Gender and Global Security

Gendered divisions of violence are the hierarchical dichotomies of self-other, us-them,

aggressive-passive, soldier- victim, and protector-protected that divide the world into
masculinized offenders and defenders and feminized populations over which they fight and
seek to conquer or defend. IR or Internal Relations was founded to end this war instead its
masculinist bias and imperialist commitments—born of its creation initially by elite,
Eurocentric men who made it a useful tool for elite, Eurocentric statesmen—have made it less
about ending war and more about controlling it and using it more effectively in the interests of
those in power. As what had been argued in the previous chapter politics is seen as enabling
power, then politics is the opposite of war, which shuts down debate in the face of the raw
power of might makes right. At the same time, both offenders and defenders need to justify
their actions by waging war in the name of those who cannot fight and thus are in need of and
worthy of protection (typically, a nation’s or group’s “own women and children”). Such
rationales for war are disturbed by the realities that “women and children” are now rarely
protected from direct violence in most contemporary wars and that the structural violence of
homelessness, hunger, disease, and so on visited by war, particularly in the global South, and
war spending affects especially civilian populations the world over. The association of peace
with the feminine and the association of war with the masculine have disadvantaged and
marginalized calls for and analyses of how to bring about peace, not only as the absence of
war and other forms of direct violence but also as an end of structural violence. Only by
addressing both direct and structural violence can the crisis of insecurity be reversed.