Gendering Global Conflict is rich, compendious (there are well over 1,500 notes), thoughtful, frustrating, and internally contradictory. It is a work full of useful insights and missed opportunities. Its most important contribution lies in bringing a wide range of feminist approaches to bear on all of the leading theories in the contemporary international relations literature. Nearly every IR scholar should read at least one chapter of the book, whether they take a third- (Chapter 3), second- (Chapter 5), or first-image (Chapter 6) approach, analyze dyads (Chapter 4), or are interested in strategy (Chapter 7) and tactics (Chapter 8). The book might be considered a handbook for the next generation of graduate students interested in complicating conventional approaches to the study of international relations. Time and again, it calls into question core methodological, ontological, and normative assumptions by demonstrating how gender inflects various theories of war and the practices of war itself.

The book does not forward a new theory of war, however, and this has the effect of undermining the overall aims of the project, even the deconstructive ones. Laura Sjoberg says that she has resisted positing a “coherent narrative of what war is” (p. 284). However, her missteps show why a feminist theory of war is so badly needed. In this brief review, I will attempt to sketch one possible way to formulate a more coherent feminist narrative of what war is and why it occurs (or does not) by recovering some of the missed opportunities in the work.

A major theme in the book is the nature of power. Sjoberg is cognizant of feminist critiques of masculine “power over,” where power is “conflated with ‘the crude instrumentalism of violence’” (p. 181). Drawing on the work of Amy Allen, she raises the possibility that feminist theory can “‘distance power from domination’” (p. 95). Such a view sees “individuals outside the halls of elite power” as important to politics and “war decision-making specifically” (p. 164). Yet Sjoberg rejects these approaches to power. She accepts that “elite individuals or leaders . . . are indeed more likely to have direct, causal influence over war-policy making, given their preponderance of ‘power-over’” (p. 170).

The author’s commitment to power-over as “real” power is most striking in her discussion of third-image theories of war. Drawing on Kenneth Waltz, she argues that gender determines 1) unit functions, 2) the distribution of capabilities among them, and 3) the political processes of unit interaction in world politics. But instead of arguing that the system is not what it appears to be through the lens of structural realist analysis, Sjoberg argues that gender hierarchies have produced the system that Waltz describes: one characterized by self-help, (so-called) power politics, competition, and control (p. 93). According to Sjoberg, the structural realist view of the facts is basically correct. A gendered culture of anarchy “selects for power-over,” creating a “relatively stable” system that excludes policy options such as empathy, positive-sum collaboration, and the unilateral deconstruction of the cycle of violence (p. 95).

The problem is that all of these policy options are in fact part and parcel of international politics, which suggests that either the selection mechanism is not very strong or that a different kind of power is doing the selecting. Endemic conflicts are resolved. Nuclear-armed enemies stand down. States give up important aspects of their autonomy to engage in extensive cooperation with others. These facts are no more or less part of the reality of international relations than conflict and war, and they too involve the exercise of power. If Sjoberg had offered a third-image theory built upon “alternative, noncompetitive” forms of power (p. 95), she might have offered a genuinely novel understanding of the distribution of capabilities. A gendered understanding of system structure might explain a much wider swath of behavior than structural realism, including how wars are avoided and come to an end. If we consider power to be acting in concert with others and distinct from (but possibly combined with) violence, we would have a different view of the overall distribution of capabilities in the international system. ^{Footnote 1}

Sjoberg’s limited ambitions when it comes to reconceptualizing power come into view over the course of the work. For her, a feminist theory of war does not necessarily attempt to explain how to stop war or even lessen the incidence of it. Instead, such a theory should imagine “what acting in the world toward feminisms’ political goals would look like in the practice of war, or war-making and war-fighting” (p. 298). The author begins the book by arguing that what makes her work specifically feminist is that it is concerned not only with gender as an explanatory variable but also with “gender emancipation as a political aim” (p. 47). This “transformative” (p. 65) approach to war theorizing, then, involves imagining a new kind of war that could help “[end] gender subordination” (p. 298). This is “a feminist ethics of war(s)” (p. 298).

I am in full agreement that in order to fully challenge the gendered aspects of not only war but violence in general, it must be possible for feminism to be consistent with war. The sex essentialism that figures men as inherently violent and women as inherently passive belies the fact that women can and have at times challenged male dominance with physical violence. Moreover, in order to upend the binaries that characterize gender (strong/weak, dominant/passive, hard power/soft power), we have to know and account for the fact that women are perfectly capable of inhabiting the masculine and men are perfectly capable of inhabiting the feminine. Yet this is not sufficient for an emancipatory feminist theory of war. While the sex of those with power-over may be fungible, emancipation from gendered subordination requires dismantling and complicating the epistemologies, norms, and ontologies of genders themselves, not just rearranging bodies within them.

This is where a real leap of imagination is required to rethink the terms of international relations theory. Consider the women’s movement of the last two centuries. Nothing about the women’s movement is of interest to mainstream international relations theorists, despite the fact that it was and is undoubtedly an international process and event(s). Sjoberg might argue that she has little to say about the women’s movement because she claims to be interested in the “study of war ‘proper,’” unlike other feminists (p. 57). But the entry of large numbers of women into politics for the first time in history is rich with questions and possibilities related to war.

First, as a movement demanding political freedom for half of the human population, one might expect that the women’s movement, like other struggles for freedom, would have involved a violent revolution (or many of them). Why is this remarkable fact not considered to be part of the “war puzzle”? Sjoberg mentions that the number of women in legislative bodies has “increased more than twofold over the last two decades,” (p. 157) as though it happened without an international struggle. She knows this is not the case, but without a robust alternative understanding of power, she cannot explain either the dynamics or outcomes of that ongoing conflict, let alone the fact that the protagonists have largely avoided doing physical violence to men.

Second, the author is critical of the empirical work demonstrating that countries where women have achieved the most are less bellicose (pp. 135–40). While some of this work may simply treat women as a variable, Sjoberg herself adopts disempowering terminology saying that the states under consideration “treat women fairly” (p. 290). In places where women have used direct action and nonviolent struggle to gain a greater degree of equality, governments are less bellicose. That seems like an important insight to build upon: 1) Greater equality for women is not just something that masculine states decide to give them, but something that women have achieved through struggle. 2) Such states are less apt to adopt masculine norms and fight wars. This suggests that a feminist theory of international structure that challenges our most basic assumptions about power could go some ways toward explaining how and why masculinity is not inevitably or inexorably hegemonic. (Such an approach to power might also help explain why attempts by so-called powerful states to dominate so-called weak states with violence and warfare often fails.) ^{Footnote 2}

And this leads us to the issue of resistance. Political resistance to war with alternative forms of power is part of what shapes the practice, outcomes, and occurrence of wars. In a book that is so wide-ranging and so deeply engaged with the diversity of roles played by women with respect to war, it is strange and striking that there is so little here describing the historic and present role of women (and men, often gendered “feminine”) in resisting war. They are not entirely absent from her discussion. She mentions a nonviolent activist (p. 249), offers footnotes on the link between feminism and pacifism (p. 342) and on Nobel Peace Prize winners (p. 389), and offers a one-paragraph history of women’s peace movements (p. 61). But if a feminist theory of war is actually going to account for how those who are not elites shape war (p. 158), how ordinary people’s actions can “be causal in preventing war” (p. 169) and how traditional understandings of power over can be circumvented by both ordinary people and other elites (p. 181), it will require much more than Sjoberg offers here.

The extraordinary exercise of power by women the world over, leading to their entry into politics in large numbers, has often been enfolded into antiwar movements. In the United States and Europe alone, the suffragist movement helped launch a transatlantic peace movement in the early twentieth century, and third-wave feminists were some of the leading voices in the struggle to end the war in Vietnam. Both movements had deep and abiding political effects, arguably helping determine who won and lost wars and the conditions under which wars were begun or ended. One of the results of the women’s movement has been the increased involvement of women in the planning and practice of war over the last 50 years, something that neither Sjoberg nor mainstream international relations theory seems interested in (or capable) of explaining.

At the heart of Sjoberg’s analysis is the common tendency to conflate “conflict” and “war,” terms she uses in parallel throughout the work (as reflected in her title and subtitle). “Nonviolence” is the third term—the form of power and direct action that refuses both passivity and violence and therefore upsets the binaries of masculine and feminine. Aggressive, powerful women and self-sacrificing, empathetic men have changed the character of world politics and warfare already. In the last chapter, Sjoberg implicates masculine dominance by offering a powerful description of the “felt” effects that war has on the lives of ordinary women and men (Chapter 9). But without the story of how peace builders and war resisters combat and transform this sensorium of destruction, these people appear as little more than tragic “victims” of an unavoidable, self-reproducing war system.