The largest death toll globally is caused by gender hierarchies

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