The valorization of masculinity necessitates the devaluation of femininity which fosters militarism- war becomes a continuum that is impacted on gender lines

(Cynthia, May 2010, The City University London, UK and University of Warwick, UK, Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12:2, 139-157)

Ethno-nationalist issues, foreign-ness, the expression of the perceived security interests of an ethnic or national self in relation to its others, is a second major cause of war (Horowitz 1985; Gurr and Harff 1994; Hutchinson 2005). It is often an antecedent cause, in Fogarty’s terms, if not an immediate one. Raids against the ones outside the walls of the first city states, the barbarians on the borders of the early empires. Later, the Infidel. Some contemporary wars are fought by an insurgent ethnic group trying to get recognition inside a larger polity, looking for more autonomy or its own state: as Chechen separatists seek to escape from the Russian Federation while the Russian military mobilize to stop them. How can this kind of racializing cause in war be detected? By listening to what the ideologues are saying, the religious leaders. What is the propaganda, who is putting it out? What names are claimed, what names are being imposed on others? ¶ By contrast, patriarchal gender relations as a cause of war, I would suggest, most often fall in the ‘root cause’ or ‘favourable conditions’ category, and here we have to pay attention to culture. With the exception of the abduction of the mythical Helen of Troy (and the spurious attempt of George W. and Laura Bush to portray the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as a war to save Afghan women from repression by the Taliban) wars are not fought ‘for’ gender issues in the way they are sometimes fought ‘for’ oil resources, or ‘for’ national autonomy. Instead, they foster militarism and militarization. They make war thinkable. They make peace difficult to sustain. As noted above, women close to militarization and war are observant of cultures, cultures as they manifest themselves in societies before, in and after armed conflicts. If we think of the war system as having a cyclical or spiralling life, as a continuum over time, proceeding from the discourse of militarist ideology, through material investment in militarization, aggressive policy-making, outbreaks of war, short firefights, prolonged stalemates, ceasefires, demobilization, periods of provisional peace, anxieties about security, rearmament and so on, and if we look closely at the social ¶ relations in which individuals and groups enact these various steps, that is where it is possible to see gender relations at work, pushing the wheel around. The above account of a feminist standpoint, generating an understanding of war that contradicts the hegemonic view, is derived first and foremost from my empirical research among women’s antiwar organizations and networks. But, closely involved with that movement, there is a world of feminist scholars (men as well as women) who have striven over the past three decades to articulate in a growing library of written work the understandings arising among women war survivors and activists. Many collected editions bring together research and reporting from a range of different countries and periods (for instance, Cooke and Woollacott 1993; Lorentzen and Turpin 1998; Moser and Clark 2001; Giles and Hyndman 2004). Research-based monographs show the influence of gender relations at points along the continuum of militarization and war. Robert Dean (2001), for instance, in his study of the Kennedy administration taking the USA to war in Vietnam, shows masculinism at work in preparation for war. Susan Jeffords (1989) in The Remasculinization of America, shows, through an analysis of films and novels, national efforts to salvage masculine pride after such a defeat. Many firsthand accounts show in painful detail how, in military training, patriarchal masculinity lends itself to exploitation for war-fighting, and how violence is eroticized in masculine fantasy (Theweleit 1987). Together such studies articulate the feminist perception that patriarchal gender relations are among the ‘root causes’ of ¶ militarism and war.