Laura Sjoberg has undertaken the enormous task of applying a gender perspective to the study of war in Gendering Global Conflict. While many feminists have worked within the study of war, analyzing its gendered causes and gendered consequences, Sjoberg presents the first comprehensive attempt to position feminist theory as the missing piece to the war puzzle.

Feminists have been challenging the core concepts of international relations theory and its accounts of war for some time, highlighting the masculinist assumptions underpinning this field of work ^{Footnote 1} and how these assumptions obscure gender roles in times of so-called war and peace. From the late 1980s, when Cynthia Enloe began questioning “where are the women?” in the study of IR, ^{Footnote 2} feminist theories have focused on militarization, gender in warmaking, gender in peacemaking, and the relationship of “everyday violence” to political violence, to name a few concerns. The various scholars working in this field have sought to challenge the notion that the state and state system are gender neutral, to critique conventional concepts employed in the study of security, and to advocate for gender-based perspectives that consider the roles that women and gender play in conflict, war, peace, and security. ^{Footnote 3}

Sjoberg’s latest work is an attempt to unify these concerns and construct a coherent gendered analysis of the causes and consequences of war. Her analysis engages structural-level, institutional-level, and individual-level accounts of war through a progression of chapters on each.

Of course, there is not one “feminism” that articulates a unified and coherent perspective on the wide spectrum of issue areas and political events that have been the purview of feminist international relations scholarship. Indeed, there are as many feminisms as there are other –isms within the discipline: feminist realism, feminist liberalism, feminist constructivism, feminist critical theory, feminist postcolonial theory, feminist poststructuralism, et cetera. Here, Sjoberg impressively manages to synthesize not only the various feminisms but also key components of nonfeminist IR theory to provide the most systematic account of war that I have seen to date.

Reviewing new literature is often a labor in nit-picking. Authors selected to review works may feel pressured to criticize the work under review. An early-career colleague has described this compulsion in academia as “a state of endless, polite warfare.” ^{Footnote 4} By most accounts, the default to criticism is about jockeying for power. As Michel Foucault pointed out, power is generative, and the act of speaking “truth” constitutes and reflects relations of power; in academia, the power of discourse serves to construct the boundaries of acceptable or legitimate knowledge within disciplines. ^{Footnote 5}

Knowledge and power, then, are intimately connected, and this has deep implications for reviewing work. The act of critiquing a work has been described as a “parasitical operation” that too often diverges from the useful contribution to the “spirit of the art” under critique and is more often done, rather, at its expense. ^{Footnote 6} Studies in workplace relations have found that condescending comments, insults, put-downs, and even intimidation “can be effective paths to power” ^{Footnote 7} since such actions create “the impression that the expresser is competent.” ^{Footnote 8} As a feminist researcher, it also seems that the negative review paradigm is one of the “legitimizing function[s] of masculinity discourses within these theories.” ^{Footnote 9}

I prefer to avoid the power play frequently displayed in reviews, and to borrow a technique from improvisational theater, engaging instead in a “yes, and . . . ” approach to reviewing Sjoberg’s book. This approach in many ways reflects Sjoberg’s own approach, which draws on the diverse feminisms “in dialogue with one another and with war analyses that have omitted gender” in order to provide the “missing piece” to the war puzzle (p. 5). Rather than simply critiquing the shortcomings in each analysis, Sjoberg synthesizes insights within each approach in a process of “yes, and” construction rather than critical deconstruction. This approach is more than a method; it enacts a feminist ethic “of communicative, perspectival, and contingent ways of knowing” (p. 297).

There is a lot to “yes” about Gendering Global Conflict. First, there is the dialogical method itself. This approach reflects an engagement with the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire—that is, the acknowledgment that dialogue is not an end in itself but “a process of learning and knowing . . . that always involves an epistemological curiosity about the very elements of the dialogue.” ^{Footnote 10} As with Hegel’s dialectic, the synthesis is constructed relationally, through interaction and reconciliation of paradigms.

Sjoberg’s dialogue progresses logically. The early chapters set the groundwork, with Chapter 1 establishing the dialogue between mainstream (read: male-stream) perspectives on war and highlighting the absence of gender as a framework or analytical tool within these perspectives. Chapter 2 discusses various feminisms in order to establish why gender matters in war and what feminist war studies does. Sjoberg’s aim here is to synthesize the contributions of various approaches since, as she well demonstrates, “feminist inquiry is constituted by both contestability and actual contestation” (p. 55). The remaining chapters execute the dialogue of theories, engaging with structural analyses of war, then with relational analyses of war (that is, dyadic-level theories), and finally with individual-level analyses to explain, first, how gender is a causal factor in war and, second, how gender is key for understanding how wars are fought. Given my impulse after reading this book to incorporate some of these ideas into my own research, I am inclined to say that Sjoberg is successful in this effort.

The second important contribution of the book is its ability to go beyond sex analysis (what happens to women in war) to a true gender analysis. This analysis explores “the ways that gender tropes interact with, constitute, justify, and even serve as direct or indirect causes of war(s) in gendered narratives of state identities, in structural gender inequality, and in sites of operation of gendered expectations from bedrooms to workplaces to state governments to international organizations” (pp. 139–40). While many accounts of the role of gender in conflict privilege a particular level of gender analysis—whether individual, cultural/institutional, or structural—as explanatory for behaviors of actors in conflict zones, ^{Footnote 11} some feminists have criticized this disaggregation since, in practice, these elements are interdependent. ^{Footnote 12} It is not simply knowing that the actors are gendered (and that their behaviors are a performance of gender) that can help us to understand war, but also the gendered nature of international relations as a system and a structure conducive to war and violence. That is, “gendered states make and are made by gendered strategic cultures that lead both to gendered war decision-making and gendered war-justificatory narratives” (p. 140). Sjoberg makes the links between the different levels, drawing on the interdependent and co-constitutive nature of states’ relationships, in conjunction with an international system ordered by a gender hierarchy, and the role of individual gender for “great men” making decisions about war. In so doing, she provides a comprehensive explanation for war as the result of gender and the distribution of power and privilege according to position on the gender hierarchy.

As one drawn particularly to structural analyses for war and conflict, I find Sjoberg’s engagement with Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State and War (1959) and Theory of International Politics (1979) particularly exciting for showing how the “invisible” structure can be a permissive factor for war. Drawing on Waltz’s definition of a structure as a principle that orders the international system, specifies the functions of units within that system, distributes capabilities of units within the system, and is constitutive of political processes that shape the relations between units, Sjoberg convincingly shows how gender more than anarchy may be the structural feature of the international system that enables conflict. The differences between states “map onto the ways that gender shapes state identities and functions” (p. 90) so that “regardless of the specific content of the competition, units within the system (states) are in constant competition to prove their masculinity and deny their femininity. Since gender-based characteristics are often measured relatively, this makes the international system inherently competitive” (p. 98).

This analysis resonates strongly with my own research on gender hierarchy and political violence in conflict. ^{Footnote 13} At the same time, I would like to see this framework extended through further engagement with nascent feminist political-economy analyses of violence, which stress “the linkages between poverty, material gender inequality, and violence” and sees violence both domestic and political as part of the broader structure of global power relations ^{Footnote 14} While Sjoberg highlights that the distribution of power and privilege according to gender lines serves to (re)construct hierarchical gender relations at all levels (international relations, state relations, interpersonal relations), it is also important to recognize the material gains that come with achieving primacy in the gender order. It is not the achievement of being “most masculine” alone that drives competition, but also how the distribution of material goods and resources coincides with gender identity. ^{Footnote 15} Although Sjoberg addresses this distribution in terms of individual gender in her chapter on “Living Gendered War(s),” the analysis can be extended to the other levels as well.

In a world of finite resources, the accumulative function of war cannot be understated. In economic and political environments in which there are traditional opportunities for men to acquire the social recognition and prestige that they have come to expect from socially constructed gender norms, “employing violent means of achieving that status may present the only available alternative to exclusion and marginalisation.” ^{Footnote 16} Gender hierarchies are embedded in cultural, political, and economic contexts and are subject to exploitation or disruption when there is a shift in one or more of these contexts. In many conflict contexts, the destabilization of economic or political structures can exacerbate unequal social relations and manifest in gendered violence as a means for gaining power and authority or control over productive and reproductive resources.

Given the strength of Sjoberg’s framework developed through this dialogical approach, it is possible to engage in further conversation between Gendering Global Conflict and neo-Gramscian political economy that extends beyond a view of systems of production that shapes the individual gendered experiences of war in order to account for the ways in which change in the international structure of political economy has shaped the practice of contemporary war, its gendered causes, and implications. The author engages only briefly with the idea of “new wars” (p. 17), but I think there is much to be said about the gender relations of the global political economy and how economic and political structures intersect to shape the (changing) gendered organizations in conflict and the gendered behaviors of actors. ^{Footnote 17}

Sjoberg has initiated a new and much-needed discussion between the feminisms theorizing about war and “mainstream” IR. Through her comprehensive and meticulous engagement across this very broad field,, she provides an excellent launching point for extending the discussion still further. Sjoberg sets the bar high for future analyses of war, and anyone with an interest in international relations theory, gender theory, security studies, or peace studies will find her book to be a rich source of scholarly engagement.