Feminist lens is key to understand the root cause of war

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