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When exploring what it means for care to be a public good, it is helpful to think of care as an action, a service, or an ethic. This perspective is represented in ethics and philosophy literature by looking at care as a form of response or relation. A responsive definition of care focuses on a person’s response to the needs of others, and meeting those needs with empathy, openness, and a sense of responsibility (Gilligan, 2011; Held, 2014; Noddings, 2010). Some go further by saying that the relation of one person to another is a core aspect of being human and that to understand care ethics, one must understand “the irreducibly relational nature of human existence” (Tronto, 2013, p. 181). This emphasizes that all care ethics are built on human relations, and when using care ethics as a lens for care as a public good, one must also understand the essentiality of human relations.

Philosopher Virginia Held (2014) writes about the ways that care ethics are a revolutionary call to action: “The ethics of care asks for the transformations of society, politics, law, economic activity, the family, and personal relations away from the assumptions of patriarchy and toward the world of caring and the kind of justice caring calls for” (p. 108). Held’s statement summarizes a branch of care ethics that recognizes the societal structures that support or restrain this type of relation (Tronto, 1993). As care ethics have evolved, they have made connections to distributive justice, with scholars arguing for “an ethic of resistance both to injustice and to self-silencing” (Gilligan, 2011, p. 175). One operating under an ethic of care must not only recognize the universality of human relations but also the need to publicly call out injustice. This ethical framework, which asserts both the essential relational nature of humanity and the need for justice, fits with and supports the argument for care as a public good.

Cooperatives are an intentional choice for this paper. Community members who are privileged and are accruing wealth, yet not in a position of political power, may recognize the exploitative systems described above and want to help others. In this highly individualized society, organized around individual actions in the market, privileged individuals may see altruism, through donations to charities, foundations, or specific causes, as their best avenue to effect change. Privileged individuals may also want to extract themselves from capitalism and neoliberalism, yet not know how. I propose community care cooperatives as an actionable step individuals from various backgrounds – including middle- and upper-classes – can take in order to move toward a care-centered world.

A cooperative can take many forms, as it is any type of “autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise” (Statistics on Cooperatives and the Wider Social and Solidarity Economy, 2019; International Cooperative Alliance, n.d.). While this is not always the case, cooperatives are often hyper-local and culturally-sensitive by design and are based on values of democracy, equality, equity, self-help, self-responsibility, and solidarity (International Cooperative Alliance, n.d.). Cooperative members actively participate in setting policies and making decisions. Members are in control of capital and decide collectively how to handle any potential surplus and ensure its equitable distribution. It is collective action with the purpose of contributing to the sustainable development of the community; cooperatives are by the members for the members.

The contemporary sociality is based on social relations inherent to a particular mode of production, within which people are allocated certain roles and positions according to their class. In the capitalist mode of production, social relations are necessarily based on exploitation and are riddled with conflict. In order for the class relations thus established to survive in a bourgeois society, they, as well as the productive capacities they utilize, must be reproduced. One of the key units that ensures the reproduction of social relations and productive forces within capitalism – beside a series of public services that are being systematically suffocated in neoliberalism – is family. This somewhat unromantic fact about family, which was already alluded to by Friedrich Engels (2010), as well as multiple subsequent traditions of SRT4 and the wide struggles for the abolition of white, nuclear, bourgeois family (Lewis, 2022: 36–74), reveals the specific role allocated to the family, namely that of a focal point for social reproduction, which absorbs the problems that arise and accumulate in society. But what are we exactly referring to when we talk about the SRT? Why is it a necessary tool for an analysis of informal labour within neoliberalism? Social Reproduction Theory is all about life-making. Its core tenet is the fact that the accumulation of surplus value is not possible without informal and unpaid labour that generates healthy labour power either through maintenance of direct producers, or by taking care of non-labouring members of the subordinate classes (children, the elderly and the unemployed), or through generational renewal of workers and their lives (birth taken for granted as the biological reproduction of new labour force) (Vogel, 2013:150). In recent times SRT has been used as a characteristic Marxist-feminist tool, a theoretical and critical framework, and a political strategy for tackling the relationship between oppression and exploitation, as well as waged and unwaged labour. It departs from Marx’s understanding of reproduction within the capitalist mode of production (Čakardić, 2020) but expounds on Marx’s theoretical sketch and redirects the analysis from the logic of capital toward labour power (Jaffe, 2020:6–7). It poses the question formulated in the words of Tithi Bhattacharya: “If worker’s labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?” (2017:1). Thus, SRT locates “hidden” processes that enable production, and it seeks to investigate the existential conditions of the worker and analyses the phenomena of life-making and produced gender reality. Nancy Fraser sums up this issue in the following paragraph: Non-waged social-reproductive activity is necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value and the functioning of capitalism as such. None of those things could exist in the absence of housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care and a host of other activities which serve to produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings. Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society (2016). In addition, SRT sharpens the analytical blades we use to make the existing theories of labour more thorough, to better understand the historical phenomenon of gendered and racial division of labour, and to grasp the issue of class and class struggle more precisely. Capitalist societies have separated the social reproduction labour from that of economic production and have “remunerated ‘reproductive’ activities in the coin of ‘love’ and ‘virtue’, while compensating ‘productive labour’ in that of money” (Ibid.). Since capital needs socially reproductive labour to produce and reproduce labour force, it is determined to secure the appropriate amount of this very valuable resource at the lowest possible cost. Neoliberalism does this by informally assigning the responsibility for social reproduction to women, families and communities. This way, it degrades reproduction to the forms that are most suitable for the maximization of capitalist profit. As noted by the proponents of the Wages for Housework Campaign of the 1970s, family is still one of the most fundamental units of social reproduction and life-making, of heterosexual religion and private property, which simultaneously produces coercion and violence to further strengthen its basic economic role (Dalla Costa, 2008). By the same token, it secures the unpaid care work for family members, domestic labour, and what Silvia Federici called “a labour of love” (2012:15). Despite the fact that family represents an “ideological mystification and a political project” (Seymour, 2022), that not all families are the same, that the idea of men as “providers” is undergoing a serious crisis, and that not all families are even heterosexual, the legal and political project of “familialisation” has never been stronger. This is not to be ascribed simply to religion or traditionalist conservatism, but to “the morals of the market”, as expressed by Jessica Whyte. What she means by that concept is a radical rerolling back of the social and the neoliberal practice of outsourcing the burden of social responsibility to families (2019). It is precisely in that context that the Thatcherian hoax about the primacy of family and individualism over society, about the abolition of social responsibility, should be examined. The morals of the market presuppose radical abolition of social roles of the state, reassigning them to the family as the supposedly only unit that is accountable for subsistence of its members. Therefore, its moral role is to secure a shelter, a safe space, an isolated “anti-social” island that is supposed to protect us from all social crises and economic insecurity. Exactly in that line of argumentation Richard Seymour notes: When society is either hostile or indifferent, when public provision is etiolated, when institutions of solidarity are shrivelled and demoralised, the anti-social family can provide a range of services: free transport, help with spiralling debt, financial support against unemployment, care in the event of illness, or shelter against racism (2022). The family thus becomes a shelter expected to accomplish immeasurable effort, and to do it all out of love, because this is understood as a naturally given and necessary moral sacrifice. Neoliberalism, according to our conclusions derived from the discussion in the first part of the paper, literally turns home into a physical shelter that allows the worker to rest before the next day’s labour, a place that gives them a roof above the head and a bed to rest when rest is needed (Bhattacharya, 2013–2014). Rather than having the state and the employers ensure socially conscious and sustainable housing, available and free public transport, public healthcare and education, as well as community services and decent wages and pensions, the morals of the market takes on the role of a mediator between the state and the family and charges the family with all the duties of the state, therefore making the family responsible for all the consequences of social crises, bad living conditions and poverty. However, the socially reproductive capacities of the family are not infinite. We are continuously witnessing not only economic crises, but reproductive crises as well, systemic exploitations of individual and collective abilities for regeneration of people and relations between them, as well as a systemic “care crisis”. “In that case,” writes Fraser, “the logic of economic production overrides that of social reproduction, destabilizing the very processes on which capital depends – compromising the social capacities, both domestic and public, that are needed to sustain accumulation over the long term” (2016). Furthermore, it appears that the ongoing global pandemic brutally reinforced the care crisis and underscored the fact that the economy of the so-called “essential work” disproportionately exploits women (Mezzadri, 2022), especially women of colour (Powell 2020), and makes life intolerable and unhealthy for millions of people (Kisner, 2021).

Therefore, if political care is at the centre of organizational and social life, as I argue it should be, ‘caring for’ various needs of others, including care providers, should become one of its crucial components. Hence, another important theoretical implication of the framework offered is the need to politicize the notion of care by focusing on who receives and delivers it (Tronto, 1993, 1995, 2013), as reflected in Tronto’s idea of ‘caring with’. The framework inflects political care with psychoanalytic ideas on affect and body, offering a deeper understanding of the current predicament of carelessness in organizations and society (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). Today, though the most meaningful and socially valuable jobs are linked to care, defined as tending to, mending and repairing, such categories are often associated with poverty or even slavery (Graeber, 2018). These arrangements rely on the nexus of symbolic significations and ideologies reaffirming stereotypical associations of care with women’s attentiveness to others, particularly close others, and caring with dispossession. As a result, they impoverish our sense of self by ignoring care as both a human ability and a human need (Fotaki et al., 2020, chapter 1). At the same time, work relationships are often instrumental rather than infused with care because caring for co-workers involves trade-offs when organizational performance and productivity are at stake (Antoni et al., 2020). A declining sense of responsibility for the needs of others (Cantillon & Lynch, 2017; Lynch, 2009) often reduces care to compliance with public relations as part of managerial discourse and practices, while meaningful caregiving continues to be associated with the trivial, the private and the emotional, the importance of which is unacknowledged. The neoliberal injunction associating citizenship with compulsive consumerism supports these significations while it produces unhealthy associations and toxic attachments that corrupt organizations’ institutional and moral fabric (Long, 1999). However, it also reveals that dominant discourses, organizational structures and norms are unstable if not supported by affect, opening the space for desiring differently by creating new imaginaries and significations (Komporozos-Athanasiou & Fotaki, 2015). Thus, the proposed approach draws attention to emotions, including our unconscious fears and desires to reveal the fantasmatic constitution of neoliberal capitalism that is not immutable and can be changed. Producing alternative accounts of care as offered above can disrupt existing symbolic norms propagated by the neoliberal market logic and the affective power structures on which the paradigm rests. We can use them to form new attachments, moving away from the illusory pursuit of individual wants towards recognizing our inextricable links with others and all forms of life and non-sentient matter.

The third and final contribution is to develop a holistic notion of care without exclusions, which is contextually (socially, politically and translocally) embedded and embodied (Fotaki & Harding, 2017, chapters 5, 6). Critical care theorists have applied care ethics to international relations (Held, 2006; Robinson, 1999) to develop an approach that responds and attends to others’ differences without presuming universal homogeneity. This article furthers this debate by framing care as rooted in ontological and political vulnerability (Gilson, 2016; Hamington, 2004; Held, 2006; Petherbridge, 2016; Robinson, 1999). It highlights connections between close and distant relations while affirming a principle of care for the most vulnerable as a foundation for developing universal holistic global care.

Currently, our individual and collective lives are organized around the accumulation of capital and growth of the market. It is time for new values, goals, and understandings of how humanity fits into the larger web of life. The most prominent care scholars, such as Joan Tronto, Nancy Folbre, and others, argue that we must recenter society around care in order to fundamentally end the twin exploitations of care and environment. Scholar Kristin Munro (2019) asserts that “promoting human and environmental well-being requires fundamentally changing the production processes that take place in households and elsewhere” (p. 451), which can only happen by a drastic shift in the current capitalist system. Tronto (2013) extends this line of thinking to democracy itself: “To pursue democracy while at the same time taking seriously how central care is for all human life requires a fundamental rethinking of questions about how we organize our lives, individually and collectively” (p. 27). A care-centered world cannot exist until there is a shift in our primary societal values.

Thus far, policies in the U.S. designed to address the devaluation of care fail to achieve this value shift. Solutions to care-related problems answer the question, “How can we better represent care in the current system?” rather than “How can we better value care as a society?” For example, public and subsidized child care is offered as a solution to gender inequality, as it can increase women’s hours of paid employment, reduce their need to stay close to home, and make it easier for families to migrate to areas with more economic opportunities (Folbre, 2021). I argue that analyzing and promoting policies for their ability to promote participation in the formal market fails to address the root problems of inequality and misses the bigger picture. We should not support policies because they allow for economic participation; we should support policies because they allow for individuals and communities to center their lives around essential dimensions of care and thus wellbeing. While solutions for economic equality are not wrong, I feel a more long-term solution is to reconceive care as a public good.

Similarly, this deconstructionist framework provides constructivist FSS authors with a basis for their claims about the contrast between feminist and scientific methods. These claims concern a wide range of issues.7 The most important of these for this chapter, however, is the fact that constructivists frequently maintain that feminist methods enjoin researchers to engage with the contextual (or ‘relative’) nature of lived experience, meaning, and truth (e.g. Cohn 2013; Moser and Clark 2001; Sharoni 2001; Wibben 2011, 2016); or, in other words, they have claimed that their idiographic focus provides a corrective against the (neo-)positivist focus on developing objective, (quasi-) nomothetic generalisations/identifying causal laws. Wibben, for instance, suggests that decontextualisation ‘is central to [scientific] approaches striving for objectivity by presenting only what is seen or perceived – without comment or interpretation’ (2011, p. 19). In fact, she approvingly quotes Nancy J. Hirschmann’s claim that ‘[c]ontext is what makes meaning possible’ and ‘meaning makes reality’ (ibid., p. 27). Such claims are frequently accompanied by radical efforts to counter decontextualised, a-social/under-socialised, liberal understandings of human beings. As Natasha Marhia argues, liberal humanism portrays human beings as ‘stable, bounded subject[s]’ and ‘autonomous, rational chooser[s]’ (2013, p. 26). In contrast, constructivist authors claim that this portrayal (1) has been ‘extrapolated from the highly individualistic competitive behavior of Western men in the marketplace’ (Tickner 2005, p. 2177), (2) obscures ‘the matrices of power through which individuals become socially differentiated’ (Marhia 2013, p. 19), and (3) fails to account for how these differentiations ‘can function in exclusionary ways’ (ibid., p. 22). Hence, liberal humanism is understood as a framework that is unable to account for the fact that an individual’s security is ‘to a large extent a function of their social situatedness, their location in a web of interpersonal and social relationships […] and intersecting fields of discourse’ (ibid.).

In summary, constructivists FSS authors conceive of modernist (philosophy of) science as a text or discourse that is complicit in the reproduction of gendered prejudices, biases, and injustices. As a result, they have become increasingly sceptical of the idea that ‘we can locate anything morally and politically worth redeeming or reforming in the scientific world view, its underlying epistemology, or the practices it legitimates’ (Harding in Wibben 2011, p. 18). Importantly, this stance departs from humanist critiques of science, as it rejects their claim that ‘the natural and human sciences are fundamentally different’ (ibid., p. 32). Wibben’s narrative approach, for instance, suggests that one of the main errors of humanism is the fact that it tries to ‘redefine rather than dissolve Enlightenment dualisms’ (ibid.). Instead, constructivists propose what we might term an anti-dualistic universalisation of hermeneutics that ‘takes the text (or discourse) as its unit of analysis’ (Norris in Gentry 2016, p. 25). In contrast with the scientific emphasis on facts and their verification and/or falsification this approach endeavours to examine the political effects of ‘adopting one mode of representation over another’ (Milliken in ibid.). This aim is, of course, characteristic of significant parts of the broader constructivist literature as well. Indeed, constructivist FSS – in its disavowals of mainstream/scientific methods, dualistic thought, essentialism, foundationalism, modernist/liberal humanism, etc. – has self-evidently mirrored the philosophico-methodological orientation that is now generally associated with the cultural turn.

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.

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).

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.

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

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].

Ann Tickner argued that whereas the Feminists are inclined to critical theory, mainstream IR is oriented towards problem solving theory. As a result, Tickner argued that Realism takes the world as it finds it and accepts the current order as its framework. Moreover, Tickner argued that whereas Feminists reject prefer humanist and philosophical traditions taking spatial and temporal attributes into account, Realists rely on positivist epistemologies taking the natural sciences as the models to follow. Lastly, Tickner argues that whereas Feminism is associated with the social construction of reality whereas Realists opt for an atomistic, asocial conception of behavior determined by the laws of nature (Tickner 1997). Against the criticisms of Ann Tickner, Robert Keohane argued that only a limited number of major IR theorists are oriented towards problem-solving, positivist and asocial (Keohane 1998, 194). Keohane focuses on Morgenthau since most of the criticisms of Tickner concentrates on him. Keohane argues that since Morgenthau was a refuge from Nazism, he was not satisfied with the prevailing world order of the late 1930’s and 1940’s as a framework of analysis. Moreover, Morgenthau had an intensely normative purpose: to prevent the reoccurrence of war generated by ideologies such as fascism and communism. Kenneth N. Waltz, the leader in Neo-Realist Theory, underlined the importance of socialization in the world politics and as a result it not appropriate to regard him an advocate of asocial theories (Keohane 1998, 194). Against the last criticism of Tickner, Keohane argued that “no serious student of international relations expect to discover meaningful universal laws that operate deterministically, since they recognize that no generalization is meaningful without specification of its scope conditions. One can recognize that knowledge is socially constructed without giving up the efforts to widen intersubjective agreement on important issues” (Keohane 1998, 194).

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.

If we accept that gender is the social meaning attached to the shape of our bodies, we can begin to understand why it is that feminist IR scholars insist that gender is not something we add to the study of world politics, but rather is integral to its functioning. That is, you cannot ignore (or abstract) the ways that gender informs and affects the practices of world politics. Gender is, on this view, not only a noun (i.e., an identity) and a verb (i.e., a way to look at the world, as in the phrase ‘gendering global politics’) but also a logic, which is produced by and productive of the ways in which we understand and perform global politics. This chapter wants to explore further the issue of gender and the body, and to suggest that the relationship between sex and gender is not as straightforward as it is commonly represented. [T]he genital area accounts for only 1 percent of the surface area of the body. But – 1 percent or not – genitals carry an enormous amount of cultural weight in the meanings that are attached to them, and I would argue that they constitute nearly 100 percent of what we, as both cultural members and as producers of cultural knowledge, come to understand and assume about the body’s sex and gender. (Valentine and Wilchins 1997: 215) We in the Anglophone world conventionally share an ontological assumption of the duality of gender: humans (and most other living things, for that matter) come in either ‘M’ or ‘F’. This is best described as a commitment, most often unconscious, to dimorphism: the assumption that human beings can be easily and unprob- lematically divided into two (di) distinct categories based on their physical forms (morphism). This essential separation informs the ways in which we think about the body and also the ways in which we think about a host of social and political events and relationships that we conceive of as being ‘to do’ with the body – for example, marriage ceremonies, parenting, sports, even eating. Because the separation occurs at a subconscious level, we are not even aware most of the time that our preconceptions about bodies are influencing how and what we eat, what sports we think we should or shouldn’t learn at school and who other people should and shouldn’t sleep with. The crucial insight of this book is that these assumptions about bodies are intrinsically, inherently related to the study and practices of global politics, because global politics is studied and practised by gendered bodies. It is very comforting to think of the body as something that we cannot change,3 something that does not affect our social or political lives, or even not to think of it at all. Conventional contemporary theories of International Relations do not speak much of bodies because the individual does not matter – only collectives of individuals known as ‘nations’ feature, and only then insofar as they are assumed congruent with the state (hence ‘nation-state’). Admittedly, in classical realist theory, representations of state behaviours draw heavily on ideas relating to ‘human nature’ (Morgenthau 1952: 963). Classical realism claims as its antecedents theorists of ‘human nature’ such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and appeals to logics of ‘human nature’ to explain self-interest and rationality as ‘evidenced’ by the unitary state. However, the ‘human nature’ under discussion is, on closer inspection, the nature of ‘man’ (see Morgenthau 1973: 15–16). ‘Men’ feature, then, but only inasmuch as they are abstract universalised individuals; men as bodies do not enter into discussion. This is largely due to the conventional understanding of the body as natural rather than social or political. However, as Chris Weedon explains, ‘[t]he appeal to the “natural” is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking, but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future’ (1997: 3, emphasis in original). Formulating a politics of the body, or a perspective on global politics that takes the body seriously, requires that we think carefully about how the body manifests in our understandings of international relations. ‘Formerly, the body was dominantly conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, primarily physiological reality. Today, more and more scholars have come to regard the body as a historical, plural, culturally mediated form’ (Bordo 2003: 288). This claim is a useful starting point for thinking about the body in global politics: how and in what ways is the body mediated? How have our understandings of ‘appropriate’ bodies changed over time? How do variously located practices of global politics mediate and situate bodies differently? As Michel Foucault argues, ‘the body is . . . directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (1977: 26). If this is the case, then we need to understand the ceremonies and signs, and acknowledge that our understanding is affected by the bodies that carry and are carried by them. This is not a politics of aesthetics, that is, how the body looks in specific circumstances. In this volume we do investigate how bodies are represented, but also interrogate the political practices through which bodies come to matter at all in global politics.

Inter-state interaction: does gender hierarchy shape political processes? The third manifestation of international system structure, according to Waltz, is that structure shapes the political processes among units, and insures the basic continuity of political processes so long as the structure remains. Though there are a number of political processes between states that could be discussed as related to gender hierarchy, including diplomacy (Enloe 2000), interstate jurisprudence (Charlesworth et al. 1991), and international institutions (Moser and Moser 2005), this brief exploration will focus on two aspects: competitive power between states generally and militarization specifically. As mentioned in the last section, a patriarchal social order in the international system incentivizes unit competition. The international system gender hierarchy is also manifested in the processes by which that competition takes place. Particularly, feminist scholars have argued that the gendered competition among states selects for a particular (masculinized) sort of power (dominance). Allen (2000) delineates three sorts of power: power-over, or dominance, the sort of power that is most recognized in the international arena; but also power-to (the ability to act contrary to dominant forces despite their preponderance or power-over); and power-with (the ability of weaker actors to act together for counter- hegemonic purposes). If power is the driving force behind interstate relations and global politics (an assumption made by much if not most of IR theory and most structural theory), then seeing power as power-over means that the accumulation of power is necessarily competitive and zero-sum, making conflict likely if not necessary as power-seeking states for relative position. Viewing power as zero-sum also presumes a stark and delineable distinction between self(state) and other(state) where accumulated power is a resource the advantages of which can be confined to its accumulator. This narrow view dominates interstate processes, where ‘gendered power is the victory of certain ideas over others in social [and political] inter- action because they are associated with valorized gender’ (Sjoberg 2006a, 33). In this way, gender ‘a particular kind of power relation central to understanding international processes’ (Steans 1998, 5). States that lack power-over are not necessarily powerless, but alternative, non-competitive versions of power are feminized and devalued in the international arena in competitions for masculinized dominance. This is why, in states’ competitions, in war, trade, or sport, the winner’s masculinity is implicitly and often explicitly affirmed, while the loser’s masculinity is subordinated or doubted. Other processes are possible, however. As Allen argues, ‘to think about power solely in terms of domination neglects y empowerment’ (Allen 1999, 122). While, ‘by emphasizing plurality and community [feminist theory] consciously seeks to distance power from domination’ and understand power collaboratively, the gender-hierarchical international system is blind to such an alternative (Allen 1999). Policy options like empathy (Sylvester 1994), positive-sum collaboration (Lennie 1999), unilaterally deconstructing the cycle of violence (Elshtain 1992), care (Robinson 2011), or empowerment (Hill Collins 2000) are often outside of states’ (perceived) toolboxes because the gendered system selects for power-over rather than power-to or power-with as a political process among units. The dominance of power-over as how states relate is relatively stable so long as the system remains gender hierarchical. Feminist scholars have seen gender hierarchy inspiring power-over relationships despite other possibilities in human rights discourses in Latin America (Brysk 2000), international interactions with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Sjoberg 2006a), the United States in the ‘war on terror’ (Young 2003), in Asia-Pacific Relations (D’Costa and Lee-Koo 2008), among states in post-Cold War Eastern Europe (Waylen 1994), and inter-Arab League relations (Tessler and Warriner 1997). Countless other examples from realist analyses of foreign policy- making show the dominance of competitive approaches to power among states; feminist work suggests that the source of the dominance of these approaches is in gendered competition as a political process, possibly inspired by structural gender hierarchy in the international system. If gendered competitions through power-over are one political process that international system gender hierarchy can be seen to shape, a number of related processes can also be discussed in these terms.19 For the purposes of space, here, we will discuss one, militarization. Peterson and Runyan (1999, 258) defined militarization as ‘processes by which characteristically military practices are extended into the civilian arena.’ Though war is an essential condition of militarism – the apex or climax – militarization is much broader than war, activating an underlying system of institutions, practices, and values. Feminists have pointed out that the militarization pervasive in global politics ‘occurs through gendered workings of power’ (Enloe 1993, 246). In the gendered process of militarization, military–industrial complexes need men to be willing to kill and die on behalf of their states to prove their manhood and women to behave as properly subservient to meet the needs of militaries (Enloe 1983, 212; Peterson and Runyan 1999, 118). Militarization is shaped by gender hierarchy in its aims (competitive power-over), its means (the military–industrial complex), its language (of strength and domination), and its impacts (which disproportionately affect women).

Gender hierarchy as a/the cause of war Seeing the international system as gender-hierarchical suggests different understandings of when, how, and why war occurs than those currently dominant in IR theory and Security Studies. First, appropriating a Clause- witzian observation, war can be seen as politics by other means. If gender hierarchy is a structural feature of the international system and a key organizing principle in dictating state identity, interaction, and relative position, then conflicts between states can be characterized as conflicts within/about the gendered order of the international structure. Conflict can be seen as, at least in part, gendered posturing between actors jock- eying for a higher position along the gendered sociopolitical hierarchy among states. Conflict is not, as realists argue, a competition for survival (an explanation which has always been somewhat unsatisfactory given the relative inequality of states and the self-help behavior of states at no risk of failing to survive). Instead, it is a competition where states, as gendered actors in a gendered system, are out to dominate rather than to survive, and are more interested in dominance than prudence. For example, Haynes notes that Soviet World War II-era socialist realist film characterizes the Nazi breaking of the non-aggression pact in terms of gender, where Nazi Germany’s hypermasculinity would ultimately be its downfall (2003, 7). States do not look to continue to exist or to end others’ existence, they look to affirm their masculinity (and protect their feminine elements) while feminizing others. When we think of structural gender hierarchy as a key part of explaining state behavior, governments that risk their survival for honor (like the Belgians or the Melians before them) do not appear so singular. Second, and following, then, gender hierarchy can be seen as a/the permissive cause of war. Wendt (1999) was correct in arguing that there is nothing inherent about anarchy that makes the international system conflictual, but perhaps too quick in looking for ‘cultures of’ that anarchic structure. A third theoretical path, the one I argue holds the most explanatory potential, is that there is a structural factor other than or in addition to anarchy in the international system which can explain the conflictual nature of the international system. I suggest that gender hierarchy is such a structural factor. Some scholars might see little theoretical progress in the assertion that gender hierarchy (rather than anarchy) might be a permissive cause of war. I argue that even if this supposition did not add predictive value to theorizing global politics, it would be of value for its explanatory power. Gender hierarchy, though it manifests itself in different ways at different times in different contexts, consistently organizes social and political value on the basis of (perceived) gender and normally valorizes characteristics associated with (hegemonic) masculinities over characteristics associated with (subordinated) femininities. As such, regardless of the specific content of the competition, units within the system (states) are in constant competition to prove their masculinities and deny (or protect) their femininities, in whatever configuration. Since gender-based characteristics are often measured relatively, this incentivizes competition and conflict in the inter- national system. Even if this explanation predicted competition the same way that understanding the international system as anarchic did, it would be useful to think about the influence of gender to the extent that it exists. I suggest there is more to it, however. The third potential implication of system structural gender hierarchy is that it functions differently than anarchy as a permissive cause of war, and potentially adds predictive ability as well as improving explanatory value. This is because variations among states’ ideal-typical understandings of genders can account for variations in the level of competition and bellicosity of states within the gender hierarchical structure of the international system. Therefore, it is possible that structural gender hierarchy has something to say not only about the causes of war, but also about the causes of wars and the variations among them. Genders in the gender hierarchy among states vary both at the system- level and within the system. If gender hierarchy is the structural property of the international system, which shapes political processes, the particular gender tropes along the hierarchy and the relative position thereof both differ among units (states) and change over time despite the constant nature of structural gender hierarchy. Put differently, a fundamental limitation of most structural explanations for war is that they are only structural explanations and therefore only a permissive cause, since whatever makes them structural makes them immovable. As a result, what Waltz identifies as ‘other causes’ are necessary to explain the occurrence of wars and the variation among them. A more parsimonious way to account for the frequent occurrence of wars alongside the frequent non-occurrence of wars is to look for a structural feature of global politics, which is at once structural (constant, ordering) and varies (accounting for when states fight and when they do not). Systemic gender hierarchy provides such a structural explanation, as gender as an ordering principle is constant, even as the genders and their orders are fungible. Therefore, and fourth, it is possible to see that gender hierarchy as a structural feature of the international system predicts state behavior differently (and potentially more precisely) than seeing the international system as an anarchy (alone). While structural gender hierarchy predicts the existence of war (the question that Waltz was interested in), it also has the potential to do some accounting for wars. The next section of this article briefly discusses some potential hypotheses which arise.

(J. Ann, What is your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions International Studies Quarterly Vol 49 No 1 March)

Feminists claim that the lack of gender equality, which they believe exists in all states, albeit to widely varying extents, cannot be understood without reference to historical, gender-laden divisions between public and private spheres. At the time of the foundation of the modern western state, and coincidentally the beginnings of global capitalism, women were not included as citizens but consigned to the private space of the household; thus, they were removed both from the public sphere of politics and the economic sphere of production (Peterson, 1992:40-44). Women were not included in the original social contract by most contract theorists in the western tradition; rather, they were generally subsumed under male heads of households with no legal rights of their own (Pateman, 1988). This public/private distinction, upon which the modern western state was founded, has set up hierarchical gendered structures and role expectations, that impede the achievement of true gender equality, even in states where most legal barriers to women's equality have been removed. For example, when women enter the workforce, they do so with the expectation that they will continue to perform necessary reproductive and caring tasks, thus increasing their workload significantly because of this double burden. More importantly, this reinforces an expectation that may carry over into the types of paid employment, such as childcare and social services, considered most suitable for them. When women enter politics, particularly in areas of foreign policy, they enter an already constructed masculine world where role expectations are defined in terms of adherence to preferred masculine attributes such as rationality, autonomy, and power. It is for such reasons that women continue to be under-represented in positions of political and economic power even in societies long committed to formal equality and equal opportunity legislation. Measures, such as women's participation in politics and percentage of women in the workforce, do not adequately capture the fact that states have been constituted historically as gendered entities with all the attendant problems that this has created for women. Gender inequality, therefore, is not a single variable that can be adequately indexed or measured statistically; rather, it is a historically contingent, complex confluence of socio-cultural power relationships, including associated subjective understandings.39 Such relationships are not easily transferable into numerical data. (17)

(J. Ann, You just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists , International Studies Quarterly 41)

Given that most contemporary feminist scholarship takes gender—which embodies relationships of power inequality—as its central category of analysis, the fact that the meaning of gender is so often misunderstood is, I believe, central to problems of misunderstanding and miscommunication. Almost all feminists who write about international relations use gender in a social constructivist sense, a move that many see not only as necessary for overcoming gender discrimination, but also as a way of opening avenues for communication by avoiding some of the threatened responses illustrated above. As Sandra Harding (1986:17-8) has suggested, gendered social life is produced through three distinct processes: assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies, appealing to these gender dualisms to organize social activity, and dividing necessary social activities between different groups of humans. She refers to these three aspects of gender as gender symbolism, gender structure, and individual gender. Feminists define gender, in the symbolic sense, as a set of variable but socially and culturally constructed characteristics—such as power, autonomy, rationality, and public—that are stereotypically associated with masculinity. Their opposites— weakness, dependence, emotion, and private—are associated with femininity. There is evidence to suggest that both women and men assign a more positive value to masculine characteristics. Importantly, definitions of masculinity and femininity are relational and depend on each other for their meaning; in other words, what it means to be a “real man” is not to display “womanly” weaknesses. Since these characteristics are social constructions, it is entirely possible for Margaret Thatcher to act like an iron lady or a “real man”; in fact, many feminists would argue that such behavior is necessary for both women and men to succeed in the tough world of international politics. As Tannen (1990:43) claims, girls and boys grow up in different worlds of words, but gender goes beyond language: it is a symbolic system that shapes many aspects of our culture. As Carol Cohn (1993:229) has suggested, even if real men and women do not fit these gender “ideals,” the existence of this system of meaning affects us all—both our interpretations of the world and the way the world understands us. As Joan Scott (1986:1069) claims, while the forms gender relations take across different cultures may vary, they are almost always unequal; therefore, gender, in the structural sense, is a primary way of signifying relationships of power. Although gender is frequently seen as belonging in the household and, therefore, antithetical to the “real” business of politics, a reason why it is often seen as irrelevant to IR, Scott argues that it is constructed in the economy and the polity through various institutional structures that have the effect of “naturalizing,” and even legalizing, women’s inferior status. Recent feminist writings that deal with issues of race and class problematize these power relationships still further.9 Individual gender relations enter into and are constituent elements in every aspect of human experience (Flax, 1987:624). Jane Flax reminds us that, while feminism is about recovering women’s activities, it must also be aware of how these activities are constituted through the social relations in which they are situated. Therefore, gender is not just about women; it is also about men and masculinity, a point that needs to be emphasized if scholars of international relations are to better understand why feminists claim that it is relevant to their discipline and why they believe that a gendered analysis of its basic assumptions and concepts can yield fruitful results. (614-15)

(J. Ann, What is your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions International Studies Quarterly Vol 49 No 1 March)

The "message that feminists are seeking to deliver" is, therefore, a more profound challenge to the discipline than Keohane implies; moreover, the questions that feminists deem important are typically not adequately answerable within a conventional social scientific framework. Feminist questions challenge the core assumptions of the discipline and deconstruct its central concepts; many of them are constitutive rather than causal.'7 Working from the discovery of the gendered biases in state-centric security thinking, feminists have redefined the meaning of (in)security to include the effects of structural inequalities of race, class, and gender. Similarly, on the bases of theoretical critiques of the gendered political uses of the public/private distinction, feminists have rearticulated the meaning of democracy and have tried to reconstitute its practice to include the participation of women and men in all the political and economic processes that affect their daily lives (Ackerly, 2000:178-203). While not rejecting in principle the use of quantitative data, feminists have recognized how past behavioral realities have been publicly constituted in stategenerated indicators in biased, gendered ways, using data that do not adequately reflect the reality of women's lives and the unequal structures of power within which they are situated. For this reason they rely on hermeneutic, historical, narrative, and case study methodological orientations rather than on causal analysis of unproblematically defined entities and social relations. Importantly, feminists use gender as a socially constructed and variable category of analysis to investigate these dynamics."8 They suggest that gender inequality and other social relations of domination and subordination have been among the fundamental building blocks on which, to varying extents, the publicly recognized features of states, their security relationships, and the global economy have been constructed and on which they continue to operate to varying degrees. In contrast to an ontology that depicts states as individualistic autonomous actors-an ontology typical of conventional social science perspectives on IR and of liberal thinking more generally--feminist ontologies are based on social relations that are constituted by historically unequal political, economic, and social structures.19 Unlike conventional social science IR, which draws on models from economics and the natural sciences to explain the behavior of states in the international system, IR feminists have used sociological analyses that begin with individuals and the hierarchical social relations in which their lives are situated. Whereas much of IR is focused on factors that explain the behavior of states, feminists are motivated by the goal of investigating the lives of women within states or international structures in order to change or reconstitute them. Given these different ontological presuppositions and emancipatory goals, evaluation of feminist research according to the scientific standards articulated by Keohane is problematic. (6-7)