Women and War

Considering the Role of Gender in Conflict Studies

In her famous 1990 book, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, Cynthia Enloe provocatively asks international relations scholars: “where are the women?” This is quite the query to pose to a field so dominated by arguments emphasizing the causal role of material structures and systems, and yet scholarly developments in the past thirty years have vindicated Enloe. Indeed in some ways Enloe’s question does not go far enough. It is not just the gendered roles of women that shape interstate and substate violence but the gendered roles of men as well. Put simply, a failure to account for gender leads to major blind spots that undermine our ability to understand a wide variety of issues related to international security and conflict.

Perhaps the most obvious place to start is substate violence. As Hudson et al. show, there is a wide variety of observational data linking greater levels of gender equality within states to measures of state security and peacefulness. Moreover, they find that levels of violence against women within a state is the single best predictor of the state’s bellicosity. While most of the evidence they cite is merely observational, it is corroborated by other studies that connect societal norms around gender to state aggression. For example, Hudson and Boer show that societies with “bare branches,” large populations of men unable to find romantic partners due to societal preferences for sons over daughters, are more prone to petty crime and civil strife. Moreover, the low-status and often underemployed “bare branches” are easily manipulable by the state, which can use them for dangerous military adventures abroad. After all, their low societal standing makes them expendable. Given these findings, it is not surprising that Caprioli, drawing on data from 1960-2001, finds a strong correlation between gender inequities within a country and that country’s propensity to experience intrastate conflict.

Of course, much of this evidence is observational, limiting its ability to causally link gender inequities to violence. But the overwhelming number of similar findings makes it difficult to suggest that women play no role in influencing patterns of conflict initiation. For one, there is compelling evidence that the democratic peace—the finding that democracies do not fight each other—is actually a suffragist peace. As Conover and Sapiro note, “although American women as a group can hardly be classified as pacifist, they certainly appear less militaristic than American men.” Findings such as this led Barnhart, Trager, Saunders, and Dafoe to examine the phenomenon more systematically, and they find that it is actually not democracy but rather the female vote that explains the observed democratic peace. They replicate the survey findings of Conover and Sapiro across a wide range of countries and also reveal a striking difference in how men and women impose audience costs on leaders. As they put it, “while most men impose audience costs because of inconsistency and the threat to reputation that this implies, most women impose audience costs for belligerency.” In short, male and female voters tend to punish leaders for different things. Finally, Barnhart et al. estimate several regression models, some of which are shown in the figures below, that all support the hypothesis that it is really female voters that are driving the democratic peace.

We have fairly compelling evidence, therefore, that women tend to be more pacific in their foreign policy preferences than men. But that does not mean that any given woman in a position of power will be dovish. Just look at leaders such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, or Golda Meir. Indeed, in arenas traditionally dominated by men, there are likely powerful selection pressures that mean that the women who are successful in these settings are likely to have achieved their success, at least in part, by acting more similarly to men. Consequently, it is of little surprise that Koch and Fulton, drawing on data from 1970 to 2000, find that democracies led by a female executive were associated with higher levels of defense spending and experienced greater external conflict. In contrast, multiple studies (Caprioli 2000; Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Regan and Paskeviciute 2003) have found that countries in which women have greater access to political power are associated with lower levels of defense spending and less external conflict. This suggests that, collectively, women tend to have pacifying effects on a nation’s foreign policy, but individual female leaders operating in otherwise male-dominated environments are generally worse at promoting peace because they must conform to extreme stereotypes of masculinity.

Dube and Harish’s terrific study on queens and state bellicosity in medieval Europe lends further support for this interpretation. Unlike many of the studies in this genre, they are able to causally identify the effect of female leaders through the use of an instrumental variable design. Exploiting the presence of first-born sons and the number of daughters as instruments, they find that medieval polities led by queens were more belligerent than those led by kings (especially if the queen leading the medieval state had a male consort). They also find that queens, on average, gained more territory than their male peers, further supporting the notion that queens were more aggressive leaders. But equally interesting are their findings regarding other leaders’ treatment of female rulers. Specifically, unmarried queens experienced a larger number of attacks from other states than did kings. This, of course, suggests that queens without a consort were perceived by their male peers as politically and militarily weak.

Collectively, these studies suggest that much of the “gendered peace” is social in nature. After all, despite being bellicose and more effective conquerors, unmarried queens were subject to greater levels of aggression from neighboring states simply because their gender led male rulers to discount them. Similarly, women operating in male-dominated domains are either compelled to adopt male-coded behavioral traits to justify their position or, perhaps more likely, are selected into the position because they already possess traits favored by male gatekeepers. But there is also evidence that at least some of this observed behavior is mediated by biological impulses. For example, research by Cassar, Wordofa, and Zhang finds that women compete as much as men when incentives are not pecuniary but rather are oriented around child welfare. This observed phenomenon is one potential explanation for why Israeli women are actually more hawkish than Israeli men: if they feel that rocket attacks on Israeli cities imperil their progeny, they may perceive the threat of terror more acutely than their male peers.

Of course, women also shape how wars are fought. What is interesting here is, again, how significant social norms are in influencing women’s roles in warfighting. Perhaps the most famous work in this vein is Thomas’s study of suicide bombers. She finds that in more conservative societies, female suicide bombers produce far higher casualties because they are better placed to infiltrate sensitive areas without arousing suspicion or being subjected to invasive searches. Similar research on peacekeeping finds that gender diversity among peacekeepers improves efficacy by ensuring that women in combat zones have access to peacekeeping forces who share their gender. This enhances trust and, consequently, leads female civilians to more readily volunteer information that peacekeepers can then use to prevent violence.

But women are not just combatants within war; they are also victims of war. Systematic sexual violence is a particularly heinous, but not uncommon, feature of civil conflict that primarily affects women. A variety of theories, ranging from those positing the use of rape as a tactic to shame and terrorize populations to those suggesting this behavior simply derives from male combatants’ exploitation of weak state authority in pursuit of sexual gratification, have been advanced. But most of these explanations have significant empirical problems. Most notably, sexual violence does not strongly correlate with other measures of violent criminality during periods of civil conflict. Thus, it is unlikely that men are simply exploiting the lawlessness of war to pursue unwanted sexual interactions because, if this were the case, they should also be committing crimes such as looting and murder at greater rates.

Biological explanations similarly struggles to account for the observation that the RUF in Sierra Leone had the highest percentage of female fighters of any armed group yet was also the organization that employed sexual violence most prolifically. What is even more surprising, at least if one were to buy the arguments around innate biological differences, is that field interviews reveal that women in the RUF were active participants in gang rapes, encouraging male perpetrators, restraining female victims, and raping female captives with objects. Interestingly, the best evidence suggests that rape is neither a top-down tactic to promote terror nor a bottom-up phenomenon driven by male sexual urges. Instead, rape primarily occurs because it serves as a socialization mechanism. This is valuable because many guerilla groups bring together poorly trained and unmotivated individuals, including child soldiers, who struggle to form cohesive units. Given this, it is plausible that gang rape serves as a form of socialization because, “when trapped in a group of hostile strangers, individuals are likely to choose participation in costly group behavior over estrangement from their new peers.” It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that RUF, the aforementioned group most linked to sexual violence, is also the group that most heavily relied on kidnapping to fill its ranks.

Of course, the debate over women in combat is not limited to guerilla conflicts and insurgencies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Many Western militaries have now fully opened up their ranks to women, with the US finally allowing women to serve in all combat roles in 2018. These moves have been politically contested and have inspired a growing research agenda on the integration of women into previously all-male units. Indeed, one of my friends here at Oxford is writing her dissertation on this very topic (and gave a very interesting interview that I highly recommend).

To conclude, one cannot analyze war in a materialist vacuum. Issues of gender permeate the phenomenon of conflict, influencing everything from substate violence to conflict initiation to wartime tactics and combat effectiveness. This is not to say that gender is a sufficient explanation of conflict, but it is an absolutely necessary component of one. Both biological drivers and socially constructed norms of masculinity and femininity have worked to shape the way that humans engage in combat and war, and thus any social scientist seeking to study conflict should, at least occasionally, think back on Enloe’s question: where are the women?