Sjoberg advocates replacing righteousness in just war thinking with dialogue and empathy for the good of human safety everywhere and concludes with alternative visions of Gulf War policies, inspired by feminist just war theory."--BOOK JACKET.

Highlighting Iraqi women's voices, this is an examination of women, gender and feminisms in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion.

The Lonely Soldier--the inspiration for the documentary The Invisible War--vividly tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006--and of the challenges they faced while fighting a war painfully alone. More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness, instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival. As one female soldier said, "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine." In The Lonely Soldier, Benedict tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. She follows them from their childhoods to their enlistments, then takes them through their training, to war and home again, all the while setting the war's events in context. We meet Jen, white and from a working-class town in the heartland, who still shakes from her wartime traumas; Abbie, who rebelled against a household of liberal Democrats by enlisting in the National Guard; Mickiela, a Mexican American who grew up with a family entangled in L.A. gangs; Terris, an African American mother from D.C. whose childhood was torn by violence; and Eli PaintedCrow, who joined the military to follow Native American tradition and to escape a life of Faulknerian hardship. Between these stories, Benedict weaves those of the forty other Iraq War veterans she interviewed, illuminating the complex issues of war and misogyny, class, race, homophobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of these stories is unique, yet collectively they add up to a heartbreaking picture of the sacrifices women soldiers are making for this country. Benedict ends by showing how these women came to face the truth of war and by offering suggestions for how the military can improve conditions for female soldiers-including distributing women more evenly throughout units and rejecting male recruits with records of violence against women. Humanizing, urgent, and powerful, The Lonely Soldier is a clarion call for change.

In the last decade the world has witnessed a rise in women's participation in terrorism. Women, Gender, and Terrorism explores women's relationship with terrorism, with a keen eye on the political, gender, racial, and cultural dynamics of the contemporary world. Throughout most of the twentieth century, it was rare to hear about women terrorists. In the new millennium, however, women have increas­ingly taken active roles in carrying out suicide bombings, hijacking air­planes, and taking hostages in such places as Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Chechnya. These women terrorists have been the subject of a substantial amount of media and scholarly attention, but the analysis of women, gender, and terrorism has been sparse and riddled with stereotypical thinking about women's capabilities and motivations. In the first section of this volume, contributors offer an overview of women's participation in and relationships with contemporary terrorism, and a historical chapter traces their involvement in the politics and conflicts of Islamic societies. The next section includes empirical and theoretical analysis of terrorist movements in Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, and Sri Lanka. The third section turns to women's involvement in al Qaeda and includes critical interrogations of the gendered media and the scholarly presentations of those women. The conclusion offers ways to further explore the subject of gender and terrorism based on the contributions made to the volume. Contributors to Women, Gender, and Terrorism expand our understanding of terrorism, one of the most troubling and complicated facets of the modern world.

Publisher Description

The war in Iraq has put the condition of Iraqi women firmly on the global agenda. For years, their lives have been framed by state oppression, economic sanctions and three wars. Now they must play a seminal role in reshaping their country's future for the twenty-first century. Nadje Al-Ali challenges the myths and misconceptions which have dominated debates about Iraqi women, bringing a much needed gender perspective to bear on the central political issue of our time. Based on life stories and oral histories of Iraqi women, she traces the history of Iraq from post-colonial independence, to the emergence of a women's movement in the 1950s, Saddam Hussein's early policy of state feminism to the turn towards greater social conservatism triggered by war and sanctions. Yet, the book also shows that, far from being passive victims, Iraqi women have been, and continue to be, key social and political actors. Following the invasion, Al-Ali analyses the impact of occupation and Islamist movements on women's lives and argues that US-led calls for liberation has led to a greater backlash against Iraqi women.

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective. Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general. Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online.Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies, this book delves into visual and text-based materials to unpack gender-based violence(s) perpetrated and experienced by both sexes within and beyond the conflict zone.

Women war criminals are far more common than we think. From the Holocaust to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to the Rwandan genocide, women have perpetrated heinous crimes. Few have been punished. These women go unnoticed because their very existence challenges our assumptions about war and about women. Biases about women as peaceful and innocent prevent us from "seeing" women as war criminals—and prevent postconflict justice systems from assigning women blame. Women as War Criminals argues that women are just as capable as men of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. In addition to unsettling assumptions about women as agents of peace and reconciliation, the book highlights the gendered dynamics of law, and demonstrates that women are adept at using gender instrumentally to fight for better conditions and reduced sentences when war ends. The book presents the legal cases of four women: the President (Biljana Plavšic), the Minister (Pauline Nyiramasuhuko), the Soldier (Lynndie England), and the Student (Hoda Muthana). Each woman's complex identity influenced her treatment by legal systems and her ability to mount a gendered defense before the court. Justice, as Steflja and Trisko Darden show, is not blind to gender.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women become victims of sexual violence in conflict zones around the world; in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, approximately 1,100 rapes are reported each month. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the causes, consequences and responses to sexual violence in contemporary armed conflict. It explores the function and effect of wartime sexual violence and examines the conditions that make women and girls most vulnerable to these acts both before, during and after conflict. To understand the motivations of the men (and occasionally women) who perpetrate this violence, the book analyzes the role played by systemic and situational factors such as patriarchy and militarized masculinity. Difficult questions of accountability are tackled; in particular, the case of child soldiers, who often suffer a double victimization when forced to commit sexual atrocities. The book concludes by looking at strategies of prevention and protection as well as new programs being set up on the ground to support the rehabilitation of survivors and their communities. Sexual violence in war has long been a taboo subject but, as this book shows, new and courageous steps are at last being taken Ð at both local and international level - to end what has been called the “greatest silence in history”.