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What other features might a radical democratic theory possess that takes seriously the critique of social suffering? It may be more fruitful to adopt an approach that, at least in the first instance, is problem- rather than model-oriented. Radical democrats might do better to develop principles from an initial focus on specific issues of social inequality, rather than embark at the outset on a quest to distil the essence of the political and from this derive models into which all concrete struggles are subsequently shoehorned. Of course, any problem-oriented approach will unavoidably be 'influenced' by theoretical presuppositions, but it won't necessarily be as ‘driven’ by the rigid logic of the model that seems to flow from a one-sided focus on political ontology (see Shapiro 2007). It is, after all, a problem-oriented approach that has informed many other types of radical theorizing, such as feminism, and has made them suspicious of the formal abstractions of theory that disregard the distinctiveness of certain group experiences (e.g. Martineau and Squires 2012). Partly because of its established links with activism, feminist theorizing has more often than not been propelled, in the first instance, by particular problems relating to gender inequality and the marginalized experiences of women. Feminist political theorizing about justice, for instance, starts with the problem of the gendered division of labour, and the undervaluing of women's care work. It uses this sociological perspective to expose the conceptual deficiencies of asocial individualism as a device for deriving principles of justice because of the way it obscures human vulnerability and dependency and thereby fails to recognize care as a fundamental element of social justice (Bubeck 1995; Fraser 1997; Kittay 1999). Others feminists think through issues of democratic participation starting from the problem of the underrepresentation of women in [END PAGE 214] established democratic structures, their effective political invisibility, which is a consequence of their vulnerable position as workers in transnational production processes (e.g. Fraser 2008; Phillips 1991).

The hope is that a problem-oriented approach to radical democratic theorizing is less likely to result in the marginalization of the actual and disregard of distinctive group experiences than are approaches oriented to the issue of ontology. The difficulty with the latter approaches is that the strategy of temporarily bracketing off social relations in order to capture the essence of the political turns into a theoretical inability to reintroduce excluded issues of power without violating the pristine foundational logic that they claim to have identified. Consxequently, the logic of political ontology is given an unwarranted primacy that effectively occludes the autonomy and specificity of social relations and practices. Differently put, in so far as it lacks a sense of mediation, this political anti-essentialism becomes an essentialism. Thus, Mouffe is unable to address substantive issues about power that have a direct bearing on her model of democratic agonism because of a misplaced fear of falling into an essentialism that would violate her rigid linguistic constructivism. Arendtian ideas of political action as creative inauguration are famously empty, proscribing many issues of subordination and oppression by relegating them to the realm of social necessity and, therefore, privacy. Although his ontology of abundance is more materialist in nature, Connolly finds it hard to incorporate types of social experience or practice that do not conform to his notions of creative becoming and dynamic assemblages. In all these cases, social being is treated in a tokenistic and cipher-like fashion as simply yet another empirical exemplification of foundational dynamics of indeterminacy. Although it is not abstraction per se that causes socially weightless thinking, it may be that radical democratic theory may be better placed to think about oppression by deploying abstractions that are, at least in the first instance, sociological rather than philosophical in nature. The aim of grounding political theory in sociological reconstruction rather than ontological construction would be to, in Charles W. Mills’s words, 'reflect the specificities of group experience, thereby potentially generating categories and principles that illuminate rather than obfuscate the reality of different kinds of subordination' (2005: 173; also Honneth 2012: 46-8).

Human freedom became the problem. If human beings are free, does this mean that there is some ultimate ‘man’ who can be liberated from the forces of production; or does radical freedom mean that there is no longer any human essence to which politics can appeal? All this came to a head in the student sit-ins and disruptions of 1968. There were protests throughout Europe in the late 1960s which were random, unthought out, and motivated not by the economically defined class of workers so much as by students and intellectuals. In the aftermath of these disruptions it was realised that politics was no longer the affair of economic classes and large or ‘molar’ groupings. Local disruptions at the level of knowledge, ideas and identity could transform the political terrain. Deleuze and others opened the politics of the virtual: it was no longer accepted that actual material reality, such as the economy, produced ideas. Many insisted that the virtual (images, desires, concepts) was directly productive of social reality. This overturned the simple idea of ideology, the idea that images and beliefs were produced by the governing classes to deceive us about our real social conditions. We have to do away with the idea that there is some ultimate political reality or actuality which lies behind all our images. Images are not just surface effects of some underlying economic cause; images and the virtual have their own autonomous power. This is where structuralism and post-1968 politics intersected. We need to see our languages and systems of representation not just as masks or signs of the actual, but as fully real powers in their own right. The way we think, speak, desire and see the world is itself political; it produces relations, effects, and organises our bodies.

What are the roots of conflict and insecurity for states? When the international system is relatively stable, attention turns to differences in state attributes. Some scholars argue that civilizational differences, defined by ethnicity, language, and religion, are an underlying catalyst for conflict and insecurity.1 Others have spoken of the importance of differentiating between democratic and nondemocratic regime types in explaining conflict in the modern international system.2 Still others assert that poverty, exacerbated by resource scarcity in a context of unequal access, is at the root of conflict and insecurity at both micro- and macro-levels of analysis.3
 In this article we argue that there is another fundamental and powerful explanatory factor that must be considered when examining issues of state security and conflict: the treatment of females within society. At first glance, this argument seems hardly intuitive. How could the treatment of women possibly be linked to matters of high politics, such as war and national security? The two realms seem not to inhabit the same conceptual space. Yet in 2006, Secretary-General of the United Nations Koa Annan opined, “The world is . . . starting to grasp that there is no policy more effective [in promoting development, health, and education] than the empowerment of women and girls. And I would venture that no policy is more important in preventing conflict, or in achieving reconciliation after a conflict has ended.”4 It is possible that views such as Annan’s are just a nod to political correctness, which can be ignored without consequence by security scholars and policymakers. Yet it is also possible that security scholars are missing something important by overlooking the situation of women in the study of security. In this article we examine the question: Is there a signiacant linkage between the security of women and the security of states? When a coauthor of this article raised this question in a departmental research meeting, the answer offered was a swift and certain: “No.” Violence wrought by the great military conflicts of the twentieth century was proof that security scholars would do best by focusing on larger issues such as democ- racy and democratization, poverty and wealth, ideology and national identity. Along a scale of “blood spilt and lives lost” as the proper location of concern for security studies, colleagues queried, Why would one ever choose to look at women? Taken aback by such professed certainty that we were on the wrong course, it took some time for us to articulate an answer. How to explain, for ex- ample, that the death toll of Indian women due to female infanticide and sex- selective abortion from 1980 to the present dwarfs by almost fortyfold the death toll from all of India’s wars since and including its bloody independence? Perhaps, we reasoned, it would be instructive to consider the scale upon which women die from sex-selective causes. Using overall sex ratios as a crude marker for a host of causes of death by virtue of being female (female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, egregious maternal mortality rates, disproportion- ate childhood mortality, and murder/suicide rates), we would and ourselves contemplating the numbers in figure 1 in comparison with the great slaughters of the twentieth century. Because the death tolls for the wars and conflicts listed above include deaths of women as both civilians and combatants, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the “blood spilt and lives lost” over the last century have been, in the first place, that of females. When thinking of war and peace and national security, many picture a uniformed soldier—male—lying dead on the field of battle, gendering these important issues male. Perhaps fresh vision, such as offered in agure 1, would turn thoughts to the girl baby drowned in a nearby stream or the charred body of a young bride burned in a “kitchen are” of her in-laws’ making. To pose the question more conceptually, might there be more to inquire about than simply the effect of war on women—might the security of women in fact inouence the security of states? Theoretically, there are strong reasons for believing that there is a relation- ship between the security of women and the security of states. Gender serves as a critical model for the societal treatment of difference between and among individuals and collectives. A long tradition in social psychology has found three basic differences that individuals notice immediately when they encoun- ter a new person almost from infancy: age, gender, and race.5 Although there is some preliminary evidence that recognition of racial differences can be “erased” when such differences are crossed with coalitional status, no one has shown a similar disabling of gender recognition.6 Indeed, the psychologist Alice Eagley asserts, “Gender stereotypes trump race stereotypes in every so- cial science test.”7 In this way, gender, like age, becomes a basic category of identification and a profound marker of difference.8 Gender and age categorizations play variant roles in society. Everyone will someday move into another age group; in general, however, this cannot be said of gender groupings. Gender difference is arguably the primary formative axed difference experienced in human society,9 and sexual reproduction is the strongest evolutionary driver of human social arrangements.10 Concurring with these insights from psychological and evolutionary research, French phi- losopher Sylviane Agacinski reoects, “It is always the difference of the sexes that serves as a model for all other differences, and the male/female hierarchy that is taken as a metaphor for all inter-ethnic hierarchies.”11 Societal-based differences in gender status beliefs, reflected in practices, customs, and law, have important political consequences, including consequences for nation-state security policy and conflict and cooperation within and between nation-states. After outlining our theoretical framework, we survey the existing empirical literature linking the situation of women to the situation of states. We then present an initial empirical investigation of the framework’s propositions. [figures omitted]

Masculinities in many societies, even in times that appear to be ‘peaceful’, are socially constructed through activities such as competitive sports and computer games in a form that is readily adaptable to serve well in war conditions. James McBride suggests that in the USA football is an allegory or metaphor for war, sharing its pursuit of male territorial gains. ‘Football, like war,’ he writes, ‘is a form of male aggression, consciously played out in a variety of cultural practices’ (McBride 1995: 4). He notes that domestic violence by men against women surges during significant football events and at the onset of wars. With its male bonding rituals, McBride writes, ‘the game of football reinscribes war and the concomitant values of the warrior as a tem- plate for the identity of football enthusiasts – the vast majority of men in America’ (McBride 1995: 86). An elite group of men continually engaged in readying the USA for war are the defence intellectuals who debate and plan the country’s nuclear weapons policy. Carol Cohn, a feminist social scientist, was shocked to find, during participant observation among such a group, that these articulate, charming, humorous and decent men routinely discussed the most horrific possibilities of vaporized cities and mangled bodies in light-hearted, abstract and euphemistic terms, revealing an ‘astounding chasm between image and reality’ in their techno-strategic language (Cohn 1990: 34, see also Chapter 1). The linking thread in the discourse of this nuclear ‘priesthood’, as she terms them, was sexism. It was their masculinity that enabled them to distance themselves from the actual death and destruction implied in their work, inescapable to anyone engaged with everyday human care and concern. It is not only masculinity, however, that keeps a society trapped on the continuum of war. Femininity plays its part too. Painful examples of women, deeply embedded in conventional patriarchal gender relations, urging their men to fight, and even to rape enemy women, were given above. Many less dramatic but quietly pervasive processes have been observed in which civilian women are induced to play an unquestioning part in support of societal militarization. Taking a country into war The moment of entry into war can be specially revealing of the causal effect of gender. Italian fascism and German National Socialism were able to draw on a radicalized masculinity emerging from the First World War, to reconstruct a sense of national community and prepare for the Second World War. More recently, it has been suggested that patriarchal masculinity was at the root of the erroneous political decision to take the USA into war against the Communist regime in Vietnam. Robert Dean found the policy makers of the time to have been ‘a small and strikingly homogenous group’, strongly formed by their shared class and gender belonging. He shows how those foreign policy decision makers ‘incarnated an imperial masculinity tied to patterns of class and education’. They shared a background in exclusive male-only institutions, such as boarding schools, Ivy League fraternities and secret societies, elite military service and metropolitan men’s clubs, ‘where imperial traditions of “service” and “sacrifice” were invented and bequeathed to those that followed’. They served to imbue men with a particular kind of manhood, indoctrinate them in an ‘ideology of masculinity’, ritually creating ‘a fictive brotherhood of privilege and power’ (Dean 2001: 4–5). These were the patriarchal gender relations that, intertwined with those of economic class and nationalism/imperialism, disposed a group of men to lead their country into a doomed war.

Why do states make war? When (and why) do states refrain from making war? Though the ‘war puzzle’ has attracted much scholarly attention, one commentator lamented that, while ‘much has been written about the causes of war, little has been learned about the subject’ (Vasquez 1993, 3). This may be because war ‘multi-causal’ (Suganami 1996, 401) and put- ting together the ‘war puzzle’ (Vasquez 1993, 1) is complex. Several scholars have provided pieces of the ‘war puzzle’ both in terms of the causes of war generally and the causes of wars specifically, focusing on systemic-level variables (like international anarchy); super-national-level variables like culture and norms; state-level variables like regime type, trade interdependence, shifts in relative power, or changes in military technology; and sub-state level variables like leadership.1 Many of these theoretical approaches find little common ground in addressing the ‘war puzzle.’ A characteristic they do share almost universally, how- ever, is the omission of gender analysis. By ‘gender analysis,’ I mean thinking about the way that social expectations about masculinities and femininities influence the constitution, processes, and structures of global politics.2 On the other hand, the feminist tradition in International Relations (IR) has argued that the theory and practice of war has been gendered throughout modern history and that gendered elements at all levels of global politics are important causal and constitutive factors in causing war generally and wars specifically (Steans 1998; Tickner 2001; Sjoberg 2006a). Feminist theorizing about war has proposed that war is productive of and reflective of gender norms in global politics, that gender-based causal variables are required to understand war-making and war-fighting, and that the consequences of war can be understood in gendered terms (see, e.g. Tickner 1992; Sylvester 2010). While feminists theorizing war and wars have done important work, epistemological, ontological, and methodological barriers have often stopped feminist analysis from attracting a ‘mainstream’ audience in the discipline. Critics of feminist work (e.g. Halliday 1988; Keohane 1998) in IR have argued that there is not a feminist theory of IR or a feminist theory of war on par with a realist theory of war or a liberal theory of war. While this seems to me a hypocritical critique, since there is not a theory of war coming from any other paradigmatic approach to IR, it is nonetheless a critique feminist theorizing must overcome. This article looks to overcome those barriers by theorizing about war and wars through feminist lenses, but engaging an existing approach to theorizing war. Though there are doubtless a number of approaches to engage, this article focuses on one in particular, exploring the relevance of gender to understanding the general causes of ‘war,’ or, in Waltz’s (1959) terms, ‘third image’ analysis.3 Particularly, it focuses on the question of structure at the ‘third image’ or systemic level.4

Gender and war(s) Feminist theorists have also suggested that sex and gender are key to theorizing war. Some scholars have shown sex to be a key variable in war(s) by linking sex equality within states and states’ tendency to make war(s) (e.g. Den Boer and Hudson 2002; Caprioli 2004; Hudson et al. 2009). Using statistical evidence, Hudson et al. made the state-level (or ‘second image’) argument that ‘the treatment of females within society’ is a ‘fundamental and powerful factor’ in explaining when wars occur (2009, 7). While this work using gender as variable is interesting, using gender subordination as an analytical concept through which to understand inter- national conflict provides more leverage to analyze the gendered nature of states, militarism, and war.10 This perspective is the foundation for an emerging subfield of Feminist Security Studies that argues that security can be understood as constituted by gender, war seen as caused by gender hierarchy, and wars considered gendered competitions (Sjoberg 2009a; Sylvester 2010; Wibben 2011). Feminist scholarship has explicitly linked war and gender subordination in a number of different ways: conceiving of global politics as a ‘war system’ where sexism, human subordination, and violence are linked (Reardon 1985); noting that war often victimizes women (Stiehm 1983); pointing out the co-constitution of gender, nationalism, and conflict (Yuval-Davis 1997); linking gender and militarism (Enloe 1989), and understanding the enterprise of war as fundamentally gendered (Tickner 1992).11 This article argues that feminist theorizing of war and feminist structural theorizing can be productively linked.

For feminists, assertions that war-making has nothing to do with gender has always sounded hollow in light of the predominance of men in the security apparatus. The masculinity of war thus is a starting point for a number of feminist studies, yet there is contestation about what exactly the relationship is between gender and war. It is possible to identify three fault-lines in the feminist literature. The first focuses on the premise that associates men with war and women with peace: Is it correct to say that men for the most part support war and that women are more likely to favour peace? The second divide pertains to levels of analysis and addresses causality: Does the relationship between gender and war belong at the individual or systemic/structural level? Finally, the third fault-line pertains to the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and war: Does militarist masculinity have a substantive content or are masculinity and war empty signifiers that derive their potency from their formal qualities? The first disagreement amongst feminists is whether women should be thought of as outside war or inside war. On the surface, the evidence is striking: historically and cross-culturally men have accounted for the vast majority of soldiers and fighters. Women have participated in fighting wars, but they have invariably made up only a small minority of fighters (Goldstein, 2001). While this puzzle has given rise to interesting theorising, feminists have been uncomfortable with universalist assertions that reproduce the association of women with peace and men with war and that fail to take into consideration historical and cultural contexts.1 Against the empirical record that associates men with war and women with peace, feminists thus have put forward evidence that contradicts the idea that women do not fight. In part they have done so by broadening the types of militarised conflicts they look at to include non-state actors, and by taking seriously the various supporting roles that women play in conflicts. This has allowed them to bring into view the fact that women participate in violence and wars extensively: they cheer on men to engage in violence and shame them into participation (Goldstein, 2001); they have appeared as suicide bombers in the Middle East, in terrorist activities in Chechnya, and as participants in the Rwandan genocide (Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007); they have a long record of fighting in liberation movements and militias, in African, Asian and Latin American revolutions of the 20th century, in loyalist militias in North Ireland, in militant movements in Kashmir and Sri Lanka, and in recent African conflicts from Sierra Leone to the Congo (T£treault, 1994; Puechguirbal, 2003; Sjoberg and Gentry, 2007; McEvoy, 2009; Parashar, 2009; MacKenzie, 2009). Women do not constitute a majority of fighters in these contexts, but they make significant contributions, accounting for over 30% of insurgents in some instances. Moreover, women increasingly are integrated in regular militaries; they now account for almost 15% of the US military (The Women's Memorial, 2011), the highest amongst NATO member states.2 The second disagreement amongst feminists focuses on the question of the causal or constitutive relationship between gender and war, and whether this relationship needs to be explored at the individual or the systemic/structural level of analysis. In other words, is masculinity a cause of war or are war and masculinity co-constituted? And do these causalities arise from socialisation and individual identities or from the masculinisation/militarisation of societies, cultures and global structures? These are amongst the most contested issues with far-reaching implications for how feminist scholarship can connect to security studies more broadly. The difference between approaches largely hinges on the understanding of gender. A series of quantitative studies has made a link between a country's propensity to go to war and the degree of gender equality within a country. They have shown a strong and consistent correlation between domestic gender inequality and a tendency of states to resolve conflicts violently. Using different indicators for gender equality (such as the percentage of women in the labour force and in parliament) and for violent conflict (militarised interstate and intrastate disputes and a "global peace index") and drawing on different databases, these studies agree that gender inequality is a significant predictor of conflict that in some models even outweighs the key explanatory variable of democracy (Tessler and Warriner, 1997; Caprioli, 2000, 2003, 2005; Caprioli and Boyer, 2001; Regan and Paskeviciute, 2003). Although empirically operating at a state level of analysis, scholars have drawn on arguments at the individual level to explain this correlation, evoking evolutionary biology and psychology. They have argued the adaptive advantage of male violence and its diffusion over time and drawn a causal relationship between resulting male characteristics and war fighting (Hudson et al., 2008). But the argument is difficult to sustain. Goldstein's comprehensive survey of evidence finds no support for simplistic causalities based on human biology and psychology, emphasising the interaction of biology with culture. Ultimately, he explains, the cross-cultural uniformity in the association of warfare with men is a result of "small, innate biological gender differences in average size, strength, and roughness of play" which combine with the "cultural modeling of tough, brave men, who feminize their enemies to encode domination" (Goldstein, 2001, p. 406). Biology and culture interact to produce a universal pattern and, in a startling reversal of general wisdom, biology emerges as more malleable than culture. Goldstein's survey thus gestures towards levels of analysis beyond the individual. A more thoroughly constructivist understanding than his leads to explanations at systemic or structural levels. A long tradition of feminist literature has located the relationship between war and gender at the systemic level and postulated a connection between patriarchy and "the war system" (Reardon, 1985). This type of literature has found the reasons for militarism in various forms of misogyny and suggested that fighting patriarchy is imperative in order to overcome war (e.g., Wasmuht, 2002; Mathis, 2002; Zwingel, 2003; Sjoberg, 2012). Cynthia Cockburn (2010) recently has provided a re-statement of this argument that takes into consideration new developments in feminist theory, including a focus on intersectionality. Taking the standpoint of anti-war feminist movement activists, she suggests that gender relations are one important root cause of war. She rejects individual-level arguments, emphasising that this causality cannot be put on the backs of what individual men and women do. Instead, war is a system in which everyday violence operates on a continuum with military violence, in which militaries and governing ideologies are systemically intertwined, and in which economic power and ethnic and national power intersect with gender power. She conceptualises militarised masculinities and femininities as emerging from social practices and discourses, insisting that these constructions can be thought of as causal.

INTERSECTIONALITY IN MILITARIZATION AND WARS In a recent volume, Hunt and Rygiel (2006b, 3) develop the concept of “(en)gendering” war to “disrupt and make visible the masculinized, militarized, racialized, sexualized, and classed dynamics through which war operates.” They argue that official war stories do political work: they camouflage interests, agendas, and politics that underpin war for the purpose of legitimating and gaining support for militarization. A crucial aspect of their effectiveness is the extent to which they depend on gendered ideologies (masculinization and feminization) that are naturalized and therefore go unnoticed (2006, 5). By going unnoticed ideologies are depoliticized, even as the identities and practices they mobilize profoundly affect politics. In the remainder of the chapter I explore how feminization accomplishes typically unnoticed political work in war stories. The most familiar theme in war stories involves constructing the enemy as “other”: to distinguish “us” from “them,” render others in some sense inferior, and thereby justify war’s violence against “them.” The specifics of othering vary by history and context but invariably involve some form of objectification so that “they” become objects to which norms of respect and non-violation need not be extended. Historical othering ranges from early Greeks characterizing Persians as effeminate to Christians casting nonbelievers as immoral to Europeans depicting “natives” as uncivilized. Thinking through how othering occurs in nationalist, colonial, and con- temporary war stories reveals gendered identity investments and ideologies in operation. Critics of European imperialism have produced a wealth of research documenting the manipulation of ideologies to justify colonial wars and obscure their racist, economic, and heteronormative dynamics.3 What surfaces repeatedly are characterizations of the colonized as feminine: weak, passive, irrational, disorderly, unpredictable, lacking self-control, and economically and politically incompetent. European power wielders (not only men or all men) could then justify military interventions by casting themselves in favorable masculinist terms: as uniquely rational, sexually and morally respectable, and more advanced economically and politically. In colonial wars and geopolitical maneuvering, “civilization” became a code word for European superiority. Through this lens, military interventions were perhaps a regrettable but nonetheless a necessary component of “enlightening” and “civilizing” primitive, unruly (feminized) “others.” As Eisenstein (2004, 75) observes, although they extolled the virtues of reason as a progressive force, Europeans positioned rationality “against savagery (natives), emotionality (women), and sexuality (racialized others).” At the same time—and complicating simplistic models of gender—the development of European nationalism and normalization of bourgeois respectability produced an idealized model of femininity: pure, dutiful, and maternal. This superficial valorization of femininity is contradicted by the practices it invoked. Romanticizing the maternal feminine did less to empower women than render them perpetual dependents. Feminine virtue and morality were best ensured by confining these qualities—and (bourgeois) women—to a private sphere of domesticity and assigning men the public-sphere responsibility of defending and protecting feminized dependents. Rather than empowering European women, the idealization of bourgeois (heteronormative) femininity became a tool for disempowering non-European men. The patronizing and protectionist logic of bourgeois norms provided imperial governments with a moral, and rational, justification for militarized colonization. In this war story, the barbarity of “other” men was proven by their (allegedly) oppressive treatment of women, and this demanded the rescue of victimized females by honorable, civilized men. In short, the protection of idealized femininity (to paraphrase Spivak’s [1987] apt analysis) justified wars by white men to save brown women from brown men. The crusading rhetoric and protectionist logic obscured colonial government agendas, and it resurfaces with particular vengeance and new complexities in contemporary militarism and war.4

The insight involves several interactive moves. In one sense, casting the subordinated as feminine devalorizes not only the empirical gender category of women but also sexually, racially, culturally, and economically marginalized men (e.g., “lazy migrants,” “primitive natives,” “effeminate gays”). Underpinning this claim is the observation that although structural hierarchies vary by reference to the “difference” emphasized and the modalities of power involved, they typically share a common feature: the denigration of feminized qualities attributed to those who are sub- ordinated (lacking reason, agency, control, etc.). Invoking the “natural” inferiority of the feminine plays a powerful, though not exhaustive, role in legitimating these hierarchies. In a second sense, and understanding gender analytically, not only subjects (women and marginalized men) but also concepts, desires, tastes, styles, “ways of knowing,” cultural expressions (art, music), roles, practices, work, nature, and so on can be feminized—with the effect of reducing their legitimacy, status, and value. Importantly, this devalorization is simultaneously ideological (discursive, cultural) and material (structural, economic). Consider how what is considered women’s work—whether done by women or marginalized men—is typically underpaid, or frequently not paid at all; and we hardly notice, in part because the depreciation of feminized activities is so taken for granted. This devalorization normalizes—with the effect of legitimating—the marginalization, subordination, and exploitation of feminized practices and persons. Oppressions differ, as do attempts to explain and/or justify them. As Wendy Brown (1997, 86–87) states, “not simply the content but the modalities of power producing gender, race, or caste are specific to each production,” even though “these powers of subject formation are not separable in the subject itself.” Because oppressions take various structural forms, feminization is not the only “normalizing” ideology in operation. What distinguishes feminization and renders it so ideologically powerful is the unique extent to which it invokes a deeply internalized and naturalized binary—the essentialized concept of sex difference—which is then available to naturalize diverse forms of structural oppression. This warrants clarification. Even as sex and gender are increasingly ambiguous to some, most people most of the time take a categorical, essentialized distinction between male and female completely for granted: as biologically given, reproductively necessary, and psychosocially obvious. Yet constructionists argue not only that sex difference itself is produced—through contingent, historical practices and institutionalizations—but also that sex difference as an essentialized binary and masculinism as a system of asymmetrical power are co-constituted. In other words, the deeply sedimented concept of sex difference and historically institutionalized practices of gender hierarchy are mutually constituted. As one effect, the naturalness of sex difference is generalized to the naturalness of masculine (not necessarily male) privilege, so that both aspects come to be taken-for-granted givens of social life. Common sense becomes a two- pronged justification of hierarchy. On the one hand, subordinated individuals or groups are devalorized by feminization; depictions range from lack of capacity and being weak or irrational to being offensive or posing a danger. On the other hand, responding appropriately to such individuals or groups requires masculinized practices; these range from patronizing and protectionist behaviors to disciplinary measures and violent coercion. In short, not only are the subordinated devalorized by feminization, but the qualities they supposedly lack are typically just what the dominating (masculinized) group has to offer, or is compelled to practice. This conveniently justifies both the necessity of rule and who should rule. The common sense of privileging the masculine and devaluing the feminine is culturally and collectively internalized to such an extent that we are all variously complicit in its reproduction. And it is also implicitly and explicitly manipulated to reproduce inequalities as if this were natural and inevitable, thus making critique and resistance difficult. In short, devalorizing the feminine produces even as it obscures vast inequalities of power, authority, and resource distribution. Exposing how this power operates must be one objective of a critical political agenda. I argue that the transformative potential of feminist critique lies in exposing and subverting all hierarchies that rely on denigration of “the feminine” to normalize and depoliticize subjection. I am not arguing that gender hierarchy is the “primary” oppression overshadowing race or class or sexuality. The point is rather that gender hierarchy and its elevation of “masculinity” is a historically contingent structural feature of social relations, that the subordination of women is not reducible to other structural oppressions (or vice versa), and that the dichotomy of gender underpins—as the denigration of the feminine naturalizes—hierarchies of gender, class, race, sexualities, and geopolitical “difference.” Because forms of subjection differ structurally, systematic and comparative analyses of race class, gender, and sexuality require attention to “different histories, different mechanisms and sites of power, different dis- cursive formations, different regulatory schemes” (Brown 1997, 86). In this chapter, however, my focus is less on the production of subjection than on the exposure of the political work that collective and internalized gender coding does across multiple forms of subjection. I am not presuming that sexist oppression is the most salient or powerful hierarchy in any particu- lar context; I am arguing that investigating feminization as devalorization allows a broader understanding of how oppressions are naturalized and provides us with greater analytical/political leverage. Although this is only one among a number of critical insights to be expanded and applied,2 I consider it a particularly productive vantage point, especially in relation to militarization and war.

IR scholarship doesn’t seem to “fit” contemporary politics First, the observation that IR theories and hypotheses have difficulty matching up with the present moment is relatively uncontroversial and well accepted. But this is not necessarily a fault of scholars or scholarship, but rather because we are always operating in an interim—the “games” we are analyzing have yet to conclude. Scholars writing during the “inter-war” period, for instance, could not know that they were doing so, unaware as they were that World War II was yet to come. Those theorizing bipolar stability in 1986 could not know for certain that the world was about to systemically change. I have read articles from last summer (2016) whose claims and assumptions about American foreign policy and the American-led world order already appear out of place and incongruent with the new normal of politics. Only with the benefit of hindsight, once emergent processes have concluded, can we know what we’re looking at with the certainty scholars prefer. Once we reach that point, we can then go about the process of comparing it with the long narratives of history. For the most part, this is to the good and the historian’s admonition against “presentism” is a valuable one. To be sure, many “new” things aren’t quite so new or impressive when seen against the backdrop of history. But IR scholarship is expressly not history and there will be times where we observe events occurring, crises erupting, and warning shots that become the first shot in a war, rather than a forgotten shot across the bow or yet another near-miss. The irony of making this claim on a site dedicated to emphasizing criticality, contingency, and representational politics is not lost on me. And I don’t endorse the tired claim that IR scholars have no meaningful political knowledge/impact/relevance regarding contemporary politics, which occasionally gets trotted out as a general critique of academic work. IR scholarship has much to say in terms of envisioning radical alternatives, identifying different ways of being in the world of global politics, and reassessing the very questions that seem to define its practices, as well as the more traditional claims and studies regarding mechanisms and empirical regularities. The distinction I’m drawing is that (some) IR scholars are indeed quite good at this, yet IR scholarship itself is not built for it. What needs to be made more visible and expanded is a willingness to fundamentally rethink what role IR scholarship plays, who it is for, and what it does in the world—all of which is currently happening in various areas of the discipline. However, this needs to be amplified and coupled with a generalized willingness to put these insights into widespread practice at all levels and in all areas of the discipline. Reflexive debates about decolonization and difference, epistemological assumptions regarding generalizability, prediction, and the value of narrow, context-based claims may be seen by some as divergent from “actual” international politics, but they directly implicate how our work responds to times like these. If we really are in a time of “change” and “crisis” in international politics and we’re having difficulty applying extant IR knowledge to the present—particularly knowledge that authors like Weber refer to as “disciplinary IR”—IR should seriously consider adapting some of the ways in which it frames, represents, and relates events and practices across time to be more in line with those issues under investigation.

Scholars of utopianism in IR seek to avoid narrow, or ideologically ‘correct’ 8 analyses of revolutionary conditions through foregrounding process and means over ends. However, they nonetheless create a conceptual blackmail, whereby a project of radical political transformation can only be considered properly political if it is realistic, where what is realistic becomes an asocial and ontological boundary between the political and the anti-political. As such, failed utopian projects are only so because they are not realistic, and if they are not realistic they therefore sit beyond politics, and outside of the purview of an IR Theory constructed to analyse, respond to and/or transform world political phenomena. This results in a myopia towards forms of utopian praxis considered ‘unrealistic’, and ignores the ways that political failure exceeds itself. This risks making historical and contemporary manifestations of kairotic utopianism fall outside of the purview of disciplinary IR. As a way of building on the means-focussed approach to utopianism in IR but moving beyond this conceptual blackmail and myopia, I will suggest that an overlooked and idiosyncratic anarchist tradition of prefigurative ‘no-point’ utopic praxis can help to reinterpret utopian ‘failure’ as a politically productive and unfinished site for thinking about radical transformation in IR, and act as an already existing normative basis for a politics of radical social and political transformation.

The paper does not directly address the ways in which utopianism has been put to work in IR theory more generally.9 Rather, it examines the literature that has sought to explicitly promote a certain way of understanding utopianism in IR. Some of this literature has made important contributions to the ways in which we think about revolutions and utopianism in disciplinary IR. In responding to and rejecting the ends-focussed modalities of 20th century authoritarian statism, it has impelled a focus on the relationship between specific historical conditions and utopian politics, the immanent possibilities of particular socio-political conditions, and the importance of means over ends.10 Indeed, this intersection between antiauthoritarianism and immanence maps on to the more explicitly anarchist sensibilities that inform some of the subsequent arguments in this paper, but that move us beyond the limitations of the chronos/kairos dichotomy noted above. This dichotomy has produced a narrow analysis of political ontology that evaluates radical politics according to feasibility and a dialectical relationship with existing institutional structures. The ‘realism’ these scholars adopt, although sometimes defined and applied in different ways,11 and emerging from different intellectual foci,12 is a perspective nonetheless relatively consistently rooted in ‘what is immanent within history…grounded in “actually existing” conditions’, 13 involving ‘a process which is limited, long term and humble’, 14 ‘benign and reformist steps’, practicality and process, ‘calculated to make a better world somewhat more probable’. 15 Furthermore, what is deemed to be ‘realistic’ is rooted in a world-view informed by and against 20th century authoritarian statism.16

Conclusion: Thinking, talking, and making feminist shadow networks

In her post on “Selfcare as Warfare” on her blog feministkilljoys, Sara Ahmed writes, “even if it’s a system change we need, that we fight for, when the system does not change, when the walls come up, those hardenings of history into physical barriers in the present, you have to manage; to cope” (Ahmed 2014, para. 28). At its core, this is what qLab and FTT seek to offer: a space for not only managing and coping when the university is banging down our doors, but a space that also affirms and validates the research we need to do to find meaning and to, hopefully, help others find meaning; a space for solidarity, wherein solidarity becomes a method for anti-racism and for fighting white supremacy and imperialism; solidarity as a tactic for opposing misogyny and trans and queerphobia. Solidarity is also what drives feminist shadow networks. It is what enables us as feminists to highlight that which resists—because we’ve fostered solidarity, mutual support, and care. But that solidarity must be grounded in intersectional feminism to resist its tokenization and the over-reliance on white feminism that relies on a binary focus on gender to the neglect of other intersecting systems of oppression.

The androcentric premises also have political consequences. They protect the ideological basis of exploitative relationships. Militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism and other pathological ‘isms’ of modernity get legitimacy from the assumption that power relations and hierarchy are inevitably a part of human society, due to man's inherent nature. Because when mankind by nature is autonomous, competitive and violent (i.e. masculine) then coercion and hierarchical structures are necessary to manage conflicts and maintain social order. In this way, the cooperative relationships such as those found among some women and tribal cultures, are by a dualised definition unrealistic and utopian. (Birkeland 1995: 59). This means that power relations are generated by universal scientific truths about human nature, rather than by political and social debate. The consequence is that people cannot challenge the basis of the power structure because they believe it is the scientific truth, so it cannot be otherwise. In this way, militarism is justified as being unavoidable, regardless of its patent irrationality. Likewise, if the scientific "truth" were that humans would always compete for a greater share of resources, then the rational response to the environmental crisis would seem to be "dog-eat-dog" survivalism. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which nature and community simply cannot survive. (Birkeland 1995: 59). This type of social and political power structure is kept in place by social policies. It is based on the assumption that if the scientific method is applied to public policy then social planning can be done free from normative values. However, according to Habermas (Reitzes 1993: 40) the scientific method only conceal pre-existing, unreflected social interests and pre-scientific decisions. Consequently, also social scientists apply the scientific characteristics of objectivity, value-freedom, rationality and quantifiability to social life. In this way, they assume they can unveil universal laws about social relations, which will lead to true knowledge. Based on this, correct social policies can be formulated. Thus, social processes are excluded, while scientific objective facts are included. Society is assumed a static entity, where no changes are possible. By promoting a permanent character, social science legitimizes the existing social order, while obscuring the relations of domination and subordination, which is keeping the existing power relations inaccessible to analysis. The frozen order also makes it impossible to develop alternative explanations about social reality. It prevents a historical and political understanding of reality and denies the possibility for social transformation by human agency. The prevailing condition is seen as an unavoidable fact. This implies that human beings are passive and that domination is a natural force, for which no one is responsible. This permits the state freely to implement laws and policies, which are controlling and coercive. These are seen as being correct, because they are based on scientific facts made by scientific experts. One result is that the state, without consulting the public, engages in a pathological pursuit of economic growth. Technology can be used to dominate societies or to enhance them. Thus both science and technology could have developed in a different direction. But due to patriarchal values infiltrated in science the type of technology developed is meant to dominate, oppress, exploit and kill. One reason is that patriarchal societies identify masculinity with conquest. Thus any technical innovation will continue to be a tool for more effective oppression and exploitation. The highest priority seems to be given to technology that destroys life. Modern societies are dominated by masculine institutions and patriarchal ideologies. Their technologies prevailed in Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan and in many other parts of the world. Patriarchal power has brought us acid rain, global warming, military states, poverty and countless cases of suffering. We have seen men whose power has caused them to lose all sense of reality, decency and imagination, and we must fear such power. The ultimate result of unchecked patriarchy will be ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust. Such actions are denial of wisdom. It is working against natural harmony and destroying the basis of existence. But as long as ordinary people leave questions of technology to the "experts” we will continue the forward stampede. As long as economics focus on technology and both are the focus of politics, we can leave none of them to experts. Ordinary people are often more capable of taking a wider and more humanistic view than these experts. (Kelly 1990: 112-114; Eisler 1990: 3233; Schumacher 1993: 20, 126, 128, 130).

It will take women until 2061 to achieve gender parity in international patenting, based on current trends, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).Women inventors were behind only 23% of all international applications between 1999 and 2020, while men were involved in 96%, report finds.Biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and food chemistry had the highest rates of women inventors, with “far fewer” women inventors in mechanical engineering.By region, Latin America and the Caribbean perform strongly, with women representing 21% of all listed inventors. In Asia, women inventors represent 17% of the total, while in North America and Europe, women account for 15% and 14% respectively of all listed inventors. For Africa and Oceania, the figure is 13%.“Much work” is still needed to ensure women in all countries have equal opportunities, the WIPO says. This should include policies and actions to stimulate gender diversity in teams – and more research into the societal and technological factors fuelling the gender gap in patenting.

The concordance between this list and the means by which gender inequality is typically maintained in human societies is clear. Gender roles lead to highly differential possibilities for personal security, development, and prosperity, even in today’s world. An example of this kind of exploitation occurs when women “naturally” receive less pay than men for equal work, or when domestic violence is considered “normal.” The second component, manipulation of consciousness to ensure acquiescence, is maintained through socialization, gender stereotyping, and a constant threat of domestic violence—all of which insidiously identify women as inferior. The perpetrators of female infanticide, for example, are virtually all female. The third component, fragmentation, is easily effected from women’s circumstances of patrilocality and greater family responsibilities (and in some cases, the practice of physical purdah), thus minimizing social access that could otherwise be used to build net- works with other women. And finally, marginalization serves to clearly distinguish men and women, with no doubt as to the relative status of each sex. Galtung posits that structural violence arises from cultural violence, that is, the day-to-day use of overt or implicit force to obtain one’s ends in social relations. Thus, while structural violence may obviate the need for open violence in the public sphere, it is based on open or implicit violence in the private sphere of the home. Norms of cultural violence diffuse within religion, ideology, language, and art, among other aspects of culture. “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right—or at least not wrong,” writes Galtung.44 Violent patriarchy is the primary basis of cultural violence in human collectives: although women have become active agents with notable success in the struggle for equality in many states, violence re- mains an enduring component of relations between men and women in the private sphere the world over, providing a natural wellspring for social diffusion.45 Gendered hierarchies also help explain the violence associated with nationalism, for the hierarchized difference between men and women that is at the root of structural inequality and violence diffuses to become an integral aspect of nationalism. Evolutionary theory tells us that clan or national identity is al- most exclusively male-defined, for in the evolutionary landscape, it was males who defined who was a member of the in-group, and who belonged to out- groups, based on male reproductive concerns. “Gender relations are a crucial, not peripheral, dimension of the dynamics of group identities and intergroup conflicts,” writes Spike Peterson,46 thus helping to explain the inherent nationalist antipathy toward feminist goals. Given this linkage between violent patriarchy and nationalism, any reforms of the cultural distribution of power between men and women will be viewed as a threat to nationalist efforts to protect or unify the community.47 Legitimized by gendered structural and cultural violence, patriarchal nationalism provides justification for advancing state interests through the use of force. In that light, we would expect that neither a meaningful decrease in societal violence nor a sustainable peace among nations is possible in human society without a decrease in gender inequality.48 But is that possible?

Apocalypse, as I began by saying, changed – it did not go away. And here I want to hazard my second assertion: if, in the nuclear age of yesteryear, apocalypse signified an event threatening everyone and everything with (in Jacques Derrida's suitably menacing phrase) "remainderless and a-symbolic destruction," then in the postnuclear world apocalypse is an affair whose parameters are definitively local. In shape and in substance, apocalypseis defined now by the affliction it brings somewhere else, always to an "other" people whose very presence might then be written as a kind of dangerous contagion, threatening the safety and prosperity of a cherished "general population."This fact seems to me to stand behind Susan Sontag's incisive observation, from 1989, that, "Apocalypse is now a long running serial: not 'Apocalypse Now' but 'Apocalypse from Now On.'" The decisive point here in the perpetuation of the threat of apocalypse(the point Sontag goes on, at length, to miss) is that the apocalypse is ever present because, as an element in a vast economy of power, it is ever useful. That is, throughthe perpetual threat of destruction– through the constant reproduction of the figure of the apocalypse – the agencies of power ensure their authority to act on and through the bodies of a particular population. No one turns this point more persuasively than Michel Foucault, who in the final chapter of his first volume of The History of Sexuality addresses himself to the problem of a power that is less repressive than productive, less life-threatening than, in his words, "life-administering." Power, he contends, "exerts a positive influence on life … [and] endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations." In his brief comments on what20he calls "the atomic situation," however, Foucault insists as well that the productiveness of modern power must not be mistaken for a uniform repudiation of violent or even lethal means. For as "managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,"agencies of modern power presume to act "on the behalf of the existence of everyone." Whatsoever might be construed as a threat to life and survival in this way serves to authorize any expression of force, no matter how invasive, or, indeed, potentially annihilating."If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power," Foucault writes, "this is not because of a recent return to the ancient right to kill' it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." For a state that would arm itself not with the power to kill its population, but with a more comprehensive power over the patters and functioning of its collective life, the threat of an apocalyptic demise, nuclear or otherwise, seems a civic initiative that can scarcely be done without.

Opponents of the Democratic Party argued the risks of war, but their pragmatic policy challenges did not grab sufficient traction to slow the unreeling web of justification. Of course, there was little denial that the war would create more terrorists, generate a lower threshold for intervention, receive weak international support, and in the end leave the dangerous business of Afghanistan unfinished. But the Democrats became entangled in reflexive posturing about the effects of the debate itself—the importance of "message sending" to the United Nations and "consensus" backing for the president as negotiator-in-chief. With 9/11 not far behind, "tough" messages appeared to provide a much desired supplement to boost confidence, while pragmatism, caution, and planning took a back seat. Presidential hopefuls cut loose from this morass and took advantage of Republican-offered political cover. Republicans did appear to benefit from tough war rhetoric in the immediate election aftermath, enabling Bush to run successfully in 2004 as a wartime president. As WMD continued not to turn up, the intervention dragged on, costs mounted, political fortunes reversed—although the entanglements remained and remain. [End Page 87] The debate of 2002 found that a systematic presidential campaign—when bolstered by cherry-picked evidence—can be particularly powerful, especially when administration supporters in Congress veer shamelessly from long-held positions on policy and the leadership of the opposing party takes shelter in offered political cover. Further, the debate illustrates how the events that should prompt policy debate become colonized, in this case making common sense difficult to muster because the network imaginary laces a web of associative fears with compensatory toughness. On the whole, the debates were not the nation's finest hour. The debate of 2002 strove to convert a traumatic national event into a conservative-articulated, Republican-captured, presidentially initiated rise in power, and ended by setting the stage for congressional investigation, the rise of the Democrats, reassertion of congressional power, and a new presidency committed to public diplomacy. WMD were at the heart of the six-year-long controversy. It was hardly remembered that [WMD] weapons of mass destruction were not deployed by terrorists on September 11th. Rather, fast, anonymous, networked, modern systems of circulation were turned, through ingenuity, into first-strike weapons. Seen with fresh militancy, 9/11 suggests that the modern world remains vulnerable to mutating events that change, shock, and command attention, actions that attain expanding scope and influence by virtue of a network imaginary, where such moments self-organize and multiply in varied directions. The development of policy studies as rhetoric, then, calls attention to the disruptive events as these become situated in the restricted focus of national debate and recovered, through critique, as an unfinished metapolitics, which demands rethinking of the taken-for-granted grounds and alliances upon which post-event consensus became fabricated. In its time, the "War on Terror" was framed as a "clash of civilizations" and a new Munich. In retrospect, 9/11 should be understood as signaling a much closer, changing, entangled, future world where the complications of security spread and interlock to haunt twenty-first-century network imaginaries.

Reflecting on how we might stand against neoliberalism and the colonial expectations of productivity, the third author of this paper reflected in our DH Unbound panel (Social Justice Oriented Critical Design Pedagogy in Urgent Times) that she finds that qLab is a space where we support each other in these ways as we root for slow and meaningful community-based scholarship rather than number-based quantitative evaluations. A simple statement at first, but if we reflect on the burden of these pressures, it may no longer seem so simple. Certainly, given the scarcity of tenure-track positions, the increasing precarity of teaching-focused lecturer positions, and the expectation that everyone including graduate students publish more (and these are only to name a few academic pressures), the competitive nature of academic becomes all the more clear, where people maintain the highest of expectations of themselves and of others. For us, embodying slowness is not equal to being unproductive. Rather, it requires a re-structuring of what “productivity” means, focusing on giving the time and care to our work and to our bodies. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, one of our lab members was editing a book on World Islam. As the submission time drew nearer, she observed that more than half of the book contributors who were women had to withdraw their chapters from the book. Nature and other science-based journals, at the very beginning of the pandemic, already had the statistics that women were publishing less than men, and that this was expected to continue over the pandemic (Minello 2020). We strongly believe that it is not just that women are taking more responsibility for the children and the home, but that women and other marginalized genders, racialized scholars, and queer scholars are giving more care at work and to their research in order to ensure that it work is meaningful for themselves and for their students, and to ensure that the work is of high quality that lives up to the community’s expectations. As Kathy Hytten writes, “slowing down is good for us as individuals, colleagues, and knowledge producers. Slow does not mean idle; rather, it provides a space for meaningfulness and for genuine inquiry” (Hytten 2017, 159). While recognizing the labour that goes into such care, qLab advocates for that space of slowness, to allow us the space to show care with each other as we seek to normalize this kind of consideration within our broader academic ecosystems, and we call for others to do the same.

Crucially, this trust within our lab and in our research is built slowly, especially because within feminist, Indigenous, and community-based methodologies, trust is and should be slowly built, focusing on relationship building and nurturing. Often, in reflecting on such research, academics agree that in these research settings trust and relationships should come slowly, and that, given Canada’s history of settler colonialism, it is unfair and, frankly, impossible to ask marginalized and targeted communities to immediately trust researchers. And yet, in practice, the hidden curriculum of constant publishing and fast-paced researching dictates otherwise. If we agree that taking time and care, that emphasizing slowness, should be considered when working with community members, we must consider why we do not use the same mentality when working with other colleagues and students. Why force ourselves to rush into work with each other without the foundational relationship building? Regardless of intent, saying “trust me” when trying to make sense of the bureaucracy of the university, of the pandemic, of new motherhood or future motherhood means very little, and it does not come naturally or easily to racialized women. Trust must come slowly, and it must come from a place of genuine support, care, and active listening. Adding our voices to the important work within fields of feminist digital humanities and feminist geographies on care, trust, support, and slow scholarship (e.g., Adams-Hutcheson and Johnston 2019; Caretta and Faria 2020; Livio and Emerson 2019; Pawlicka-Deger 2020; Smyth, Linz, and Hudson 2020), we urge other labs to reflect on how this might be possible for their lab, research, and scholarly communities.

Structural gender hierarchy and wars A feminist understanding of gender hierarchy as a structural feature of global politics suggests some suppositions about war and about war(s), discussed here in narrative form for economy of space. One hypothesis might be that the content and salience of the hegemonic/ideal-typical masculinity in states would be expected to be a predictor of their relative tendency to go to war. In a gender hierarchical international system, relative material or symbolic equality between states would be expected to breed conflict, while conflicts between states with vastly different functions or capabilities would be expected to be less frequent. Still, asymmetric conflicts would be expected to occur when a conflict between states’ claims to masculinity and/or states’ insults to each others’ masculinities occurs. Put differently, (state) gender relations would be expected to be an intervening variable in how power parity influences aggression. States with elements of hypermasculinity (Nayak 2006; Heeg Maruska 2010) in their nationalist discourses would be expected to be more aggressive, while states with elements of gender equity in their nationalist discourses (state feminists) would be less likely to be aggressive (see Mazur and Stetson 1995; Mazur 2001; Lovenduski and Baudino 2005). This is not because of any inherent property of the state but instead because of where the (perceived or actual) properties of the state place it on a gender hierarchy among states. The relative frequency of wars would be expected to vary with the relative intensity of gendered competition between states, which would be expected to vary with the relative aggressiveness of the ideal-typical masculinity in the international system. Gendered elements of state identities (like honor, protection, chivalry, and aggression) would be expected to determine ‘centers of gravity’ (Clausewitz 1830) that cause war, while gender hierarchy among states would be expected to be a permissive cause of war. A dominant hypermasculinity in the international system structure would lead states to approximate hypermasculinity in their functions, search for capabilities, and interaction with each other. Such an international arena would be expected to be conflictual and competitive. A dominant chivalric masculinity would produce different results, emphasizing values like ‘the responsibility to protect’ and incentivizing states to function and relate in ways that maintain toughness and tenderness. This can be expected to be manifested across states, not only in individual ones, using Waltzian logic.

The scale of the American Empire—its move from (mostly) hemispheric to global domination—only began to change in the 1930s. In fact, in my opinion the entire way Americans understand and frame geopolitics was forged during this decade, perhaps the most influential in modern US history.

The primary impetus behind the transformation in the American imperial imagination was the rise of Nazi Germany. Before Adolf Hitler’s ascendance to the German chancellorship in 1933, Americans generally believed they could negotiate with foreign powers—especially white, European powers—in good faith. But the rise of Hitler in Germany (and Stalin in the Soviet Union, though he was less important) persuaded Americans that there were some people with whom one just couldn’t reason—or, as a well-known book from the early 1940s put it, You Can’t Do Business with Hitler.