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Carol Cohn (ed.). Women and Wars

In the last thirteen years, the adoption of five United Nations Security Council resolutions on “women, peace and security” has stimulated the expansion of scholarship on women’s experiences of violent conflict. In Women and Wars, eleven seasoned experts survey and critique this growing body of research in an accessible, sophisticated and comprehensive manner. Despite a somewhat old-fashioned title, Women and Wars successfully challenges essentialist representations of war-affected women as helpless victims and natural peacemakers. Carol Cohn opens the collection by situating the study of conflict-affected women in a theoretical discussion about gender and political violence, which encompasses questions relating to men and masculinities. She introduces a three-tiered theoretical framework: gender as situated accomplishment for individuals, as meaning system (or discourse) for human societies and as structuring principle for the institutions that wage war and/or foster peace. In so doing, she sets the ground for nuanced, clear and well-illustrated discussions of the many ways gender mediates individuals’ experiences of war, and shapes collective understandings of what kinds of violent acts qualify, or fail to qualify, as war. The first set of empirical chapters addresses some of the ways women bear and survive the plights of war, with emphasis on disrupted livelihood systems, conflict-related sexual violence and health problems, and international and internal displacement. This section aptly highlights important tensions and shortcomings in donor states’ strategies to support conflictaffected women. Of particular interest is Pamela DeLargy’s discussion of programs set up to support survivors of conflict-related sexual violence that unintentionally stigmatize the victims (72–74). Wenona Giles’ report of refugee women who experience the bureaucratic demands of the host country as a form of control that is reminiscent of war-related violence is also particularly thought-provoking (92–94). However, and this is where the limitations of a focus on “women” becomes apparent, these early chapters remain too focused on the experiences of individual women, as opposed to gendered discourses and institutions. For instance, even though Giles notes that “refugee” and “internally displaced person” are “not inherent characteristics of people” but “legal descriptors that are imbued with specific social and political relations” (83), she treats “women” as empirically given subjects. The interest of this otherwise well-structured and informative chapter could have been heightened by a critical analysis of the refugee regime’s participation in the production of gender identities when it treats individuals differently, depending on whether they are identified as women, men or other. The second set of empirical chapters introduces succinct yet powerful accounts of women exercising agency in political activism, state military