Sex and World Peace

Sex and World Peace argues that the security of women is a vital factor in the overall security of the state and its incidence of conflict and war. The authors compare micro-level gender violence and macro-level state peacefulness in global settings, supporting their findings with detailed analyses and color maps. Their research challenges conventional definitions of security and democracy, and they examine top-down and bottom-up approaches to healing the wounds of violence against women, inequity in family law, and the lack of parity in decision-making councils. Women's systemic insecurity unravels the security of all, and the authors articulate an international policy agenda that reflects this reality.

An eye-opening contribution to our understanding of the powerful misogynist forces that still contribute to violence and war. This volume should be required reading for all students of international relations and those who make policy. -- Ann Crittenden, author of The Price of Motherhood Sex and World Peace is unprecedented. While there have been books on gender and international relations and books exploring the causes of war with statistical analyses of archival data, to my knowledge no other book does both. This is therefore a germinal contribution to the emerging field of gender and international relations. It will also add to the ongoing American debate between realism and idealism in foreign policy. Of course this book will appeal to researchers and advanced graduate students, yet the accessible writing--leading the reader into the central argument by vivid 'case studies'--will also make it useful to advanced undergraduates. Finally, practitioners and activists in diplomacy, international aid NGOs, enlightened multinational corporations, and women's and men's organizations aimed at transforming gender relations will find much here that is instructive and useful. -- David G. Winter, University of Michigan Valerie M. Hudson and her colleagues take a monumental stride forward in providing a clear theoretical and empirical case for linking important outcomes in international politics, such as security, to the treatment of women. Their tour de force book connects micro-level incidents of violence against women--instantiated in such phenomena as inequity in family law, polygamy, and imbalanced sex ratios--to macro-level occurrences such as conflict and war. In this approach, they highlight the way in which legal institutions in particular serve to perpetuate patterns of violence within the family and larger society. The authors argue that the true clash of civilizations is not taking place between East and West, Christian and Muslim, but rather occurs in the chasm between men and women and in the discrepancy between attitudes, expectations, responsibilities, and opportunities playing out on the world stage. They provide an important theoretical link locating the origins of the mechanisms individuals use to establish and sustain hierarchies of dominance in international relations through the use of violence within the family. This learning then generalizes out into other domains, unconsciously but pervasively aligning dominance in the family to power between states that threaten or use violence to maintain control over groups constructed as a weaker "other." The implicit and ubiquitous nature of these patterns, in turn, provides unquestioned justification for the repression and protest spawning conflict around the globe. -- Rose McDermott, Brown University

List of MapsPreface and Acknowledgments1. Roots of National and International Relations2. What Is There to See3. When We Do See the Global Picture4. The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States5. Wings of National and International Relations6. Wings of National and International Relations7. Taking WingAppendix A. Operationalizations for Data Analysis in Chapter 4Appendix B. Data Analysis Results for Chapter 4NotesContributorsIndex