Although these two superb books do not share a common vocabulary as such, each underscores the continued necessity of analyzing gender, conceptually and empirically, as central to understanding transformations in state politics and policies in times of relative stability (Western postindustrial democracies) and volatility (nationalist conflicts). For Matthew Evangelista, tracing the work that gender does in inciting or validating nationalist conflict offers plausible answers to the questions of “What kind of gender relations” contribute to nationalist violence and “what kind” might not? (p. 23). For Dorothy E. McBride and Amy G. Mazur, tracing the work that gender does provides a purchase on how to make democracies more democratic by expanding women's substantive and descriptive representation and inclusion in the state.
Both books thoughtfully address the definition of evidence, and each is scrupulous about defining the parameters of (and subsequent methods for) their research. Both exemplify an innovative use of methods while remaining critically engaged with what each refers to as the “conventional” or “foundational” scholarship of, respectively, international relations and comparative politics (Gender, Nationalism, and War, p. 11; The Politics of State Feminism, p. 241). Finally, the authors generously invite other scholars to participate and collaborate on refinement of their theories and findings, pushing their thinking beyond its original bounds.
Gender, Nationalism, and War examines seven feature films to illuminate the relationship(s) among gender, nationalism, and war in four conflicts: Algeria, the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and Quebec. Evangelista's approach is explicitly interdisciplinary, drawing on visual and textual analysis, as well as more traditional social science methods and measurements, for example, economic and demographic data (pp. 3, 11). The author is careful to introduce and situate each film in a detailed narrative of the history and contours of each conflict, thus setting a highly nuanced scene for his analyses. His method, he acknowledges, may be unique to the discipline of political science, especially the field of international relations, but it provides an uncommon perspective on the hypotheses generated by the study of gender and war. He claims that film offers a vivid way of visualizing and conveying the relationships studied empirically and systematically in conventional scholarship (e.g., Mary Caprioli, “Gender Equality and State Aggression: The Impact of Domestic Gender Equality on State First Use of Force,” International Interactions 29 [no. 3, 2003]: 195–214); thus, he sees his book as its imaginative complement (p. 264).
Evangelista's curiosity about “the causal logic” of Virginia Woolf's ruminations in her famous essay “Three Guineas” galvanized this study. Woolf wrote in response to three distinct requests for financial support—one from a women's college building fund, one from a society supporting women's professional employment, and one from a society to prevent war (p. 3). Meditating on these requests, she generated some of the organizing possibilities for explaining relationships among men, women, and war, using the solicitations to inform her thoughtful response to the question posed to her by another correspondent some three years earlier; namely, how are we to prevent war? For Evangelista, “many of the most profound insights about gender and war,” specifically regarding the influence of education, economic equality, and social equality, can be found in “Three Guineas,” and his analysis is a testament to their lasting power (p. 271).
This book focuses explicitly on gender and nationalist conflict, for the author believes that it is “only beginning” to receive the systematic attention it deserves from social scientists, while nationalist conflict is another case to examine for the veracity of Woolf's reasoning in conflicts she did not foresee (pp. 1, 9). Consequently, he identifies possible hypotheses which, he reminds us, are not treated as testable but as illustrative, drawn from “Three Guineas,” and supplemented by findings from the transformative scholarship of Cynthia Enloe and other scholars for whom the dynamics of gender and armed conflict define their research (p. 21).
Evangelista highlights two generalizations. First, “improving women's relative status vis-à-vis men tends to reduce conflict between political communities,” but not necessarily within political communities (p. 15). Improving women's relative status is derived both directly from increased access to education and from the derivative effects of education identified in greater economic mobility and political participation, decreased child bearing, and better maternal health. Overall, he agrees to a positive relationship between sex equality and peace.
The second generalization is that “a decline in men's economic prospects, to the extent it challenges their masculine identity, can create a backlash against women, resulting in violence both in and outside their own community” (p. 15). Evangelista identifies this “economic emasculation” as a “permissive factor” in the resort to violence (quoting Marko Zivkovic, pp. 15, 32). Chris Dolan's analysis of the “proliferation of small men,” disenfranchised and disaffected, gleaned from his research in northern Uganda, also figures strongly in Evangelista's approach (Dolan, “Collapsing Masculinities and Weak States—A Case Study of Northern Uganda,” in Francis Cleaver, ed., Masculinities Matter! 2005, 57–83).
Dolan's phrase is so evocative because it captures not only the diminution in relative power of men but also the increase in numbers of working-age men (part of the demographic ‘youth bulge’), which is also significant to Evangelista's analysis. The phrase captures the symbolic effects as well as the (possible) direct material effects on the reduced capacity to marry and/or to provide for one's family, thus explaining men's choice of violence (on a familial, local, or national scale) to compete for and to secure cash, prestige, and power and, in turn, confirm their status as husbands, fathers, and providers.
Although Evangelista's work implies that this effect is more or less unidirectional, analyses of contemporary counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and Afghanistan, which also cite a link between economic conditions and violence, suggest that an improvement in women's status vis–à-vis men may indeed provoke a backlash, but that political violence is not only the province of the unemployed. (See Lina Abirafeh, Gender and International Aid in Afghanistan: The Politics and Effects of Intervention, 2009; and Eli Berman et al., “Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55 [August 2011]: 496–528.)
Two of the thematic policy debates analyzed in The Politics of State Feminism are those of women's job training and political representation, confirming that these are issues of significance to women's movements and, consequently, the handling of which may matter in situations of nationalist instability—as Evangelista cautions in his analysis of Quebec specifically, where nationalism and women's movements have intersected in complex and contested ways.
Turning to The Politics of State Feminism, this book culminates a multiyear empirical study of gender politics and the state in 13 postindustrial Western countries and lays the foundation for continued, expansive research on the politics of state feminism. The self-identified goals of this book are to build a systematic empirical theory and also to develop a theory of state feminism by “operationalizing feminist theory” using gender as a “significant component,” while still remaining in dialogue with “mainstream” political science (e.g., new institutionalism), which, for the most part, remains in ignorance of the robust findings generated by scholars of gender and politics (p. x).
McBride and Mazur are the primary authors (as well as co-conveners of the larger study), with four other contributors to the book, Joni Lovenduski, Joyce Outshoorn, Birgit Sauer, and Marila Guadagnin, also part of the leadership of that study. These scholars spent more then a decade collecting and analyzing data on late–twentieth-century policy debates and outcomes. Creating a collaborative research network on gender politics and the state (RNGS) composed of more than 164 research associates and 38 researchers, these scholars innovated and implemented what they call the “bridging approach,” a mixed-methods design combining detailed process tracing through primary research on specific cases with the building of a comprehensive data set. This data set was produced from coding by Mazur and McBride of more than 130 policy debates, with 120 variables drawn from both qualitative and quantitative research (e.g., questionnaires and interviews conducted by the research participants). It was used to test and explain the 11 hypotheses generated by case studies (many of which were previously published as independent books).
This exhaustive and nuanced scholarship is what allowed for both the identification and testing of the fundamental research question found in this capstone book: the “extent [to which] women's policy agencies have been effective partners for women's movements … in gaining access to policy-making … and influencing policy outcomes” (p. 283). That is, to what extent has state feminism assisted or hindered women's movements and their stated goals? The methods used to answer this question are “statistical inference, crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and causal-mechanism case studies” (p. x).
The book covers 30 policy debates and 11 women's policy agencies in 13 countries, and so there are multiple ways to read the analysis as it is presented in each of the book's four parts. The first half of the book expounds on theory building, delineation of concepts, and empirical findings, while the second focuses on the contributions of the authors' findings for future research and exploration. One of the fundamental findings is that women's movements are more likely to achieve their goals if the movement can influence and ally with women's policy agency in the state, and that access to women's policy agencies that are within the arena of influence matters, even if those agencies are relatively weak (in form, power, or resources). Thus, women's policy agencies and the synergy between movements and agencies are crucial.
Left relatively unexamined, however (and this suggestion is in keeping with their proposals for future research), is the constitutive or performative dimension of this relationship—as outlined in Lisa Disch's argument about a mobilization conception of representation (“Toward a Mobilization Conception of Democratic Representation,” American Political Science Review 105 [2011]: 100–14). This may be because the very bedrock concepts of gender, women, and feminism operationalized are, in the end, essentialist, rooted primarily in an oppositional sex difference of men and women.
Indeed, McBride and Mazur define gender as primarily women alone, and gendering as “women alone or in opposition to men,” with the exact result that Terrell Carver (Gender Is Not a Synonym for Women. By Terrell Carver. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1996) cautions us against; namely, that gender becomes a synonym for women (p. 281). Arguably, this definition obscures the divisiveness of the women's movement concerning sex and sexuality, especially as within the book the women's movement is pictured as homogenous (“women acting as women”), implicitly suggesting that a particular form of women's movements is universal (even if, as the authors request, their theory is taken outside the West) (pp. 33, 265). Evangelista does not commit the same error, but he too struggles to distinguish and delineate gender from its heterosexual matrix, which, in the end, shadows his illustration of the continual hetero-sexing of the nation. Recognizing the excellent quality of these books, while simultaneously noting the limitations of the authors' purchase on gender, intimates that even with the best of intentions, and the most scrupulous attention, it still remains that gender will, conceptually and empirically, escape its bounds.
