the long route toward gender justice. While both volumes build on existing theories, the chapters in Dialogue are much more likely to focus on such questions as whether Seyla Benhabib misunderstood Jurgen Habermas or to note ways that Hannah Arendt’s concept of plurality was indebted to Nietzsche. Early in the volume, James Gordon Finlayson makes the point that theorists often seem to be suggesting that flawed theories are themselves directly causing injustice. In a footnote, he adds: “It is especially doubtful that any social and political malaise is caused by the dubiety of Habermas’ or Rawls’ moral theory” (p. 27). On the next page, he continues: “This is not to deny that conceptual innovation and criticism can have practical effects. It is to say that to bring about social change new ideas require uptake and circulation, and it is this process which is gradual, diffuse, and highly unpredictable.” New ideas and careful theorizing matter, but usually matter more in the long run than in the short term.

In the face of urgent needs and obvious injustices, as well as more subtle theoretical ones, both volumes are important interventions into the ongoing conversation about gender and politics.