Feminist analysis is necessary—gendered hierarchies are proven to be the strongest predictor of conflict

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