Books by Laura Sjoberg

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men.

Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq offers a feminist critique and reconstruction of just war theory. It points out gender biases in the just war tradition and suggests alternative jus ad bellum and jus in bello standards that emphasize women, political marginality, and empathy. Laura Sjoberg applies this feminist just war theory to analyze the wars in Iraq since the end of the Cold War-the First Gulf War, the war of sanctions, and the Second Gulf War. By examining international political discourse from and about Iraq, it shows where war generally and just war specifically are gendered. Through the stories of key just war characters like Jessica Lynch, this book reveals where women are omitted and subordinated in global politics. Sjoberg suggests that dialogue and empathy replace righteousness in just war thinking for the good of human safety everywhere and concludes with alternative visions of Gulf War policies, inspired by feminist just war theory.

Laura Sjoberg positions gender and gender subordination as key factors in the making and fighting of global conflict. Through the lens ofgender, she examines the meaning, causes, practices, and experiences of war, building a more inclusive approach to the analysis of violent conflict between states.Considering war at the international, state, substate, and individual levels, Sjoberg's feminist perspective elevates a number of causal variables in war decision-making. These include structural gender inequality, cycles of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the often overlooked role of emotion in political interactions, gendered understandings of power, and states' mistaken perception of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gendering Global Conflict also calls attention to understudied spaces that can be sites of war, such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Her findings show gender to be a linchpin of even the most tedious and seemingly bland tactical and logistical decisions in violent conflict. Armed with that information, Sjoberg undertakes the task of redefining and reintroducing critical readings of war's political, economic, and humanitarian dimensions, developing the beginnings of a feminist theory of war.