'War, Peace and Feminism' [PDF 157k] - University of Sussex

War, Peace and Feminism
Laura Turquet
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate two broad tendencies in International Relations, tendencies
that have substantial ramifications for the theory and the practice of the discipline. The first tendency
is that war is privileged over peace in the study of International Relations. This assertion must be
interrogated through an analysis of the historically developed epistemology and ontology of the
orthodox approach to the subject, from which I will demonstrate that war is treated as a natural state of
affairs in international relations, a theoretical inevitability that defines peace negatively as non-war.
The outcome of this theoretical position has important consequences for the practice of international
relations, i since possibilities of war as anything other than inevitable, and peace as anything other than
a precarious cease-fire in the anarchic international system, are decisively foreclosed. The second
tendency is that feminist accounts of war reinforce the privileged theoretical position of war over
peace. This assertion requires an analysis of the various strands of feminist writing on war and peace.
There is no single feminist approach, but, I will argue, the apparent plurality of ideas clustered around
the feminist theme share a failure to effectively critique the metatheoretical assumptions of the
orthodox position, which results in not only the reinscription of the gender subordination that they
appear to dispute, but also a continued privileging of the status of war as more ‘real’ in the world than
peace. As such, the attempts of feminists to make critical interventions on the subject are limited,
which in turn has implications for the possibility of imagining and creating a different world. For
clarity, I will identify the two tendencies I have outlined separately, but this is not to say that they are
unconnected. It is not wholly within the confines of this paper to fully explicate an alternative feminist
account of war, but through critique, in the final part of the paper, I hope to indicate the ways in which
feminists could reconceptualise International Relations to take account of the subordination of both
gender and peace in the world, as the basis for emancipatory theory and practice.
The privileging of war over peace can be observed on a day-to-day basis. How common is it to hear,
‘war now seems inevitable’ or ‘the path to war is irreversible’, and how rare to hear, ‘today, peace
broke out in the Middle East’ or ‘it seems that a cessation of violence is a certainty’. Whilst war is
described as an uncontrollable thing that takes on a life of its own, a thing that despite best-laid plans
can suddenly erupt, peace is fragile, a carefully constructed condition that seldom triumphs when the
spectre of war is present. In addition, aspects of the relationship between women and war are often
discussed: we frequently hear of the toll of apparently passive ‘womenandchildren’ ii as victims of war,
and women’s suitability for combat is questioned or their link with peace is made, as implied in
George W. Bush’s recent comment on the Middle East conflict, that ‘when an 18 year-old Palestinian
girl is induced to blow herself up, killing a 17 year-old Israeli girl, the future itself is dying’.
It is possible to establish that the orthodox approach to the discipline of International Relations, a
dominant set of theories that to a large extent inform the practice of international relations, constitutes
peace within war, so that peace is conceived as the absence of war, or not-war, a relation that seriously
delimits the possibilities of achieving peace in the world. In order to do this, it will be necessary for
me to demonstrate a number of factors involved. Firstly, I will outline the parameters of orthodox
theory, in terms of its central concepts, and more crucially, in terms of its historical development and
the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underpin it. Secondly, I will point to the
limitations that this method of theorisation imposes on our ability to construct alternative
understandings of the world, by examining what the orthodox view excludes. I will also establish the
link between theory and practice, in order to demonstrate that the limits of what is perceived as
possible in International Relations in theory delimit what is judged as realistic in practice.

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The early development of the discipline of International Relations was defined to a great extent in
terms of the problem of preventing war in the aftermath of the First World War. This problem-solving
approach to war meant that peace was, from the outset, defined negatively, as an absence of war. In
practice, the solution to the problem was an attempt to create an international forum to promote open
relations between states, to put an end to the secret diplomacy perceived to have been so divisive in
Europe before 1914. The result was the foundation of the League of Nations in 1919. The ‘failure’ of
the League of Nations, resulting in its collapse in 1946, as well as the outbreak of war in Europe for
the second time in 25 years, was constructed as the failure of so-called idealistic, Kantian
cosmopolitan visions of the world, to which political realism offered a pragmatic antidote.
Realist theorists, such as Morgenthau (1985), presented the concept of sovereign nation-states
operating in a world of anarchy, extrapolated from Hobbes, as their foundational principle. Based on a
fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature, realists argued that states, controlled by sovereign
men, had no rational choice except to act in their nation’s best interests in an anarchic world. As such,
the so-called first ‘Great Debate’ in International Relations relegated opposing views as idealist,
utopian, and impossible to achieve, apparently bolstered by the evidence of failure to secure peace in
the inter-war period. It is striking that the possibilities for peace were already decisively marginalised
and that a theory purportedly based upon this aim ‘lost’ the battle to one which posited war as an
inevitability, a problem which could only ever be managed, never solved. Although the realist view of
international relations is based on a theory formulated in the 17th century, its historical specificity is
denied, rendering the central concepts of anarchy and sovereign man transhistorical and war as
inevitable. The potential for change to occur is thus only entertained as operating within this context,
against this backdrop of inevitabilities; the possibility of the context itself changing is denied. What is
also striking is the shared assumptions of these ‘opposed’ paradigms. Both idealist and realist
positions apply a problem-solving approach the study of International Relations, whereby war is the
problem to be solved and peace is the solution. iii The fact that the two schools of thought posit
different methods of achieving their shared goal tends to conceal the extent to which war as a
condition of relations between states is presumed to be a given, against which solutions must be found.
Instead of theorising war as one possible outcome of relations between states, it is taken as a concrete
foundational point, against which all other possibilities, including peace, are defined.
Moreover, an analysis of the shared epistemological and ontological assumptions of these theories
reveals further limitations and further tendencies to privilege war over peace in International
Relations. Both realism and idealism employ positivist epistemology, which, it is argued, enables them
to construct objective, value-free theories accounting for the way that the world functions. The
possibility of constructing value-free theory in social science has been convincingly disputed by the
critical realist paradigm (see Sayer 1992). iv More particularly, for our purposes, feminists have
highlighted the extent to which the central concepts of supposedly objective realist theory are
fundamentally gendered. On a realist view, the world is populated by sovereign man, a specifically
male subject who acts rationally in the public, political domain. A theory that fails to take into account
other actors, most crucially women, not only jeopardises its case for being objective and value-free; it
also assumes that only men are capable of agency in the world. However, the construction of
supposedly value-free theory is of central importance to the development of orthodox International
Relations, as a theory and as applied in practice. Defined against the normative agenda of alternative
views that construct theory in terms of what ought to be the case, realism’s pessimistic view of the
world is portrayed as an unproblematic series of facts, or quite simply, what is the case. However,
through examining the development of this paradigm, its normative content can be revealed.
After 1945, as the locus of hegemonic power moved to America, so too did the continued development
of the discipline of International Relations. Its status as problem-solving and vocational, as opposed to
abstractly theoretical, was bolstered by America’s need to train diplomatic personnel to consolidate its
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new status as the superpower and create an international order in its own image; ‘This bias was
[International Relations’] birthmark, or more pointedly it was the very reason for its creation’
(Krippendorf 1988: 207). This suggests that a fundamental feature of the development of the discipline
was a concern with what should obtain, normatively speaking.
Moreover, this aspect of the development of International Theory renders explicit the link between
theory and practice. As Cox argues, ‘theory is always for someone and for some purpose’, and under
the circumstances of its development the idea of realism as a neutral, value-free theory, which takes a
disinterested stance on what objectively exists in the world, as separate to the practical policies of
statesmen, becomes unsustainable (Cox 1996: 86). The implication of exposing this artificial
separation between theory and practice is to demonstrate that the dominance of realism does not only
have theoretical import. The privileging of war over peace in theory has fundamental ramifications in
practice; if, in theory, the world is conceptualised as anarchic and war as inevitable, in practice,
attempts to create peace, in any other capacity than a more or less temporary cease-fire, are perceived
as unrealistic and utopian. The possibilities of reconstituting peace as other than non-war are
foreclosed.
Furthermore, ontologically, that is to say, in terms of what is asserted to exist, those structural relations
that are unobservable are excluded from positivist-based theory. As a result, interpretations of the
world system are based on the observable actions of unitary state actors, for instance in their conduct
of secret diplomacy before 1914, excluding the possible explanatory power of structural relations, for
example capitalism and gender, in explaining the occurrence of war. Consequently, the focus for
theory and practice, in this example, becomes how to solve the problem of secret diplomacy as a cause
of war, rather than conceiving of this observable phenomenon as something that itself requires
explanation in terms of unobservable systemic processes. This narrow ontological conception leads to
a reductionist account of international relations. In realism, the reified status of ‘states-as-individualsas-actors’
derived from political theory of the 17th century is not simply one component in the theory,
but is privileged as the only ontologically relevant variable insofar as relations between other entities
are unobservable (MacLean 1981a). Hobbes argued that ‘it is necessary that we know the things that
are to be compounded’ since ‘everything is best understood by its constitutive causes’ (cited in Lukes
1974: 119). This methodological individualism, the idea that ‘facts about society and social
phenomena are to be explained solely in terms of facts about individuals’ results in an inability to
conceive of complex wholes as anything other than the sum of their parts, since the parts are
observable, whilst the relations between them may not be (Lukes 1974). This requires an acceptance
that since armies consist of soldiers, all that it is possible to know about an army is reducible to what
we can observe about individual soldiers (ibid. 123). But, I would argue, what an army means as a
legitimated form of state violence is more than just what one can see by observing soldiers and what
an army does cannot be reduced to the decisions and actions of individuals.
The limitations of this methodological approach are compounded by a second kind of reductionism.
This is the conception that what international activity consists in is reducible to politics, that social
relations can be understood through this one particular activity (MacLean 1981a). Most obviously, this
deprives the discipline of the ability to include economic factors in explanations of international
relations. So, for example, in the case of theorising about war, realism is theoretically disabled from
explaining the nuclear arms race, except in its most obvious observable elements, on two levels.
Firstly, only the political elements of the phenomenon are within the remit of International Relations,
as defined as the study of international politics and secondly, its unobservable relations to global
capital accumulation have no ontological status and are thus rendered invisible. It is possible to
observe the build-up of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, but it cannot be explained why ever more
advanced technology was developed, despite the fact that it had negative effects on the rest of the US
economy (let alone the rest of society), and that they could not be used to achieve any military
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objective, short of Mutually Assured Destruction (Kaldor 1982, Melman 1970). The failure to theorise
these apparent irrationalities, or even to recognise them as such, is an acceptance that war is an
inevitable and integral part of social life, to the extent that endless amounts of money and lives are
sacrificed to this unassailable ‘fact’.
Having identified a multiplicity of factors within the orthodox approach that give war a privileged
status in International Relations, I will now demonstrate that feminist accounts replicate these
characteristics, in some respects more than others, sometimes explicitly in terms of what they actually
say, sometimes implicitly arising from what is taken for granted. Firstly, I will look at an example of
the various approaches which come under the umbrella of ‘peace feminism’, to establish whether their
substantive focus, strategies for women to expedite the achievement of peace, is tackled in a way that
makes this a likely or possible outcome of their work. Secondly, I will examine the liberal feminist
approach, which is also explicitly concerned with practical measures, in this case to promote equality
for women within the institutions of war. Thirdly, I will analyse three feminisms that take a more
theoretical approach to women and war: Enloe’s project to render women more visible in the
international organisation of war; Cohn’s examination of gendered language by defence experts; and
Elshtain’s postmodern genealogical stance, which traces the historical development of women’s
relationship with war and peace to establish the gendered nature of orthodox theory. Whilst this will
not constitute an exhaustive review of feminist approaches, I will use the critique I have formulated to
suggest ways in which feminist theorists could account for war which may go some way to
undermining the privileging of war over peace in orthodox International Relations.
The subject of peace is one that has captured many feminists’ attention, in a way that war has not.
There is a tendency, sometimes made explicit, but always implied, that some areas of investigation and
theorising in International Relations are somehow more suitable for feminist interrogation than others.
Strangely, this imposition is made by feminists themselves. In outlining the substantive topics where
feminists can make valuable interventions, Peterson suggests, amongst others, that the global
feminisation of poverty, the design and implementation of development policies, reproductive issues
and population planning, are areas that could benefit from feminist interventions (Peterson 1992a). It
seems that the criterion for selecting these subject areas is that they particularly impact upon women’s
lives, and therefore the achievement of peace could comfortably sit alongside those others; it has been
shown that war, including the armaments industry, disproportionately affects women, as the victims of
war, as mothers and carers at the sharp end of welfare budget cuts and so on. Furthermore, like
development issues, peace research has a strong normative content, based on ideas of social justice,
and an explicit relation to practical action, which links in with the historical development of feminism
as a protest movement. I would certainly argue that all of these issues are of central importance to the
kind of International Relations that seeks a genuinely inclusive, global perspective on the way the
world functions. In some respects, Peterson’s view is useful in highlighting areas that are
marginalised. But there is the danger that in failing to urge feminists to engage with the orthodoxy on
their own ground, v on concepts such as sovereignty, the state and war, those marginalised areas will
remain marginalised, along with the feminists who theorise them. The point is not to argue that the
subject matter of the orthodoxy is more important, but to suggest that meaningful feminist
interventions in International Relations must take as a starting point a critique of the orthodoxy to
demonstrate why important areas are sidelined and ensure that feminism is not further ghettoised in
International Relations as ‘women’s issues’.
The central plank of peace feminists’ work is the assertion that women are essentially morally superior
to men, and naturally (or socially conditioned to be) more peaceful, placing a higher value on
preserving life and social justice in general. Penny Strange’s analysis of the arms race through a
feminist lens in It’ll Make a Man of You, focuses on the association between violence and male
identity (Strange 1983). Following Kaldor, she argues that nuclear weapons no longer ‘make sense’
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militarily or economically, except when interpreted as a device to reinforce ‘masculinity’. The need
for men to do this, Strange extrapolates, derives from the fact that men’s paternity has to be
established through law and custom, and must be constructed or conferred, whereas womanhood and
maternity are natural and uncontested. As well as this social/psychoanalytic approach, Strange
recognises the inextricable link between state violence and nationhood, arguing that a ‘permanent
army is a badge of nationhood’ (ibid. 23). Her strategy for feminist peace involves the undermining of
the bases upon which masculine scientific knowledge and thus the development of weaponry rest.
These are identified as separation and hierarchy, which allow scientists to claim objectivity and
detachment from the political and social implications of their work. A feminist approach, in her eyes,
should be associative and built upon mutual support and cooperation, not because women are naturally
pacific, but because there is strength to be found in women’s existing roles, ‘particularly those
associated with nurture and sensitivity to the needs of others’ (ibid. 26–7). Strange’s analysis hints at
several crucial structural factors in the construction of militaristic ideology: the overriding influence of
military powers in the UN, the link between armies and nationhood, and the influence of economic
imperatives upon the building of ever more advanced armaments. Focusing on the role of science, a
critique of the separation of theory and practice is also implied. However this linkage is not applied to
Strange’s own strategy for the feminist peace movement, in which, despite recognising the social
construction of women as more cooperative and nurturing, she advocates that women use this
subordinated position to challenge the opposing social construction of masculine violence. As a peace
activist, Strange is interested in exploring the possibilities of agency for women as subordinated
individuals, but the basis for these strategies requires her to accept, on the one hand, gender
subordination and, on the other, peace subordination. In theory, she hints at structural explanations for
why it may be that war is a privileged social condition, but this is not developed into a thorough
critique and is entirely abandoned in the name of proposing a viable practical strategy. Since Strange’s
theoretical analysis is weak, the opportunities for practical action are limited to the confines of the
established status quo in both respects outlined.
As well as peace feminism, there are writers that tackle the issue of war from a feminist perspective in
quite distinctive ways. Within the paradigm of liberal feminism, which has been the voice that has
been the most clearly heard and understood in International Relations theory and practice, women’s
relation to war is conceived in terms of demands for equality. Liberal feminists work on the premise
that rational human beings are entitled to basic rights, thus the exclusion of women and inequality of
their position in society is an irrationality to be corrected. In the particular case of women and war,
liberal feminists argue that rights are contingent on obligations, of which willingness to take up arms
in defence of one’s country is one of the most important. Epstein argues that women must be willing
to shoulder obligations as well as to enjoy rights, thus equality in the armed forces will enhance
women’s claim to the latter, to which end liberal feminists campaign for legal reform (Epstein 1991:
421–2). In the US, the National Organisation for Women (NOW) has worked on this basis to
challenge the exclusion of women from front-line roles in the army, on the premise that it reinscribes
‘archaic notions’ of women’s abilities in combat and deprivation of such rights may cause ‘devastating
long-term psychological and political repercussions’ (cited in Elshtain 1985: 43). This may be the
case, but such a position is devoid of a theory of why it may be the case that women are excluded
(except insofar as it is simply some kind of historical accident), and more importantly of why it is that
liberal civil rights are attached to this particular obligation, one which perpetuates and reinscribes the
state’s claim to the monopoly over legitimate violence.
Cynthia Enloe explicitly critiques the position taken by organisations such as NOW and their
campaigns for equality for women in the armed forces, arguing that they perpetuate ‘the notion that
the military is so central to the entire social order that it is only when women gain access to its core
that they can hope to fulfill their hopes and aspirations’ (Enloe 1983: 16–17). Enloe’s own approach
aims to demonstrate that women play an essential part in various domains of international relations,
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but that their contribution has been hidden and marginalised. She is concerned with making different
women’s voices heard and engaging in what Christine Sylvester describes as ‘everyday forms of
theorising that recuperate women and their experiences’ (Sylvester 1996: 263), arguing that ‘every
time a woman explains how her government is trying to control her fears, her hopes, and her labour
such a theory is being made’ (Enloe 1983: 143). Rather than aiming to ‘bring women in’ to
international relations, as liberal feminists do, in her thesis, Does Khaki Become YOU? Enloe looks at
ways of explaining the effect of militarisation on women’s lives and the central role that women play
in the ideological construction of militarism. In doing so, she rejects the ‘standpoint feminist’
approach which views militarism as a result of patriarchal social structures that is ‘somehow woven
into the very fibre of maleness’ as a ‘demoralising’ position that leads to paralysis (ibid. 176). She is
also doubtful of the utility of the idea of militarisation as simply an economic−technical phenomenon,
which she believes leaves out the ideological processes she seeks; whilst she accepts that distorted
government arms budgets disproportionately affect women, she suggests that the aim of disarmament
sought by feminist peace campaigners ‘may be too limited an objective. Militarism disarmed is
militarism still’ (ibid. 180). Instead Enloe argues that rather than looking at causes of militarism,
feminists should investigate why certain behaviours are repeated generation after generation and look
at the processes that reproduce social relations, enhancing militarism rather than some other ideology.
She argues that the need to recruit manpower requires a patriarchal ideology that divides the battle and
home fronts, the protectors from the protected and manly acts of aggression from womanly roles of
nurture. It is through recognition of this ideology that ‘the armed forces’ long dependence on women,
and the ways they have tried to camouflage that dependence (yet ensure the relationship) can be
exposed’ (ibid. 185).
But, is it explained? Enloe’s methodology is evident from her argument that militarism is sustained by
‘observable processes’ and that the observing process reinserts power: ‘it presumes that decisions are
made by someone, that there were and still are choices; some are taken, while others are rejected, and
those exercises of power derive from someone’s calculation of interest and benefit’ (ibid. 185). The
reduction of the phenomenon of militarism to observable processes, equating what is real to what can
be observed, which in turn results in a reduction of agency to individuals (or institutions-asindividuals)
is a methodologically individualist position. Whilst simplistic arguments of the causality
of militarism founded on essentialised ‘maleness’ or government budgets may be inadequate, to
abandon the possibility of gender and capitalism as complex social structures with potential
explanatory power, because they cannot directly be observed, is mistaken. Enloe’s analysis does
succeed in making women more visible in this aspect of international relations, but her reductionist
methodology begs the question of whether her ‘find the women’ focus is any more illuminating than
the ‘bringing women in’ approach of the liberals. Who is exercising the power of decision-making she
refers to, and in whose calculation of interest and benefit? If the ideology of militarism cannot be
equated with patriarchy as essentialised ‘maleness’, then what can we understand patriarchy to be and
how does it come about and reproduce itself? In a broader context, one wonders how Enloe situates
the military and militarism within international relations as a whole. Applying her methodology, she
attributes no ontological status to unobservable social structures and thus falls back into the orthodox
position, in which reified states/institutions-as-actors remain the central and privileged objects of
analysis, notwithstanding her attempt to find the women within this framework. This being the case,
does she perceive war as an inevitable and natural state in international relations, as the orthodoxy
does? These various questions are not tackled by Enloe, and perhaps one could argue that this is not
her aim. But by not interrogating the underlying realist assumptions of her analysis, she inadvertently
reinforces the orthodox account, which privileges war over peace. We can see the women, but are we
any closer to understanding militarism, patriarchy, gender or war?
Carol Cohn’s work is focused on the gendered and sexualised imagery and language of defence and
weapons experts. In her article ‘A Feminist Spy in the House of Death’ she examines the way in which
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notions of masculine virility are inscribed in the dominant discourse on defence, a discourse that
dehumanises and renders invisible the victims of war (Cohn 1988). For example, she looks at the
‘rationality’ of nuclear deterrents, which, it is argued, eliminates the incentive to ever strike first:
‘since it takes roughly two warheads to destroy one enemy silo, an attacker must expend two of his
missiles to destroy one of the enemy’s. A first strike disarms the attacker. The aggressor ends up
worse off than the aggressed’ (Krauthammer 1985: 12–16). This extraordinary calculation is made on
the basis of the so-called rational internal logic of defence experts, whereby consideration of the
human cost (or the collateral damage) of this first strike is entirely subordinated to strategic concerns,
so that although ‘the aggressed’ may have been devastated, they are nevertheless better off as a result.
The strength of Cohn’s argument is to demonstrate that despite this veneer of rationality, the language
used to describe weaponry and its capability is heavily imbued with ideas of heterosexual domination
(the thrusting and penetration of weapons (ibid. 293)), male birth (nuclear bombs described as their
creators’ ‘babies’ (ibid. 297–8)) and homoerotic imagery (the popular cartoon during the Gulf War, in
which Saddam Hussein was portrayed being anally penetrated by an American missile (Cohn 1993)),
and is anything but rational, objective or disinterested. Cohn appreciates that language is not the only
dimension of the broader issue of gender and war, but her analysis is successful in demonstrating that
the claim to objectivity, a claim which is used powerfully against those who ‘irrationally’ and
‘idealistically’ try to reinsert the consideration of human costs, is unsustainable. This argument could
be usefully extended to suggest that this discourse, which claims to describe the more ‘real’ condition
of war, as opposed to the fanciful utopia of peace, is the practical manifestation of a theoretical
orthodoxy which consistently privileges the former over the latter.
Elshtain’s theoretical approach is concerned with tracing the genealogy of realism from its foundations
in Hobbes and Machiavelli so as to demonstrate its fundamentally gendered nature. She analyses the
suppression of female imagery in these texts and alerts us to ‘the restricted and oversimplifying terms
through which realism constitutes symbolism and narrative roles more generally’ (Elshtain 1985: 41).
She notes that Machiavelli’s work revolves around a public-private split ‘in and through which women
are constituted, variously, as mirrors to male war-making (a kind of civic cheerleader) or as a
collective “other”, embodying the softer values and virtues out of place within, and subversive of
realpolitik’ (ibid. 41–2). The Just War tradition similarly places women in the role of ‘beautiful soul’:
defined in opposition to their just Christian warrior menfolk, they are helpless to prevent the ravages
of war, destined instead to continue ‘the long tradition of women as weepers, occasions for war, and
keepers of the flame of nonwarlike values’ (ibid. 43).
Like Enloe, Elshtain purports to reject the kind of standpoint view that attributes this phenomenon to
essentialised ‘masculinity’, but then goes on to endorse Hannah Arendt’s vision of the ‘miracle’ of
birth as a way to restore hope in the world. Arendt constitutes her male and female objects as citizens
possessing a ‘faculty of action’, an ideal, Elshtain suggests, that ‘adds political robustness to a feminist
picture of women drawn to action from their sense of being and their epistemic and social location’.
She continues, ‘Arendt’s citizen, for example, may act from her maternal thinking but not as a mother
– an important distinction that could help chasten sentimentalism or claims of moral superiority’ (ibid.
53). To reclaim the possibilities of political agency for both men and women is undoubtedly important
for the achievement of peace, but why women’s agency should particularly be expressed through
maternal thinking, whether sentimental and morally superior or not, is unclear. Furthermore, how this
is different from the standpoint position Elshtain rejects, how precisely ‘maternal thinking but not as a
mother’ manifests itself and whether this kind of thinking is available to men as well as women, is not
elaborated upon.
It seems that although Elshtain identifies the public-private separation from Machiavellian texts
through to contemporary realist theory, which relegates women and female morality to the private
domain, her solution is to reinsert this private conscience back into the public domain of conflict.
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Although Elshtain recognises the tradition of international theory as a competition between realism
and idealism, the answer in her analysis and her proposal for feminist international theory, is to
reassert idealism, which she explicitly associates with ‘feminine’ values (Brown 1988: 468–9). Yet,
there is a recognition that the idealist approach is suppressed. She argues against a ‘leap into utopian
fantasies of world order or total disarmament’ which she suggests ‘covertly sustains business as usual
by proclaiming “solutions” that lie outside the reach of possibility’ (Elshtain 1985: 54). The question
of why this alternative vision has been perceived as unrealistic and fantastic is not asked; instead, an
equally ‘idealistic’ proposal based on the US embracing ‘forgiveness’ as ‘a central political role’ and
taking unilateral action to end the cycle of nuclear build-up is put forward. The difference lies in the
fact that the latter solution lies within the realist model of international relations, based on sovereign,
atomised, states-as-actors, operating in an anarchic world, but where the values of private
consciousness (i.e. ‘feminine’, ‘idealistic’ values) are incorporated, whereas the former requires
thinking that goes beyond this orthodox conception of international relations, and is thus dismissed in
theory and practice as an impossibility. In Elshtain’s analysis, realism triumphs and the role of
feminist international theory is reduced to grafting some idealistic, ‘feminine’ values, some maternal
thinking and forgiveness, onto the existing model. In this view, war is the natural state of affairs,
women are essentialised as a function of the public-private dichotomy, and feminist theory as idealism
has potential only as far as it can be superimposed on realism to make it more feminine. In the end, it
is difficult to escape the feeling that Elshtain has come full circle, failing to see the critique she
genealogically constructs through to its logical conclusion, and thus collapsing back into an analysis,
which in its promotion of ‘feminine’ values and an essentialised notion of women’s agency through
maternal thinking, shares the central weaknesses of the peace feminism with which we began.
In looking at these feminist accounts, it seems that all of them share in common a failure to make
explicit a thorough-going critique of the orthodox position. The accounts I have analysed in various
ways deal with the various symptoms of the epistemologically and ontologically challenged orthodox
paradigm, constructed as realism vs. idealism, without explicating the causes of these symptoms. So,
as we have seen, Enloe embarks on a project to make women in the military more visible, but through
her methodological assumptions fails to challenge war as a natural state of affairs. Cohen exposes the
fallacy of objectivity in realist-based strategic language, but does not go on to make explicit the
connection between this and the subordination of peace to the realm of utopian fantasy. Elshtain does
make this subordination clear, but reinforces the privileging of realism, and therefore of war, by
suggesting that the problem is that feminine morality is under-valued and should be reinserted into the
existing framework. It is interesting to note how central to the accounts of Strange, Enloe and Elshtain
is the question of what kind of agency is available to women to bring about peace. What these three
accounts have achieved is a reassertion of the possibility of agency for women in international
relations, something that orthodox theory denies them through the construction of a specifically male
subject, through an exclusive focus on politics, narrowly defined, and through an explicit association
of women with peace, which is in itself subordinated to the more ‘real’ condition of war. There can be
no doubt that the questions of women’s agency and expediting peace are of vital importance, but I
would argue that they are relevant to men and women and that the latter have no privileged relation to
peace. That is not to deny, however, that the orthodox discourse in theory and practice constantly
makes this connection. Feminist accounts of war are deficient in interrogating the concept of gender
that makes this possible and in some cases they reinscribe this false relation, so that any gains made in
demonstrating the existence of women’s agency are lost as a result of failing to challenge what that
agency might consist in. It seems to me that a gender analysis of war and peace cannot proceed
without the elements of critique I have outlined. Once this is achieved, there is a real possibility that a
truly distinctive contribution could be made, one which could take a broader view of war to include
structural violence, as Singh has done (2001), as well as investigating the thus far neglected linkages
between, gender and capitalism as structured relations of subordination, on the one hand, and the
unequal distribution of peace in the world, on the other.
8

Laura Turquet has just completed an MA in International Relations at the University of Sussex.
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ii
Throughout this paper, following convention, International Relations (capitalised) will refer to the
discipline; international relations to the practical activity.
ii
Several feminists, such as Sylvester, use the construction ‘womenandchildren’ to highlight and
problematise the assumed inseparability of women from their offspring, which is common particularly
in the media, but also in orthodox accounts of war.
iii
The description of epistemologically orthodox approaches as ‘problem-solving’ theory is employed
by Cox (1981).
iv
It is important to note here that critical realism, a methodological approach to social science in
general, should not be confused with the Realist paradigm in International Relations, exemplified by
Morgenthau (1985), which is in fact underpinned by empiricist methodology.
v
Here I mean feminists should engage on the orthodoxy’s ground, but I do not mean that this should
be done in terms prescribed by orthodox theorists, such as Keohane (1989).
11