This book explores the role of gender in influencing war-fighting actors’ strategies toward the attack or protection of civilians. Traditional narratives suggest that killing civilians intentionally in wars happens infrequently and that the perpetration of civilian targeting is limited to aberrant actors. Recently, scholars have shown that both state and non-state actors target civilians, even while explicitly deferring to the civilian immunity principle. This book fills a gap in the accounts of how civilian targeting happens and shows that these actors are in large part targeting women rather than some gender-neutral understanding of civilians. It presents a history of civilian victimization in wars and conflicts and then lays out a feminist theoretical approach to understanding civilian victimization. It explores the British Blockade of Germany in World War I, the Soviet ‘Rape of Berlin’ in World War II, the Rwandan genocide, and the contemporary conflict in northeast Nigeria. Across these case studies, the authors lay out that gender is key to how war-fighting actors understand both themselves and their opponents and therefore plays a role in shaping strategic and tactical choices. It makes the argument that seeing women in nationalist and war narratives is crucial to understanding when and how civilians come to be targeted in wars, and how that targeting can be reduced. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security, gender studies, war studies, and International Relations in general.
This book analyzes policy and programming challenges for gender mainstreaming in counter-terrorism, with examples from comparative case studies of countering violent extremism programming. Interest in the issue of gender in security policy and programming has grown over the past several years, often with increasing pressure at the international and national levels to ensure commitment to inclusion of women or a gender lens. This book provides in-depth investigation of how gender can be effectively understood and included in the security process. Firstly, it adds a timely and effective contribution to the academic conversations around gender in security and how counter-terrorism programming can be implemented with human security goals. Secondly, it offers recommendations for policy makers and practitioners seeking to improve the effectiveness of countering violent extremism program design, implementation, and evaluation. A gender analysis framework is built across the chapters, drawing from various feminist analytical perspectives used in International Relations theory. The learning from this comparative gender analysis is encapsulated in the last chapter through some recommendations to help move counter-terrorism policy toward more transformative gender mainstreaming strategies. This book will be of much interest to students of counter-terrorism studies, countering violent extremism, gender studies, security studies, and International Relations.
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