Despite the fact that conventional International Relations theory has generally dismissed or trivialised the role of gender identity in international politics, gender is present in the structuring of the small, day to-day administration of institutions that are instrumental in the international, and also of the interstate system structure as a whole. A critical feminist perspective in IR can provide an analysis of what gender is and how it is ideological, how our understanding of gender guides military policy (and how military policy in turn reproduces gender), and how the international system structure, the nation, and war are all gendered.

Gender is a hierarchical, structural power relation that shapes individual identities based on a set of beliefs, images, symbols and categories creating a distinction between the masculine and the feminine (Cohn, 2013, pp.3-5, p.11). Gender can also be thought of in ideological terms, as a system that justifies unequal access to material and cultural resources, and power and authority (ibid., pp.3-5). As Robert Cox asserts, theory is always for someone and for some purpose (Tickner, 1997, p.619), and traditional, western gender theory based on an innate, biological explanation for gender roles exemplifies this. Characteristics associated with men, masculinities, include strength, rationality, controlled emotions, intelligence, independence, courage, aggression, scientific and oriented towards achievement, while characteristics associated with women, femininities, include their antonyms such as passivity, softness, compromise, dependence and non-violence. (2013, p.6). Masculinity is valued, recognised and rewarded. If men are believed to possess the masculine qualities, it would then justify the differences of power and material/cultural resources available between them and women. The man, being strong,rational and aggressive yet controlled, is assumed to be better for law enforcement or leadership. Women, in this gendered division of labour, would be assumed to be better fit for domestic work, childcare and teaching. However, these qualities are not immutable, even if underlying assumptions may be deep-rooted, and are the product of socialisation with family and the community, and the influence of educational/religious institutions along with mass media (ibid., pp.8-9). Carol Cohn perceives it to be a “situated accomplishment”, the doing of social practices and discursive codes associated with being a man or a woman in a given setting, rather than something you inherently are (ibid., p.9). While gender is often seen as belonging to the household, a more critical perspective reveals the wider societal influence of the concept.

Gender is reproduced through and greatly impacts military policy both at the level of the military base. As Cynthia Enloe asserts, the military base is a “complicated microworld dependent on diverse women” including laundresses, soldiers, pilots, wives and sex workers (2014, pp.125-126). They each understand their position in the base, what they are supposed to be doing there, through the lens of gender, but also serve as an example of how gender intersects with other hierarchies. The experience of a foreign laundress is different to that of the wife of an officer, or to an enlisted woman. This is facilitated by various military policies crafted by the commander of each base to regulate social behaviour, such as civilian hiring policies, marriage policies and sexuality policies (ibid., pp.129-130). The role of men is also shaped by control over their masculinities, and drill sergeants instill and enforce militarization of soldiers through discipline, submerging their emotions, rewarding toughness and the capacity for violence, and encouraging camaraderie (ibid., pp.149-150), although a drill sergeant himself may exercise masculinity towards his recruits in a different manner to how he exercises masculinity towards his superior (2013, p.9). In these instances, gender identity is very important for the structure of the military, but also goes to show the ways in which it intersects with other identities. At the level of strategic decision-making for militaries, the consideration of gender relations and their regulation is also very important. The military wives problem, for example, is a question of how military policy should approach marriage. If the soldier’s spouse is present at the base, it is assumed that the soldier would cut down on drunkenness, indebtedness and sexual diseases which may trouble the efficacy of the soldier, yet it may also make him slower to mobilise and burden the armed forces with household responsibilities, along with fears that a dissatisfied wife may urge her husband not to reenlist (2014, pp.142-143). How the strategic heads approach the question of marriage, a gendered institution, and its relation to the military, will have effects on how their military functions, its expenses, efficacy and planning. Gender can also have effects on planning in other ways, such as when the Filipino antibases movement succeeded in persuading the Filipino government into shutting down the American naval base at Subic Bay in 1992 due to it exacerbating conditions that promoted prostitution among locals (ibid., p.165, p.169). This is an example of how gender is important in international politics, as the motivation for the closure of the military base cannot be understood in purely realist or liberal lenses as those theories dismiss attitudes relating to marriage, prostitution or other gendered institutions as relevant to the international.

Like realist, liberal and marxist theories of IR, it is possible to construct a feminist theory of IR which stresses the gendered structure of states, militarism and war, and the ways in which wars are caused by gender hierarchy (Sjoberg, 2012, p.11). Due to how naturalised and invisible the assumptions of gender are, it is “implicated in the fundamental, ongoing process of creating and conceptualising social structures” (ibid., p.13). Laura Sjoberg demonstrates how gender is embedded into the international structure as it specifies unit function, distributes capability of units, and produces processes for unit interaction (ibid.) The unit function is demonstrated by the fact that state identity is driven by gendered components among all states, such as the notions of chivalry, honour, shame and protection (ibid., p.15). The chivalric concept of protecting the weak, for example, is a way of framing wars where an ally comes to the defence of a smaller, feminised power in desperate need. For example, the “tough-but-tender” United States aiding Kuwait against the hypermasculine Iraqi Army (ibid., p.18). As for the distribution of capability, the patriarchal structure of the international incentivises competition between states as it selects for power-to/capacity to dominate as the most important form of power, creating a necessarily competitive and zero-sum international (ibid., p.26). States that lack power are feminised and devalued in the international (ibid.). However, the states do not look to extinguish their rivals but to affirm their masculinity, protect their own feminine elements, and feminise other states (ibid., 28). Wars, in that case, are “gender posturing” between states, jockeying for a higher position on the gender hierarchy (ibid.). This reveals that feminist IR theory can be normative and predictive, as gender is a key part of the international system structure, although feminist theory does not argue that it is the sole factor driving international politics.

Gendered structures can explain what drives war, but experience of war is also gendered. Men make the decisions, do the planning, and the fighting, while women raise sons, lose the men in their lives and have to take on responsibilities generally ascribed to the men in their communities during times of war (2013, p.1). Because we live in a dangerous world, men are assumed to be the natural protectors of women due to the masculinities and femininities that are imagined to define their role in society (2014, p.29). Likewise, the nation is also frequently expressed in feminine terms, as a motherland needing defence to not be violated by the enemy, and women are seen as representative of the nation in turn, being the reproducers of national, tribal and ethnic identities due to their roles as birthgivers (2013, p.14). During war, this can result in the targeting of women due to the association of women with the nation (ibid.). However, war also in turn reproduces gender as men are propagandised into becoming soldiers as it is assumed that to be masculine is synonymous to being a soldier. As men are militarised, the effects are felt before and after a war. Before the first gun shot, violence may begin as men are more violent, and following peace, while organised violence may end, crime and abuse from returning veteran men in their life may affect her in what is considered a “continuum of violence” (ibid., p.21). If forcefully displaced, a woman may find that the modal refugee is a male and necessary sanitary products are not available in camps. This demonstrates the gendered difference in the experience of war and how gender is reproduced through war through these differences.

Despite being naturalised, normalised, and invisible to an uncritical lens, gender does indeed make the world go round as it is embedded into all structures governing socialisation. Studying international relations can provide a different perspective on experiences in war, peace, and on the international system as a whole.

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Bibliography:

Cohn, C. (2013) Women and Wars. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Enloe, C. H. (2014). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. 2nd Edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Sjoberg, L. (2012). ‘Gender, structure, and war: what Waltz couldn’t see’. International Theory, 4(1), pp.1-38. Available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297191100025X

Tickner, A. (1997). ‘You just don’t understand: Troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists’. International Studies Quarterly, 41(4), pp.611-632. Available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2600855

True, J. (2010). ‘The Political Economy of Violence Against Women: A Feminist International Relations Perspective’. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 32(1), pp.39-59. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2010.10854436