Drawing on interviews with 100 women soldiers about their experiences in combat, this book asks what insights are gained when we take women's experiences in war as our starting point instead of treating them as "add-ons" to more fundamental or mainstream levels of analysis, and what importance these experiences hold for an analysis of violence and for security studies. The book provides different perspectives about why it is important to explore women in combat, what their experiences teach us, and how to consider soldiers and veterans both as citizens and as violent state actors--an issue with which scholars are often reluctant to engage. Breaking the Binaries in Security Studies raises methodological and theoretical considerations about ways of evaluating power relations in conflict situations and patriarchal structures.