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The researchers found that immigrants generate patents across a broad swath of sectors, including computers, electronics, chemicals, and medicine. They also discovered that, while all inventors reach peak productivity in their late 30s and early 40s, immigrants decline from that peak at a slower rate than U.S.-born inventors over the rest of their careers, a disparity that remains unexplained.

The Immigrant Innovation Gap

Global STEM talent drives American leadership in critical sectors that underpin the defense industrial base, from computing to aerospace. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. graduate students in artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductor-related programs were born abroad. The U.S. remains the most desirable destination for the world’s best international scientists and engineers — a feat that China, despite extensive investments, has not come close to replicating. In today’s technology competition, the most powerful and enduring asymmetric advantage America has is its ability to attract and retain the world’s best and brightest. The Chinese Communist Party recognizes this; Chinese sources say that U.S. expansion of its international talent pipelines “would pose a huge challenge to China.”

Bottlenecks in the U.S. immigration system risk squandering this advantage. Today, top Indian STEM graduates are projected to face decades of wait time before being issued a green card. Such delays are driving talent away — more than half of AI PhDs who leave the country after graduating say they did so because of immigration issues. Even for those who manage to stay, citizenship, a requirement for many jobs in the defense-industrial base, can be elusive. The risks for American leadership are clear. Earlier this year, the chip giant TSMC announced it would delay construction of a major new semiconductor plant in Arizona due to a shortage of skilled professionals. In 2021, a plurality of National Defense Industrial Association members reported that the U.S. human capital gap is the single most vulnerable part of their supply chain, and recent studies show half of advanced STEM workers in the defense industrial base were born abroad. America’s efforts to onshore critical supply chains will not succeed unless it also onshores the talent necessary to compete.

*they are risk-taking, meaning that any squo uncertainty isn’t enough.

Jeremy Neufeld 24, Senior Immigration Fellow at Institute for Progress, 4/30/2024, “The Immigration Advantage in the U.S.-China Strategic Contest for STEM Talent”, Vol. 19, Issue 2, p. 143-146

U.S. technological leadership in the second half of the twentieth century did not derive only from federal government investments in research and development, nor from the relatively large and well-educated U.S. population. What really gave the United States an edge was the uniquely high proportion of the world’s best STEM talent that chose to make this country their home, drawn by America’s political freedoms, high standard of living, world-leading research universities, and favorable corporate environment. Scratch the surface of any major U.S. technological achievement and you will find immigrants involved. Since 1901, almost half of the world’s Nobel Laureates have been U.S.-based scientists, about 10 times more than the size alone of the U.S. population would predict; in turn, immigrants represent a third of the U.S.-based laureates, also a disproportionately large share.1 Immigrants are even more over-represented among successful entrepreneurs: more than half of U.S. startups valued at over $1 billion have an immigrant founder, as do more than half of the Forbes 2019 list of “most promising” artificial intelligence startups.2

In other words, for much of the twentieth century the combination of U.S. homegrown talent and highly-skilled immigrants added up to a significant scientific and technological advantage for the United States. This advantage is now eroding. As technological competition with China heats up, the United States must recognize high-skill immigration as the core national security issue that it is.

While this is limited to the patent section of the topic, I feel that the CP is fairly good at screening out advantages without very specific evidence about patent reform.

It’s worth noting that there is debate over whether or not recent developments in patent law are more important to any industry (specifically the biotech industry), than anything else. This means that in order to win the solvency debate, it’s worth debating the case at the same time as you push on the CP.

Despite this consensus on what we are trying to explain, the question of what causes war can mean several different things (Suganami 1996). It can refer, first of all, to the question of what makes war possible, to the permissive or logically necessary conditions for war. These fundamental or primary causes of war explain why war repeatedly occurs in international politics, why war can occur at any moment. Thus scholars trace war to human nature, biological instincts, frustration, fear and greed, the existence of weapons, and similar factors. Peace, however, is far more common than war, though as a “non-event” peace is difficult to measure. At the systemic level there may be more years characterized by war than by peace, but in nearly all war years most states are at peace, and at the dyadic level war is rare (Bremer 1992). This makes it hard to argue that human nature and related factors are causes of war. The point is that these factors are constants and cannot explain the variations in war and peace over time and space (Waltz 1959, Cashman 1993). If human nature varies, as some argue, then it is the sources of that variation, not human nature itself, that explain behavior. Moreover, even if human nature or biologically based instincts could explain aggressive behavior at the individual level, they cannot explain when such aggression leads to domestic violence, when it leads to scapegoating or other outlets, when it is resolved, and when it leads to international war. The question of how to explain variations in war and peace is the second meaning of the broader question of what causes war. Why does war occur at some times rather than other times, between some states rather than other states, under some political leaders rather than others, in some historical and cultural contexts rather than others, and so on? This differs from still a third question: How do we explain the origins of a particular war? Most international relations scholars (and particularly those in North America) focus primarily on the second question, explaining variations in war and peace. They leave the question of why war occurs at all to philosophers and biologists and leave the question of why a particular war occurs to historians. This is not to pass judgment on the relative importance of the three questions, only to say that they are different and that their investigation may require different theoretical orientations, different conceptions of causation and explanation, and different methodologies. One important exception to this focus on variations in war and peace is the argument by Waltz (1979) and other neorealists that the fundamental cause of war is the anarchic structure of the international system. Anarchy, defined as the absence of a legitimate governmental authority to regulate disputes and enforce agreements between states, “causes” war in the sense that there is no governmental enforcement mechanism in the international system to prevent wars.5 Although anarchy may provide one persuasive answer to the question of the permissive causes of war, it is generally treated as a structural constant and consequently it cannot account for variations in war and peace. Waltz (1988, p. 620) seems to concede this point and argues, “Although neorealist theory does not explain why particular wars are fought, it does explain war’s dismal recurrence through the millennia.” Other neorealists also recognize this limitation and have begun to incorporate other variables, including the polarity of the system and the offensive/defensive balance, in order to explain variations of war and peace in anarchic systems. Another exception to the focus on variations in war and peace can be found in some feminist theorizing about the outbreak of war, although most feminist work on war focuses on the consequences of war, particularly for women, rather than on the outbreak of war (Elshtain 1987, Enloe 1990, Peterson 1992, Tickner 1992, Sylvester 1994). The argument is that the gendered nature of states, cultures, and the world system contributes to the persistence of war in world politics. This might provide an alternative (or supplement) to anarchy as an answer to the first question of why violence and war repeatedly occur in international politics, although the fact that peace is more common than war makes it difficult to argue that patriarchy (or anarchy) causes war. Theories of patriarchy might also help answer the second question of variations in war and peace, if they identified differences in the patriarchal structures and gender relations in different international and domestic political systems in different historical contexts, and if they incorporated these differences into empirically testable hypotheses about the outbreak of war. This is a promising research agenda, and one that has engaged some anthropologists. Most current feminist thinking in political science about the outbreak of war, however, treats gendered systems and patriarchal structures in the same way that neorealists treat anarchy, as a constant.and consequently it cannot explain variations in war and peace. The Levels-of-Analysis Framework Ever since Waltz (1959) classified the causes of war in terms of their origins in the individual, the nation-state, and the international system (which he labeled first-, second-, and third-image explanations, respectively), international relations theorists have agreed on the utility of the levels-of-analysis framework as an organizing device for the study of war and international behavior more generally. Some scholars have modified Waltz’s framework by collapsing the individual and nation-state levels to create a simplified dichotomy of nation (or unit) level and system level (Singer 1961, Waltz 1979), while others have disaggregated the nation-state level into distinct governmental and societal-level factors (Jervis 1976, Rosenau 1980), a practice that I follow here. Following Waltz (1959), most scholars use the levels of analysis as a framework for classifying independent variables. This leads to such questions as whether the causes of war derive primarily from the level of the international system, national societies or bureaucracies, or individual decision-makers. Although the question of which level is most important has stimulated useful debate, until recently it distracted attention from the equally important issue of how variables from different levels interact in the foreign policy process. The levels-of-analysis concept is sometimes used differently, to refer to the dependent variable, or to the type of entity whose behavior is to be explained. In this sense the systemic level of analysis refers to explanations of patterns and outcomes in the international system; the dyadic level refers to explanations of the strategic interactions between two states; the national level refers to explanations of state foreign policy behavior; the organizational level refers to explanations of the behavior of organizations; and the individual level refers to explanations of the preferences, beliefs, or choices of individuals. The failure of scholars to be explicit about exactly how they are using the levels-of-analysis concept is a source of confusion in the field. Some have erroneously interpreted Singer.s (1961, p. 92) comment that the various levels “defy theoretical integration...[and] are not immediately combinable” to suggest that analysts should not combine variables from different levels of analysis to explain foreign policy decisions or international outcomes. But Singer.s statement makes sense only if the levels of analysis are conceptualized in terms of the dependent variable. This is the familiar micro-macro problem of aggregation across levels. We cannot assume that correlations or causal connections at one level of analysis are necessarily valid at another level. It is conceivable, for example, that concentrations of power may promote peace at the dyadic level but war at the system level. This has important implications for theories of war and peace. Although it is possible that individual- or national-level variables could be the primary causes of war, these variables do not constitute a logically complete explanation because they do not explain how individual beliefs and preferences are translated into state decisions and actions or how the strategies or behaviors of states interact to lead to war as a dyadic or systemic outcome. To the extent that most wars involve the mutual and interactive decisions of two or more adversaries, an explanation for the outbreak of war logically requires the inclusion of dyadic- or systemic-level variables. This does not necessarily mean, however, that these variables are the most important in terms of amount of variation explained. The levels-of-analysis framework is not the only way to organize the literature on the causes of war or on international politics more generally. It has long been fashionable for international relations theorists to frame debates in terms of the so-called paradigm wars between realism and liberalism (Baldwin 1993). In contrast to the realist focus on the struggle for power and security in an anarchic and conflictual Hobbesian world, the liberal tradition sees a more benign Grotian international society or Lockean state of nature where anarchy does not imply disorder. States have common as well as conflictual interests, aim to maximize economic welfare as well as provide for security, and create international institutions that help regulate conflict and promote cooperation (Keohane 1989). Although the paradigmatic debate between realism and liberalism has imposed some order on a chaotic field, it distracts attention from significant variations within each paradigm, variations that often lead to conflicting hypotheses. It also detracts from the important task of systematically integrating key components from each approach into a more complete and powerful theory. Furthermore, the “paradigm wars” ignore important hypotheses associated with the Marxist-Leninist tradition and saddle liberalism with charges of the neglect of power that are better associated with the utopianism of Thomas Paine and others (Walker 1998). As a field, international relations needs to shift its attention from the level of paradigms to the level of theories, focus on constructing theories and testing them against the empirical evidence, and leave the question of whether a particular approach fits into a liberal or realist framework to the intellectual historians. THEORIES OF THE CAUSES OF WAR Systemic-Level Theories The realist tradition has dominated the study of war since Thucydides, and includes Machiavellians, Hobbesians, classical balance of power theorists, Waltzian neorealists, and hegemonic transition theorists.6 Although different realist theories often generate conflicting predictions, they share a core of common assumptions: The key actors in world politics are sovereign states that act rationally to advance their security, power, and wealth in a conflictual international system that lacks a legitimate governmental authority to regulate conflicts or enforce agreements. For realists, wars can occur not only because some states prefer war to peace, but also because of unintended consequences of actions by those who prefer peace to war and are more interested in preserving their position than in enhancing it.7 Even defensively motivated efforts by states to provide for their own security through armaments, alliances, and deterrent threats are often perceived as threatening and lead to counteractions and conflict spirals that are difficult to reverse. This is the “security dilemma,” the possibility that a state’s actions to provide for its security may result in a decrease in the security of all states, including itself (Jervis 1978). Realists do not assume that international relations are always conflictual, and they have recently focused on the question of the conditions for cooperation under anarchy, often through the use of iterated Prisoner.s Dilemma models (Jervis 1978, Axelrod 1984, Grieco 1990). The iterated models are more appropriate for most situations than single-play Prisoner.s Dilemma models, and the iterated Prisoner.s Dilemma framework has generated some useful hypotheses regarding the rather restrictive conditions under which cooperation is likely. The assumption that the same game is repeated over and over is often problematic, however, particularly for security issues, because one play of the game (preemption, for example) can significantly change power relationships and affect payoffs in the next iteration. Nor is it clear that unilateral defection is always preferred to mutual cooperation; stag hunt models, in which mutual cooperation is both sides. first preference, may be more applicable in many situations (e.g. where each side fears both war and preemption by the other). There has been a tendency to apply Prisoner.s Dilemma models to many situations in which the assumptions of the model are not satisfied. The core proposition of realist theory is that the distribution of power, throughout the system or within a dyad, is the primary factor shaping international outcomes. But different versions of realist theory generate different, sometimes contradictory explanations and predictions of foreign policy choices and international outcomes, based on different assumptions about the motivations of states, the nature of power, and the identity and boundaries of the system. Given the variety of realist propositions and predictions, it is possible to interpret nearly any foreign policy behavior or international outcome as consistent with some version of realism. This is not particularly helpful, for if theories are not falsifiable they have little explanatory power. We should treat realism as a paradigm rather than as a theory, and focus instead on specific theories that generate more determinant, testable propositions. The key division in the realist literature on war is not the standard one between classical realism and neorealism8, but rather between balance of power theory and hegemonic theory. Balance of power theory includes numerous variations on the classical realism of Morgenthau (1967) and the more systemic structural realism of Waltz. Hegemonic theory is a structural theory that incorporates power transition theory and hegemonic stability theory and that downplays the importance of anarchy. Balance of power theory posits the avoidance of hegemony as the primary goal of states and the maintenance of an equilibrium of power in the system as the primary instrumental goal. The theory predicts that states, and particularly great powers, will balance against those states that constitute the primary threats to their interests and particularly against any state that threatens to secure a hegemonic position.9 Balance of power theorists argue that the balancing mechanism.which includes both external alliances and internal military buildups.almost always successfully avoids hegemony, either because potential hegemons are deterred by their anticipation of a military coalition forming against them or because they are defeated in war after deterrence fails. In balance of power theory, serious threats of hegemony are a sufficient condition for the formation of a blocking coalition, which leads either to the withdrawal of the threatening power or to a hegemonic war. Balance of power theory is more concerned with explaining national strategies, the formation of blocking coalitions, the avoidance of hegemony, and the stability of the system than the origins of wars, which are underdetermined. All balance of power theorists agree that some form of equilibrium of military capabilities increases the stability of the system (generally defined as the relative absence of major wars), and that movements toward unipolarity are destabilizing because they trigger blocking coalitions and (usually) a hegemonic war to restore equilibrium. There is a major debate, however, between classical realists, who argue that stability is further supported by the presence of a multipolar distribution of power and a .flexible. alliance system (Morgenthau 1967, Gulick 1955), and neorealists, who argue that bipolarity is more stable than multipolarity (Waltz 1979, Mearsheimer 1990). Although neorealists rely heavily on polarity as a key explanatory variable, they do so with very little supporting evidence. They overgeneralize from the Cold War experience, where bipolarity is confounded with the existence of nuclear weapons and other key variables, and fail to demonstrate the validity of their arguments with respect to earlier historical eras. Although bipolarity is less common than multipolarity, it has occurred before, as illustrated by the Athens-Sparta rivalry in the fifth century BC and the Habsburg-Valois rivalry in the early sixteenth century, both of which witnessed numerous wars. Neorealists also ignore a number of quantitative studies that suggest that bipolarity is no less war-prone than multipolarity, that wars occur under a variety of structural conditions, and that polarity is not a primary causal factor in the outbreak of war (Sabrosky 1985). An important alternative to balance of power theory is power transition theory, a form of hegemonic theory that shares realist assumptions but emphasizes the existence of order within a hierarchical system (Organski & Kugler 1980, Gilpin 1981, Thompson 1988). Hegemons commonly arise and use their strength to create a set of political and economic structures and norms of behavior that enhance the stability of the system while advancing their own security. Differential rates of growth, the costs of imperial overextension, and the development of vested domestic interests lead to the rise and fall of hegemons, and the probability of a major war is greatest at the point when the declining leader is being overtaken by the rising challenger. Either the challenger initiates a war to bring its benefits from the system into line with its rising military power or the declining leader initiates a “preventive war” to block the rising challenger while the chance is still available (Levy 1989b, pp. 253.54). The resulting hegemonic war usually generates a new hegemonic power, and the irregular hegemonic cycle begins anew. Power transition theorists disagree somewhat on the precise identity of hegemonic wars and the particular causal dynamics from which they arise; for comparisons of the wars and critiques of the theories see Levy (1985) and Vasquez (1993). Although many of the theoretical analyses of power transition theory focus on transitions between the dominant state in the system and a challenger, and include conceptions of a broader international system and hierarchy, some applications of power transition theory are dyadic in nature and apply in principle to any two states in the system. The dyadic-level “power preponderance” hypothesis, which holds that war is least likely when one state has a preponderance of power over another and is most likely when there is an equality of power, has received widespread support in the empirical literature (Kugler & Lemke 1996).

I love Liza Featherstone’s essay, “Moving Beyond Misogyny” (The New Republic, November 4 2019), an essay that highlights the current popularity of misogyny as liberal feminism’s basic category for analyzing social problems. Hatred of women is offered up as the explanation for everything from domestic violence, campus rape, and sexual harassment, to Hillary Clinton’s failure to win the presidency in 2016. Women are kept down, abused, and murdered because men hate them. It’s as simple as that.

But it’s not just that hate doesn’t explain everything – it doesn’t explain anything.

In 2014, Sweden became the first country to establish a “feminist” foreign policy framework.163 It was followed by Canada in 2017,164 and Mexico, the most recent adoptee, in 2020.165 As a new frontier in the gender-and-national security (or “gendering national security”) journey, these feminist foreign policies demand examination.

In articulating the contributions women make to peacebuilding — or how a women-focused policy agenda will lead to less aggressive, militarized, or oppressive and exclusionary outcomes — both the Canadian and Scandinavian frameworks are undergirded by the enduring narrative of women as inherently peaceful, conciliatory, and exclusively community-oriented. This implies that women’s interests are uniform, and consistent with the “common good.” The feminist agendas are largely concerned with traditional interventions in women’s lived experiences: sexual and gender-based violence, reproductive and maternal health, education, and so forth. Seeking to address challenges in these areas is an admirable, necessary goal. However, there is not just a conceptual glass ceiling governing our understanding of a woman’s place in policy and the place of women’s issues on the national security agenda. Rather, the endeavor itself resembles a glass doll house — a prettier rendering of the pink ghettos that maintains much of the same intellectual architecture of previous, failed approaches to gender-informed policymaking.

The underlying notion of “the security bureaucracies . . . looking for new enemies” is a threadbare concept that has somehow taken hold across the political spectrum, from the radical left (viz. Michael Klare [1981], who refers to a “threat bank”), to the liberal center (viz. Robert H. Johnson [1997], who dismisses most alleged “threats” as “improbable dangers”), to libertarians (viz. Ted Galen Carpenter [1992], Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy of the Cato Institute, who wrote a book entitled A Search for Enemies). What is missing from most analysts’ claims of “threat inflation,” however, is a convincing theory of why, say, the American government significantly (not merely in excusable rhetoric) might magnify and even invent threats (and, more seriously, act on such inflated threat estimates).

In a few places, Eland (2004, 185) suggests that such behavior might stem from military or national security bureaucrats’ attempts to enhance their personal status and organizational budgets, or even from the influence and dominance of “the military-industrial complex”; viz.: “Maintaining the empire and retaliating for the blowback from that empire keeps what President Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex fat and happy.” Or, in the same section:

Despite this consensus on what we are trying to explain, the question of what causes war can mean several different things (Suganami 1996). It can refer, first of all, to the question of what makes war possible, to the permissive or logically necessary conditions for war. These fundamental or primary causes of war explain why war repeatedly occurs in international politics, why war can occur at any moment. Thus scholars trace war to human nature, biological instincts, frustration, fear and greed, the existence of weapons, and similar factors. Peace, however, is far more common than war, though as a “non-event” peace is difficult to measure. At the systemic level there may be more years characterized by war than by peace, but in nearly all war years most states are at peace, and at the dyadic level war is rare (Bremer 1992). This makes it hard to argue that human nature and related factors are causes of war. The point is that these factors are constants and cannot explain the variations in war and peace over time and space (Waltz 1959, Cashman 1993). If human nature varies, as some argue, then it is the sources of that variation, not human nature itself, that explain behavior. Moreover, even if human nature or biologically based instincts could explain aggressive behavior at the individual level, they cannot explain when such aggression leads to domestic violence, when it leads to scapegoating or other outlets, when it is resolved, and when it leads to international war. The question of how to explain variations in war and peace is the second meaning of the broader question of what causes war. Why does war occur at some times rather than other times, between some states rather than other states, under some political leaders rather than others, in some historical and cultural contexts rather than others, and so on? This differs from still a third question: How do we explain the origins of a particular war? Most international relations scholars (and particularly those in North America) focus primarily on the second question, explaining variations in war and peace. They leave the question of why war occurs at all to philosophers and biologists and leave the question of why a particular war occurs to historians. This is not to pass judgment on the relative importance of the three questions, only to say that they are different and that their investigation may require different theoretical orientations, different conceptions of causation and explanation, and different methodologies. One important exception to this focus on variations in war and peace is the argument by Waltz (1979) and other neorealists that the fundamental cause of war is the anarchic structure of the international system. Anarchy, defined as the absence of a legitimate governmental authority to regulate disputes and enforce agreements between states, “causes” war in the sense that there is no governmental enforcement mechanism in the international system to prevent wars.5 Although anarchy may provide one persuasive answer to the question of the permissive causes of war, it is generally treated as a structural constant and consequently it cannot account for variations in war and peace. Waltz (1988, p. 620) seems to concede this point and argues, “Although neorealist theory does not explain why particular wars are fought, it does explain war’s dismal recurrence through the millennia.” Other neorealists also recognize this limitation and have begun to incorporate other variables, including the polarity of the system and the offensive/defensive balance, in order to explain variations of war and peace in anarchic systems. Another exception to the focus on variations in war and peace can be found in some feminist theorizing about the outbreak of war, although most feminist work on war focuses on the consequences of war, particularly for women, rather than on the outbreak of war (Elshtain 1987, Enloe 1990, Peterson 1992, Tickner 1992, Sylvester 1994). The argument is that the gendered nature of states, cultures, and the world system contributes to the persistence of war in world politics. This might provide an alternative (or supplement) to anarchy as an answer to the first question of why violence and war repeatedly occur in international politics, although the fact that peace is more common than war makes it difficult to argue that patriarchy (or anarchy) causes war. Theories of patriarchy might also help answer the second question of variations in war and peace, if they identified differences in the patriarchal structures and gender relations in different international and domestic political systems in different historical contexts, and if they incorporated these differences into empirically testable hypotheses about the outbreak of war. This is a promising research agenda, and one that has engaged some anthropologists. Most current feminist thinking in political science about the outbreak of war, however, treats gendered systems and patriarchal structures in the same way that neorealists treat anarchy, as a constant.and consequently it cannot explain variations in war and peace. The Levels-of-Analysis Framework Ever since Waltz (1959) classified the causes of war in terms of their origins in the individual, the nation-state, and the international system (which he labeled first-, second-, and third-image explanations, respectively), international relations theorists have agreed on the utility of the levels-of-analysis framework as an organizing device for the study of war and international behavior more generally. Some scholars have modified Waltz’s framework by collapsing the individual and nation-state levels to create a simplified dichotomy of nation (or unit) level and system level (Singer 1961, Waltz 1979), while others have disaggregated the nation-state level into distinct governmental and societal-level factors (Jervis 1976, Rosenau 1980), a practice that I follow here. Following Waltz (1959), most scholars use the levels of analysis as a framework for classifying independent variables. This leads to such questions as whether the causes of war derive primarily from the level of the international system, national societies or bureaucracies, or individual decision-makers. Although the question of which level is most important has stimulated useful debate, until recently it distracted attention from the equally important issue of how variables from different levels interact in the foreign policy process. The levels-of-analysis concept is sometimes used differently, to refer to the dependent variable, or to the type of entity whose behavior is to be explained. In this sense the systemic level of analysis refers to explanations of patterns and outcomes in the international system; the dyadic level refers to explanations of the strategic interactions between two states; the national level refers to explanations of state foreign policy behavior; the organizational level refers to explanations of the behavior of organizations; and the individual level refers to explanations of the preferences, beliefs, or choices of individuals. The failure of scholars to be explicit about exactly how they are using the levels-of-analysis concept is a source of confusion in the field. Some have erroneously interpreted Singer.s (1961, p. 92) comment that the various levels “defy theoretical integration...[and] are not immediately combinable” to suggest that analysts should not combine variables from different levels of analysis to explain foreign policy decisions or international outcomes. But Singer.s statement makes sense only if the levels of analysis are conceptualized in terms of the dependent variable. This is the familiar micro-macro problem of aggregation across levels. We cannot assume that correlations or causal connections at one level of analysis are necessarily valid at another level. It is conceivable, for example, that concentrations of power may promote peace at the dyadic level but war at the system level. This has important implications for theories of war and peace. Although it is possible that individual- or national-level variables could be the primary causes of war, these variables do not constitute a logically complete explanation because they do not explain how individual beliefs and preferences are translated into state decisions and actions or how the strategies or behaviors of states interact to lead to war as a dyadic or systemic outcome. To the extent that most wars involve the mutual and interactive decisions of two or more adversaries, an explanation for the outbreak of war logically requires the inclusion of dyadic- or systemic-level variables. This does not necessarily mean, however, that these variables are the most important in terms of amount of variation explained. The levels-of-analysis framework is not the only way to organize the literature on the causes of war or on international politics more generally. It has long been fashionable for international relations theorists to frame debates in terms of the so-called paradigm wars between realism and liberalism (Baldwin 1993). In contrast to the realist focus on the struggle for power and security in an anarchic and conflictual Hobbesian world, the liberal tradition sees a more benign Grotian international society or Lockean state of nature where anarchy does not imply disorder. States have common as well as conflictual interests, aim to maximize economic welfare as well as provide for security, and create international institutions that help regulate conflict and promote cooperation (Keohane 1989). Although the paradigmatic debate between realism and liberalism has imposed some order on a chaotic field, it distracts attention from significant variations within each paradigm, variations that often lead to conflicting hypotheses. It also detracts from the important task of systematically integrating key components from each approach into a more complete and powerful theory. Furthermore, the “paradigm wars” ignore important hypotheses associated with the Marxist-Leninist tradition and saddle liberalism with charges of the neglect of power that are better associated with the utopianism of Thomas Paine and others (Walker 1998). As a field, international relations needs to shift its attention from the level of paradigms to the level of theories, focus on constructing theories and testing them against the empirical evidence, and leave the question of whether a particular approach fits into a liberal or realist framework to the intellectual historians. THEORIES OF THE CAUSES OF WAR Systemic-Level Theories The realist tradition has dominated the study of war since Thucydides, and includes Machiavellians, Hobbesians, classical balance of power theorists, Waltzian neorealists, and hegemonic transition theorists.6 Although different realist theories often generate conflicting predictions, they share a core of common assumptions: The key actors in world politics are sovereign states that act rationally to advance their security, power, and wealth in a conflictual international system that lacks a legitimate governmental authority to regulate conflicts or enforce agreements. For realists, wars can occur not only because some states prefer war to peace, but also because of unintended consequences of actions by those who prefer peace to war and are more interested in preserving their position than in enhancing it.7 Even defensively motivated efforts by states to provide for their own security through armaments, alliances, and deterrent threats are often perceived as threatening and lead to counteractions and conflict spirals that are difficult to reverse. This is the “security dilemma,” the possibility that a state’s actions to provide for its security may result in a decrease in the security of all states, including itself (Jervis 1978). Realists do not assume that international relations are always conflictual, and they have recently focused on the question of the conditions for cooperation under anarchy, often through the use of iterated Prisoner.s Dilemma models (Jervis 1978, Axelrod 1984, Grieco 1990). The iterated models are more appropriate for most situations than single-play Prisoner.s Dilemma models, and the iterated Prisoner.s Dilemma framework has generated some useful hypotheses regarding the rather restrictive conditions under which cooperation is likely. The assumption that the same game is repeated over and over is often problematic, however, particularly for security issues, because one play of the game (preemption, for example) can significantly change power relationships and affect payoffs in the next iteration. Nor is it clear that unilateral defection is always preferred to mutual cooperation; stag hunt models, in which mutual cooperation is both sides. first preference, may be more applicable in many situations (e.g. where each side fears both war and preemption by the other). There has been a tendency to apply Prisoner.s Dilemma models to many situations in which the assumptions of the model are not satisfied. The core proposition of realist theory is that the distribution of power, throughout the system or within a dyad, is the primary factor shaping international outcomes. But different versions of realist theory generate different, sometimes contradictory explanations and predictions of foreign policy choices and international outcomes, based on different assumptions about the motivations of states, the nature of power, and the identity and boundaries of the system. Given the variety of realist propositions and predictions, it is possible to interpret nearly any foreign policy behavior or international outcome as consistent with some version of realism. This is not particularly helpful, for if theories are not falsifiable they have little explanatory power. We should treat realism as a paradigm rather than as a theory, and focus instead on specific theories that generate more determinant, testable propositions. The key division in the realist literature on war is not the standard one between classical realism and neorealism8, but rather between balance of power theory and hegemonic theory. Balance of power theory includes numerous variations on the classical realism of Morgenthau (1967) and the more systemic structural realism of Waltz. Hegemonic theory is a structural theory that incorporates power transition theory and hegemonic stability theory and that downplays the importance of anarchy. Balance of power theory posits the avoidance of hegemony as the primary goal of states and the maintenance of an equilibrium of power in the system as the primary instrumental goal. The theory predicts that states, and particularly great powers, will balance against those states that constitute the primary threats to their interests and particularly against any state that threatens to secure a hegemonic position.9 Balance of power theorists argue that the balancing mechanism.which includes both external alliances and internal military buildups.almost always successfully avoids hegemony, either because potential hegemons are deterred by their anticipation of a military coalition forming against them or because they are defeated in war after deterrence fails. In balance of power theory, serious threats of hegemony are a sufficient condition for the formation of a blocking coalition, which leads either to the withdrawal of the threatening power or to a hegemonic war. Balance of power theory is more concerned with explaining national strategies, the formation of blocking coalitions, the avoidance of hegemony, and the stability of the system than the origins of wars, which are underdetermined. All balance of power theorists agree that some form of equilibrium of military capabilities increases the stability of the system (generally defined as the relative absence of major wars), and that movements toward unipolarity are destabilizing because they trigger blocking coalitions and (usually) a hegemonic war to restore equilibrium. There is a major debate, however, between classical realists, who argue that stability is further supported by the presence of a multipolar distribution of power and a .flexible. alliance system (Morgenthau 1967, Gulick 1955), and neorealists, who argue that bipolarity is more stable than multipolarity (Waltz 1979, Mearsheimer 1990). Although neorealists rely heavily on polarity as a key explanatory variable, they do so with very little supporting evidence. They overgeneralize from the Cold War experience, where bipolarity is confounded with the existence of nuclear weapons and other key variables, and fail to demonstrate the validity of their arguments with respect to earlier historical eras. Although bipolarity is less common than multipolarity, it has occurred before, as illustrated by the Athens-Sparta rivalry in the fifth century BC and the Habsburg-Valois rivalry in the early sixteenth century, both of which witnessed numerous wars. Neorealists also ignore a number of quantitative studies that suggest that bipolarity is no less war-prone than multipolarity, that wars occur under a variety of structural conditions, and that polarity is not a primary causal factor in the outbreak of war (Sabrosky 1985). An important alternative to balance of power theory is power transition theory, a form of hegemonic theory that shares realist assumptions but emphasizes the existence of order within a hierarchical system (Organski & Kugler 1980, Gilpin 1981, Thompson 1988). Hegemons commonly arise and use their strength to create a set of political and economic structures and norms of behavior that enhance the stability of the system while advancing their own security. Differential rates of growth, the costs of imperial overextension, and the development of vested domestic interests lead to the rise and fall of hegemons, and the probability of a major war is greatest at the point when the declining leader is being overtaken by the rising challenger. Either the challenger initiates a war to bring its benefits from the system into line with its rising military power or the declining leader initiates a “preventive war” to block the rising challenger while the chance is still available (Levy 1989b, pp. 253.54). The resulting hegemonic war usually generates a new hegemonic power, and the irregular hegemonic cycle begins anew. Power transition theorists disagree somewhat on the precise identity of hegemonic wars and the particular causal dynamics from which they arise; for comparisons of the wars and critiques of the theories see Levy (1985) and Vasquez (1993). Although many of the theoretical analyses of power transition theory focus on transitions between the dominant state in the system and a challenger, and include conceptions of a broader international system and hierarchy, some applications of power transition theory are dyadic in nature and apply in principle to any two states in the system. The dyadic-level “power preponderance” hypothesis, which holds that war is least likely when one state has a preponderance of power over another and is most likely when there is an equality of power, has received widespread support in the empirical literature (Kugler & Lemke 1996).

Thus we find ourselves faced with a dilemma. We can’t appeal to future generations’ rights against harm to explain why we must change course now. Yet appealing to duties of beneficence doesn’t do justice to the felt urgency of the issue. Is there no way out? The American philosopher Samuel Scheffler has recently proposed a novel solution. He suggests that some of the most powerful reasons to prevent disaster in the distant future may be the interests and concerns of those alive now.

According to Scheffler, we are already deeply committed to the existence of posterity as part of the procession of human generations in which we, too, take our place. Most obviously, this commitment is exemplified by the despair most people would feel if humanity were faced with imminent extinction, as well as the grief many people do feel in the face of the climate crisis.

Third, any notion of risk must involve some kind of probability. What kind is involved in existential risk? Understanding the probability in terms of objective long-run frequencies won’t work, as the existential catastrophes we are concerned with can only ever happen once, and will always be unprecedented until the moment it is too late. We can’t say the probability of an existential catastrophe is precisely zero just because it hasn’t happened yet.

Situations like these require an evidential sense of probability, which describes the appropriate degree of belief we should have on the basis of the available information. This is the familiar type of probability used in courtrooms, banks and betting shops. When I speak of the probability of an existential catastrophe, I will mean the credence humanity should have that it will occur, in light of our best evidence.9

However, despite important insights, this position remains highly disputable. The reason behind this qualification is not hard to understand. With great trepidation my contention is that one of the main distinctions we need to take into account while examining securitization is that between 'institutional' and 'brute' threats. In its attempts to follow a more radical approach to security problems wherein threats are institutional, that is, mere products of communicative relations between agents, the CS has neglected the importance of 'external or brute threats', that is, threats that do not depend on language mediation to be what they are - hazards for human life. In methodological terms, however, any framework over-emphasizing either institutional or brute threat risks losing sight of important aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, securitization, as suggested earlier, is successful when the securitizing agent and the audience reach a common structured perception of an ominous development. In this scheme, there is no security problem except through the language game. Therefore, how problems are 'out there' is exclusively contingent upon how we linguistically depict them. This is not always true. For one, language does not construct reality; at best, it shapes our perception of it. Moreover, it is not theoretically useful nor is it empirically credible to hold that what we say about a problem would determine its essence. For instance, what I say about a typhoon would not change its essence. The consequence of this position, which would require a deeper articulation, is that some security problems are the attribute of the development itself. In short, threats are not only institutional; some of them can actually wreck entire political communities regardless of the use of language. Analyzing security problems then becomes a matter of understanding how external contexts, including external objective developments, affect securitization. Thus, far from being a departure from constructivist approaches to security, external developments are central to it.

This passage marks out one of the biggest obstacles to connecting realist and postcolonial thought: race. One would be hard pressed to find in realist theorizations anything resembling a supple understanding of race and racism (Vitalis 2015)— though Carr (2001b, 107) demonstrates a comparatively great deal of reflexivity on postcolonial liberation (see fn. 2 above). Even in Williams’s (2005) “wilful” realist tradition, there is scant discussion of how an embedded ethic of critical self-limitation fared in the context of racial or other forms of radical difference. Absent an engagement with the analytics of postcolonial thinking, or the diverse ways in which white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity inflect past and present liberal imperial formations, willful realism does not address the categories that threaten to push prudential skeptics toward violent responses, that pose limitations to an ethos of limits. As evidenced in Morgenthau, failure to think critically about race opens up the way for Morgenthau’s theoretical practice to be driven toward resentful rather than careful ends. It is at this juncture that those concerned with contemporary imperial formations are confronted with a number of possible responses: one is to deem realism, in all its complex and contradictory manifestations, as a failed, unethical, and fundamentally racist/imperial project. A second response is to politically align against liberalism, while holding this partnership at arm’s length. A third response, derived from Ayoob’s (2002) subaltern realism, is to work on an epistemic register, selectively taking insights from realist traditions that help better explain the neocolonial world. Morgenthau’s racist interjections should be critiqued and confronted—perhaps by outlining the innumerable non-Western contributions to the making of so-called Western modernity (Hobson 2004)—but this failing does not delegitimize other realist insights. What is important for Ayoob’s (2002) accommodationist stance is to combine plausible realist insights with other categories that can grasp the extent of global politics, including the dynamics of the postcolonial experience, better.

The final response is the one I advance. To adopt a mode of argumentation concerned with building a counter-imperial machine is to neither dismiss constituencies that become caught up in imperial formations, nor merely to tactically align with them; rather, establishing resonant connections among postcolonial and realist lines of thought, highlighting shared dispositions to difference, is to push the latter toward repositioning itself on new ethical lines that limit contemporary forms of violence. To recover a minor position in realism is not to accept all realist positions, nor is it to synthesize or convert any theoretical line into a coherent framework. It is, however, to amplify the shared spirituality that informs both realist and postcolonial thinking, drawing constituencies toward prudential rather than imperial defenses of difference. It is to furnish current research agendas with an anti-imperial focus, to seek the creative possibilities that may arise when divergent constituencies meet, interfuse, and shift. Thus, our response to Morgenthau, as to other realists, is to cultivate the connections that do exist, not for epistemic reasons but for a political project that strengthens counter-imperial movements.

Summary This wide array of positivist gender/IR work offers three major sets of contributions and challenges to existing IR scholarship. First, this scholarship has provided positivist evidence shedding light on many of the theoretical and descriptive suppositions developed in nonpositivist gender/IR work. Furthermore, the positivist evidence has argued for the substantive as well as statistical significance of gender in explaining critically important phenomena. As noted, Hudson et al. (2012) propose that gender has a larger impact on conflict onset than economic development or democracy. Erik Melander (2005a) found that measures of gender equity have at least as much impact on civil war onset as factors such as economic development, democracy, and ethnic fractionalization. Gizelis (2009) found that improved gender equity, as measured by higher female life expectancy, increases the likelihood of the success of UN peacekeeping missions several fold. Some of the positivist work critiques the simple view that women are always more peaceful than men are, supporting the general feminist perspective that the effects of gender on behavior are sophisticated, especially because gender is cultural/social as well as biological. For example, the role of women in terrorist and insurgent groups varies widely, as women are sometimes combatants, even engaging in sexual assault. The effects of gender on public opinion are also complex. Contra some 1980s perspectives about the hypermasculinity of nuclear weapons, for example, there is some evidence that American women are not significantly less likely than American men to favor nuclear weapons use. Second, this positivist work has helped address some scholarly questions that nonpositivist scholars had identified as important and underexplored. At a very simple level, positivist data collection has helped shed more light on the monumental scope of gender-related violence, a set of behaviors that significantly negatively affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people who happen to be women (Hudson et al. 2012). Positivist work has helped describe and understand the effects of elements of the global economy on the lives of women. It has also helped improve our understanding of the role women play in the foreign policy process, especially female heads of state, cabinet members, and members of parliament. Third, positivist work has helped identify new questions related to gender and IR. Positivist work has explored the role gender plays in the formation of trade policy preferences, the different political roles of female as compared with male casualties, the international determinants of the spread of gender equity, and others. New Directions Positivist scholarship has not yet come close to answering all existing questions relating to gender and IR. Much work remains to be done. Perhaps the single most important priority is for scholars to be aware of making essentialist assumptions that the meaning and behavioral consequences of gender are constant across space and time. Some of the positivist gender/IR work assumes that gender has essentialist effects, using research designs that do not allow for the possibility of varying effects of gender across context. Future positivist gender/IR work would benefit from relaxing essentialist assumptions, developing ideas as to how the effects of gender might vary across contexts. For example, a female national leader emerging from a society with weaker gender equity norms might behave differently than a female national leader emerging from a society with stronger gender equity norms. Research already suggests that the consequences of gender vary drastically across insurgent and terrorist groups, a phenomenon that deserves greater attention.

Does female leadership lead to greater peace? On the one hand, it is commonly argued that women are less violent than men, and therefore, states led by women will be less prone to violent conflict than states led by men. For example, men have been held to “plan almost all the world’s wars and genocides [Pinker, 2011, p.684]”, and the democratic peace among the developed nations has been attributed to rising female leadership in these places [Fukuyama, 1998]. On the other hand, differences in individual aggression may not determine differences in leader aggression. Female leaders, like any other leader, ultimately have to consider how war affects their state as a whole. And, setting overly conciliatory war policies would weaken their state relative to other states. As a consequence, war policies set by female leaders may be similar to war policies set by male leaders.1 A state’s aggression in the foreign policy arena, and its decision to go to war, is arguably one of the most consequential policy outcomes, and one in which the national leadership plays a critical role. Despite its importance, there is little definitive evidence of whether states vary in their tendency to engage in conflict under female versus male leadership. This stands in contrast to other arenas such as economic development, where a growing body of evidence has documented policy differences arising as a consequence of female leadership [Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004, Beaman et al., 2012, Clots-Figueras, 2012, Brollo and Troiano, 2016]. The existing studies that do relate female leadership to external conflict focus exclusively on the modern era [Koch and Fulton, 2011, Caprioli, 2000, Caprioli and Boyer, 2001, Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003], and are also difficult to interpret since women may gain electoral support and come to power disproportionately during periods of peace [Lawless, 2004]. In this paper, we examine how female leadership affected war among European states historically, exploiting features of hereditary succession to surmount this identification challenge. We focus on the 15th-20th centuries and polities that had at least one female ruler during this period. As with electoral systems, women in hereditary systems may have gained power more during times of peace, or when there was no threat of imminent war [Pinker, 2011]. However the way in which succession occurred also provides an opportunity to identify the effect of female rule. In these polities, older male children of reigning monarchs were given priority in succession [Monter, 2012, p. 36-37]. As a result, queens were less likely to come to power if the previous monarchs had a first-born child who was male; and, more likely to come to power if previous monarchs had a sister who could potentially follow as successor. We use these two factors as instruments for queenly rule to determine whether polities led by queens differed in their war participation relative to polities led by kings. Importantly, our paper analyzes the question of whether states led by women are less prone to engage in conflict than states led by men. This is conceptually distinct from the question of whether women, as individuals, are less violent than men,2 in part because war policies are set by leaders based on broader strategic considerations beyond personal inclinations toward violence. To conduct our analysis, we construct a new panel dataset which tracks the genealogy and conflict participation of European polities during every year over 1480-1913. Our primary sample covers 193 reigns in 18 polities, with queens ruling in 18% of these reigns. We include polity fixed effects, holding constant time invariant features of a polity that affect conflict, and exploit variation over time in the gender of the ruler. Using the first born male and sister instruments, we find that polities ruled by queens were 27% more likely to participate in inter-state conflicts, compared to polities ruled by kings. These estimates are economically important, representing a doubling over mean war participation over this period. In contrast, we find that queens were no more likely to experience civil wars or other types of internal instability. An obvious concern with our IV analysis is that the lack of a first-born child who is male may itself trigger conflicts over succession, regardless of whether a woman comes to power. However, we conduct a number of falsification tests which show that the a first-born son does not affect war participation in the contemporaneous reign, or in an auxiliary sample of 18 polities that never had queens over this period. Thus, if there are other ways in which first born males affect conflict, they do not manifest under these circumstances. A second concern is that the presence of a sister among previous monarchs (an aunt, from the stand-point of the current period monarch) may be correlated with the presence of other siblings (i.e., other aunts and uncles) who may also have fought for the throne. However, we are able to control for all of the total siblings of the previous monarchs and show that the results are unaffected if we remove wars of succession from the sample. Importantly, we demonstrate that the results are insensitive to dropping any particular queen, and any particular polity. In addition, we show the robustness of our results to numerous other controls and specifications, including a reign level specification which collapses the annual data to the reign level, as well as a dyadic specification. We examine two potential accounts of why female ruler may have increased war participation. The first account suggests that queens may have been perceived as easy targets of attack. This perception—accurate or not—could have led queens to participate more in wars as a consequence of getting attacked by others. The second account builds on the importance of state capacity. During this period, states fought wars were primarily with the aim of expanding territory and economic power [Mearsheimer, 2001, Goertz and Diehl, 2002, Copeland, 2015]. Wars of this nature demanded financing, spurring states to develop a broader fiscal reach [Besley and Persson, 2009, Karaman and Pamuk, 2013, Gennaioli and Voth, 2015]. As a result, states undertaking wars required greater capacity. Queenly reigns may have had greater capacity than kingly reigns for two reasons, both of which themselves reflect prevailing gender norms from this period. First, queenly reigns may have been able to secure more military alliances. While marriage brought alliances for both male and female monarchs, male spouses were typically more involved with the military of their home countries (than female spouses). This was a direct reflection of taboos on female military leadership during this time period. As a consequence, male spouses were also plausibly better positioned to cement alliances on behalf of queens. Second, queens often enlisted their spouses to help them rule, in ways that kings were less inclined to do with their spouses — an asymmetry again reflects gender identity norms. For example, queens put their spouses in charge of the military or economic reforms, which effectively meant there were two monarchs overseeing state affairs, as compared to one. This greater spousal division of labor may also have enhanced the capacity of queenly reigns, enabling queens to pursue more more aggressive war policies. To test these accounts, we disaggregate war participation by which side was the aggressor, and examine heterogeneous effects based on the monarch’s marital status. We find that among married monarchs, queens were more likely than kings to fight as aggressors, and to fight alongside allies. Among unmarried monarchs, queens were more likely than kings to fight in wars in which their polity was attacked. These results provide some support for the idea that queens were targeted for attack: Unmarried queens, specifically, may have been perceived as weak and attacked by others. But this did not hold true for married queens who instead participated as aggressors. The results are consistent with the idea that the reigns of married queens had greater capacity to carry out war, and asymmetries generated by gender identity norms played a role in shaping this outcome [Bertrand et al., 2015b].3 We also consider and present evidence against several alternative accounts. Queens may also have fought to signal they were militarily strong, which is a type of signaling implied by the influential bargaining model of war [Fearon, 1995]. However, if queens were signaling, there should be larger effects on war participation earlier in their reigns, when it would have been most valuable to send signals to maximally discourage future attacks. Yet, we observe no such differential effect. A second alternative account suggests that it was not the queen, but a persuasive male advisor (such as a foreign minister), who was actually responsible for setting war policy in queenly reigns. In this were the case, the gender effect on war should be even larger among monarchs who acceded at a younger age, since these monarchs are more likely to be influenced by advisors. However, we observe no differential effect based on age of accession, which casts doubt on the idea that war participation was driven by advisors. Rather we interpret our results as reflecting the direct consequence of having a queen, and associated decisions made by the monarchs themselves. In broad terms, we see our results providing evidence for the idea that leaders matter [Jones and Olken, 2005, Pande, 2003], including in shaping policy outcomes. Most proximate to our paper are studies that examine female leadership and inter-state war. These studies have found mixed results. For example, Koch and Fulton [2011] find that among democracies over 1970-2000, having a female executive is associated with higher defense spending and greater external conflict, while having a higher fraction of female legislators is associated with lower defense spending and conflict. Other studies have also found that more female legislators are associated with less external conflict [Caprioli, 2000, Caprioli and Boyer, 2001, Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003]; that female voters are less likely to support the use of force internationally [Conover and Sapiro, 1993, Shapiro and Mahajan, 1986, Jelen et al., 1994, Wilcox et al., 1996, Eichenberg, 2003]; and that female leaders and greater gender equity is correlated with lower rates of internal conflicts [Caprioli, 2000, Melander, 2005, Fearon, 2010]. These results may partly reflect the greater willingness to elect female leaders during times of peace. Owing to this concern, we exploit a plausibly exogenous source of variation in female rule. By focusing our analysis on war over the 15th-20th centuries, we also take an identification-based approach to analyzing history [Nunn, 2009]. Our paper fits into the broader literature of how female political leadership affects public policies, including spending patterns [Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004, Breuning, 2001] education [Clots-Figueras, 2012, Beaman et al., 2012] and corruption [Brollo and Troiano, 2016]; as well as how female corporate leadership affects firms outcomes [Matsa and Miller, 2013, Bertrand et al., 2015a, Ahern and Dittmar, 2012].

Evolution is a great concept. As AI scientists we use it all the time to develop better algorithms rewarding and punishing them according to their actions in simulated environments. But when nature does it to us it feels very cruel. Our objective is to master our environment, compete, reproduce, take care of our young, the young of our young, and then gracefully decline and die. And when it comes to females nature is especially unfair as they carry much of the burden of reproduction and caring for the young. And while males can reproduce almost as long as they can live, the female reproductive period is limited and while they generally live longer, after reaching menopause they need to adjust to the new realities as their bodies shift gears. 

Aging is generally unfair but it is especially unfair to women.

It should be noted, however, that not all of the contributors to this special issue are in fact committed to the adoption of a critical realist philosophical framework in this way. Gillman, Smirthwaite and Swahnberg, and Griffiths take something of an outsider’s or newcomer’s perspective with regard to critical realist philosophy. While these authors relate to critical realism as a framework of interest, none wholeheartedly subscribe to it. As editors of this special issue we were very pleased to receive such contributions, as respectful engagements and interested conversations between critical realists and proponents of perspectives that are more commonly adopted by feminist theorists and gender scholars have unfortunately continued to be few and far between. Sue Clegg, Dimitri Mader and Michiel van Ingen, however, clearly write much more from within the parameters of critical realist philosophy, using its meta-theoretical framework as a means of making interventions in important feminist debates. Although Clegg, in her piece on intersectionality, does engage in some (critical) conversation with popular poststructuralist versions of intersectional theorizing, for instance, the main purpose of her article is to use critical realism as a philosophical underlabourer in order to think through various issues currently arising in discussions about intersectional theory, particularly the relationship between structure and agency. Mader’s contribution also centres on the structure/agency problematic and, like Clegg, draws especially on Margaret Archer’s work. However, whereas Clegg explicitly intervenes in intersectionality theory, whose proponents foreground the multiplicity of different forms of positioning and are often suspicious of an exclusive focus on gender, Mader’s contribution implicitly challenges the ‘intersectional imperative’ (Wiegman 1999, 376) by focusing on the gendered power structure in abstraction from other power relations. There is therefore a crucial (if not explicit) philosophical link between Clegg’s and Mader’s contributions, insofar as the former, while being mainly concerned with intersectionality theory, also argues in favour of engaging in exactly the kind of non-intersectional, ‘separatist’ (Gunnarsson 2015, 10) theoretical projects that Mader’s article exemplifies with its in-depth focus on gendered dominance. Such feminist endeavours, which seek to trace the basic causal mechanisms of patriarchy, have been increasingly difficult to carry out in the contemporary theoretical climate, and this is in significant part due to both the aforementioned intersectional imperative and the more general poststructuralist taboo on structural forms of theorizing.

Importantly, however, it is not intersectional forms of theorizing as such that are considered problematic by critical realist authors such as Clegg and Mader. The basic intersectional claim that social situations, identities and practices are conditioned by a range of intersecting power relations is arguably indisputable. Indeed, it is telling that authors and activists who persist in ignoring that this is the case are generally those who are subordinated only in terms of one, or no, social axis of power. However, while analyses of how different power relations and categorizations complexly intersect are pivotal, they do not allow us to do the equally important work of theorizing, in an in-depth and abstracted manner, the basic causal mechanisms that are exercised by the social/cultural structures that are ‘doing’ the intersecting at a concrete level (cf. Walby, Armstrong and Strid 2012; Martinez Dy, Martin and Marlow 2014; Gunnarsson 2015). As Clegg shows, however, the stratified ontology of critical realism provides helpful forms of support for theorists who wish to carry out analyses at different levels of abstraction. That is to say, it facilitates intersectional analysis where it is needed in order to understand the multi-layered fabric of social life, while not closing the door to ‘nonintersectional’ analyses that focus on how one specific categorical and structural dimension of this social life causally affects a situation of interest. What sets Mader’s contribution to theorizing gender-based domination apart from secondwave, single-issue feminist theory, however, is its engagement with contemporary debates, reflected in the explicit incorporation of the implications of his work for intersectional analyses.

For there to be feminists in the apparatus of the state requires that there be a feminist reckoning with realpolitik. While it has been argued that feminism must, by definition, be anti-militarist, it is less clear how “state feminists”( Lovenduski 2005 ) should repurpose force in the short or medium term, not least if security policy can paradoxically create conditions for empowerment in the same moment that it safeguards national interests. FFP does not automatically challenge such corollaries of militarism as the arms trade ( Vucetic 2017 ), and gender may weigh as a reason to send weapons as well as humanitarian aid to radical statelets such as Kurdish Rojava, with its egalitarian constitution and dedicated feminist guerrillas. Even in more conventional geopolitical terms, external pressures may produce major policy shifts. At the time of writing, Ann Linde, Sweden’s foreign minister and a champion of FFP, had just overseen the admission of Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in response to the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, a significant reversal of her country’s historical nonalignment consensus (compare Linde 2022a and Linde 2022b ). Even this reluctant entry into the alliance reopens a major fault line within feminism over military blocs: civil society activists for an FFP, such as the WILPF, remain officially committed to the abolition of NATO ( Kirby and Shepherd 2023 , chapter 6).

For advocates, FFP remains ethical at its core, despite occasional necessary “deviations”( Aggestam, Bergman-Rosamond, and Kronsell 2019 , 24). Yet, the emerging forms of feminist statecraft can instead be read not as a clash between incommensurable theoretical paradigms or another “operator’s manual posing as [a theory]” (Rosenberg 1990 , 285) but as the seed of a new composite. For the moment, these encounters are sporadic, partial, and contradictory. However, as more governments take up the mantle, the confrontation will become more pitched and the merger more contentious for every aspect of the doctrine: from disputes over what consti- tutes feminism to the designation of the “foreign” outside to the criteria of grand strategy.

It appears to have a very clear message and poured a bucket of very cold water over second wave feminists’ enthusiasm for trying to use law for women.70 This has led to a disjuncture between feminist theorising and practice, which is regretted by many feminists.71 It is my disquiet about this call to turn away from law, and the belief that legal feminists, both scholars and activists, have a responsibility to engage with law that underpins the thesis. Critique of law is insufficient. There is a need to use law’s tools in traditional and imaginative ways not only to expose its gendered character but to find new ways of doing law.

This aligns the thesis alongside feminists who seek to reconstruct liberal values rather than reject them outright.72 Feminists have interrogated liberalism and found it wanting. They have critiqued the individualistic and autonomous nature of the liberal subject, the dualism that liberalism presents in its divisions between the rational versus the emotional, its formal view of equality, the vision of the neutral state and its separation of the public and the private realm. 73 Jaggar concludes that feminism has often relied on liberal ideas and has many reasons to be grateful to liberalism, but that it is incapable of bringing about the changes desired.74 Nussbaum, on the contrary, accepts much of the critique of liberalism, but she has famously mounted a spirited defence of its principles of ‘personhood, autonomy, rights dignity [and] self respect’.75 She has pointed out the diversity of liberal thinking, and notes that it has attempted to respond to feminist criticisms. She tries to persuade the reader that, ‘[t]he deepest and most central ideas of the liberal tradition are ideas of radical force and great theoretical and practical value’.76 Nussbaum’s own project, based on human capabilities, articulates a set of needs necessary for autonomy and human flourishing.77 My concern that Smart’s exhortations to desist from legal engagement, are overly dismissive of law’s possibilities, are shared by other legal feminists and critical theorists. Sandland criticizes Smart for creating a dichotomy between politics/philosophy and between deconstruction/reform thus closing down all political and legal options. 78 Being outside the system as a form of resistance is, according to Sandland, a strategy of ‘no resistance’. He sees Smart as being overly pessimistic, by dismissing the significance of cases such as R v R, where the judges removed the marital rape exemption, there is a danger of feminism ‘understating its own political and jurisprudential purchase as a subversive force interrupting the “unmodified” liberal paradigm’.79 Feminism needs to use the tension between recognition and denial of law to evaluate the merits of legal intervention on a case-by-case basis. Sandland sees there being value in finding the gaps in law that provide a space to struggle over law’s meaning.80Lacey appears sympathetic to Smart’s theoretical project, and to Smart’s insight that law’s belief that it is objective, true and impartial inflates its status so that it appear superior to other forms of knowledge. This makes it harmful to women.81 But she also has reservations about Smart’s political strategy and argues that it would be unfortunate to give up attempts at legal reform. She notes that it is unclear that other institutions such as the family, religion or politics are more susceptible to reconstruction than law.82 Writing just under ten years later Munro argues that feminism should not relinquish its attempts to reconstruct law. She is not uncritical of liberal values, but given law’s resistance to competing discourses she thinks there are pragmatic reasons for using law rather than remaining silenced by an oppositional stance.83