From Women and War to Gender and Conflict? Feminist Trajectories

This article charts a brief history of the conceptual tools used to understand gender relations with respect to wars and armed conflicts. The article begins by summarizing some of the dominant theories of second wave feminism, including radical feminism, liberal feminism, black, lesbian and Third World feminism. It explores critiques of feminist theory, as well as the roles of equality and agency in feminist studies on women and war, the tensions between Western feminism and feminism outside of the West, and the impact of a constructivist analytical lens on feminist scholarship. It depicts how specific violent conflicts influenced feminist thinking in the 1990s and the early 2000s, tracing a genealogy from genocide in Rwanda and the war in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to 9/11 and the War on Terror.