Securing the civilian: sex and gender in the laws of war

Abstract

[T]o fight has always been the man's habit, not the woman's. Law and practice have developed that difference, whether innate or accidental. Virginia Woolf, 1938: 9 This chapter examines the productive power of discourses of gender by analyzing a particular institution of global governance – international humanitarian law or the laws of war. I focus on the laws of war for two interdependent reasons. First, the laws of war are a central feature of global governance. They reflect and regulate customs and practices of war among and, less extensively, within states. The laws of war govern both the resort to force ( ius ad bello ) and the use of force ( ius in bello ). Specifically, the laws of war outline the permissible actions for states, militaries, combatants, and non-combatants to take in war according to the formal classification of armed conflicts as international or non-international. As a result, the laws of war are the primary referent for the training and disciplining of those entities and, very recently, the peacekeeping troops of the United Nations (Rowe, 2000). Yet, second, precisely at the moment that the currency of the laws of war has been generally revalued, and specifically invested with newfound worth for the protection of women, the relationships among power, gender, and the laws of war are scarcely analyzed. The scholarship that does engage in an analysis of gender and the laws of war focuses primarily on the protection of women within the law rather than the production of women in the law and, importantly, the production of the laws of war themselves.

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