In consideration of UN Resolution 1325 (which called for women's equal participation in promoting peace and security and for greater efforts to protect women exposed to violence during and after conflict), this volume takes stock of the current state of knowledge on women, peace and security issues, including efforts to increase women's participation in post-conflict reconstruction strategies and their protection from wartime sexual violence.
Twenty-three countries currently allow women to serve in front-line combat positions and others with a high likelihood of direct enemy contact. This book examines how these decisions did or did not evolve in 47 countries. This timely and fascinating book explores how different countries have determined to allow women in the military to take on combat roles—whether out of a need for personnel, a desire for the military to reflect the values of the society, or the opinion that women improve military effectiveness—or, in contrast, have disallowed such a move on behalf of the state. In addition, many countries have insurgent or dissident factions, in that have led armed resistance to state authority in which women have been present, requiring national militaries and peacekeepers to engage them, incorporate them, or disarm and deradicalize them. This country-by country analysis of the role of women in conflicts includes insightful essays on such countries as Afghanistan, China, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Russia, and the United States. Each essay provides important background information to help readers to understand the cultural and political contexts in which women have been integrated into their countries' militaries, have engaged in combat during the course of conflict, and have come to positions of political power that affect military decisions.
Where are the women? In traditional historical and scholarly accounts of the making and fighting of wars, women are often nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, war stories are told as if men were the only ones who plan, fight, are injured by, and negotiate ends to wars. As the pages of this book tell, though, those accounts are far from complete. Women can be found at every turn in the (gendered) phenomena of war. Women have participated in the making, fighting, and concluding of wars throughout history, and their participation is only increasing at the turn of the 21st century. Women experience war in multiple ways: as soldiers, as fighters, as civilians, as caregivers, as sex workers, as sexual slaves, refugees and internally displaced persons, as anti-war activists, as community peace-builders, and more. This book at once provides a glimpse into where women are in war, and gives readers the tools to understood women’s (told and untold) war experiences in the greater context of the gendered nature of global social and political life.
This volume explores how art and artifacts can tell women’s stories of war—a critical way into these stories, often hidden due to the second-tier status of reporting women’s accomplishments. This unique lens reveals personal, cultural, and historically noteworthy experiences often not found in records, manuscripts, and texts. Nine stories from history are examined, from the mythical Amazons of Ancient Greece to a female prisoner of war during World War II. Each of the social, political, and battlefield experiences of Penthesilea, Artemisia, Boudica, the feminine cavaliers, the Dahomey Amazons, suffragists, World War I medical corps, and a World War II prisoner of war are intertwined with a particular work of art or an artifact. These include pottery, iconographic images, public sculpture, stone engraving, clothing, decorative arts, paintings, and pulp art. While each story stands alone, brought together in this volume they represent a cross-sectional reflection on the record of women and war. The chapters cover not only a diverse range of women from around the globe - the African continent, the Hispanic territory of Europe, Carian and Ancient Greece and Rome, Iran, Great Britain-Scotland-ancient Caledonia, Western Europe, and North America—but also a diverse choice of artwork and artifacts, eras, and the nature of the wars being fought. This book will be of value to those interested in gender across history and its interplay in the field of war.
Before the publication of this book, Alaine Polcz was widely recognized as a psychologist ministering to the needs of disturbed and incurably ill children and their families, as the author of numerous articles and several books on thanatology, and as the founder of the hospice movement in Hungary. The autobiographic account of the experiences of a woman, then 19-20, in the closing months of the Second World War. When it was first published, in 1991, the book was a revelation of past horrors in Hungary which, until then, had lingered on in the farthest reaches of the national memory as rumor and suspicion about the violent acts committed against women during a time of chaos, havoc, and savagery. The literary world quickly recognized the merits of this book: It was highly praised by Hungarian reviewers, awarded prizes, and has already been translated into French, Rumanian, Slovenian, and Serbian.
The Laws of War and 21st Century Conflict explores how international law considers and confronts the so-called new warfare. To many, modern conflict appears unlike any we have known before. A modern battlefield might as easily be found in an urban shopping mall or in the frontline trenches of a failed state. Weaponry that once populated science fiction novels and movies is now a reality, with unmanned aerial drones used against military targets in several countries and automated robots replacing some soldiers on the battlefield. Globalization and the diffusion of technology have eroded state controls and empowered other actors, from terrorist groups to mercenaries. Now, the most deadly threats might be activated by the push of a cell-phone button or from a computer hacker's screen on the other side of the world.
Twenty-three countries currently allow women to serve in front-line combat positions and others with a high likelihood of direct enemy contact. This book examines how these decisions did or did not evolve in 47 countries. This timely and fascinating book explores how different countries have determined to allow women in the military to take on combat roles—whether out of a need for personnel, a desire for the military to reflect the values of the society, or the opinion that women improve military effectiveness—or, in contrast, have disallowed such a move on behalf of the state. In addition, many countries have insurgent or dissident factions, in that have led armed resistance to state authority in which women have been present, requiring national militaries and peacekeepers to engage them, incorporate them, or disarm and deradicalize them. This country-by country analysis of the role of women in conflicts includes insightful essays on such countries as Afghanistan, China, Germany, Iraq, Israel, Russia, and the United States. Each essay provides important background information to help readers to understand the cultural and political contexts in which women have been integrated into their countries' militaries, have engaged in combat during the course of conflict, and have come to positions of political power that affect military decisions.
This volume contains writings of or about war from the following authors : Nina Macdonald, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain, Edith Wharton, Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte, Colette, Helen Zenna Smith, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Amy Lowell, Willa Cather, Mary Lee, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Gertrude Stein, Kathe Kollwitz, Charlotte Mew, Katherine Mansfield, Louise Bogan, Toni Morrison, Jane Addams, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Martha Gellhorn, Frances Davis, Dorothy Parker, Gertrud Kolmar, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Thompson, Ding Ling, Anna Akhmatova, Olivia Manning, Elizabeth Bowen, Bryher, H.D., Mary Lee Settle, Elizabeth Vaughan, Iris Origo, Christabel Bielenberg, Etty Hillesum, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, Charlotte Delbo, Elsa Morante, Mitsuye Yamada, Hirabayashi Taiko, Kikue Tada, Doris Lessing, Kathryn Hulme, Kay Boyle, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gelhorn, Mary McCarthy, Grace Paley, Huong Tram, Lady Borton, Margaret Atwood, Muriel Rukeyser, Susan Griffin, Karla Ramirez, Margaret Thatcher, Molly Moore, Fadwa Tuqan, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Meena Alexander, Marta Traba, Lina Magaia, and Margaret Drabble.
Spanning the 20th century, this collection of accessible and very readable essays explores the ways in which men and women have both represented warfare, and represented themselves as participants in warfare.
