Sex and World Peace: How the Treatment of Women Affects Development and Security
Sex and World Peace: How the Treatment of Women Affects Development and Security
“What we have discovered is that the very best predictor of how insecure and unstable a nation is not its level of democracy, it’s not its level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ it belongs to, but is in fact best predicted by the level of violence against women in the society,” said Valerie Hudson, co-author of Sex and World Peace, at an April 26 book launch at the Wilson Center. [Video Below]
Co-author Chad Emmett joined Hudson, along with Jeni Klugman, the World Bank’s director of gender and development, and Richard Cincotta, demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center, to discuss the security implications of gender inequality and potential policy responses.
The Paradox of Missing Women
The basis of the book – applying a gender lens to international security – followed from early feedback from her colleagues at Brigham Young University, who suggested that if her goal was to understand the reasons for “blood spilt and lives lost,” she would do better to look at ideological conflict rather than women’s security.
In response, she made a simple comparison of deaths from conflict and the number of “missing women” in the world. Looking at “as many [conflicts] as I possibly could,” Hudson said she totaled 152 million deaths in 20th century fighting. By comparison, the United Nations Population Fund reported that at the turn of the century – just “one generation, if you will, of the century” – 163 million women went missing from Asia alone.
The missing women phenomenon is “a significant paradox” in global development, said Klugman. “On the one hand there have been enormous advances in terms of life expectancy, but at the same time, relative to boys and men, there’s still enormous excess mortality.”
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http://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2012/05/sex-and-world-peace-how-the-treatment-of-women-affects-development-and-security/
pdf of the discussion:
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Hudson%20Presentation.pdf
Sex & World Peace by Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad F. Emmett
Helen M. Kinsella | May 31, 2013
This is an important, well written, and informative book that will serve a wide audience of graduate and undergraduate students, academics, and policy-makers, as well as the interested public. It is a testament to the writing and presentation of the authors’ argument that such a diverse audience will be challenged and enlightened by this work. And while there are particulars about which some will disagree, the breadth of information and analysis offered in Sex & World Peace provides ample material for spirited engagement and further learning.
The authors set forth three complementary but distinct arguments, each of which can be taken on its own merits. The first is that gender inequality, by which the authors mean the subordination of women, is a form of violence “no matter how invisible or normalized” it may be (p. 5). (The authors define gender as “socially defined differences between men and women” and inequality as an “aspect of violence based on . . . relative power . . . in society [p. 6]. Gender inequality, then, is the subordination of those who are different and lacking in power and status—in other words, women.) Second, security studies as both a discipline and a practice must account for women’s security in its identification and evaluation of independent variables. Third, what is learned from this book should be taken as a call to action and a call for positive changes in policy and practice.
The overarching premise of the book is that “we can no longer speaking, in the same breath, about the security of women” (p. 208). Further, the authors argue, the security of women is violated through gender inequality, which is itself buttressed by and constitutive of three specific forms of “micro-aggression” against women (p. 17). These are: “(1) lack of bodily integrity and physical security, (2) lack of equity in family law, and (3) lack of parity in the councils of human decision-making” (p. 19).
These claims, certainly, are not without centuries of precedent, as feminist scholars and activists have long pointed out. As Simone de Beauvoir, observed regarding relations between the sexes, “All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception” (The Second Sex, 1949, p. 717). The Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams devoted a book to the configuration of women and war, speculating that the difficulties in providing food for one’s family during times of war (“the labor for bread”) was crucial to understanding the costs of war, and specifically the costs to women (Peace and Bread in Time of War, 1922, p. 77). And, of course, Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) took up the absence of women in the councils of politics, the persistence of patriarchy, and the complex interdependence of patriarchy and the promulgation of war.
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http://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2013/sex-world-peace-by-valerie-m-hudson-bonnie-ballif-spanvill-mary-caprioli-and-chad-f-emmett/
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