Control + 1 – Block Headings

AFF: Case Outweighs
Feminists have yet to grapple with what methodology is critical for rethinking IR and security. While we wait for them to rethink broader conceptions of knowledge and discourse, thousands of people will die for their answer

Tami Amanda Jacoby, PhD, York University, Canada, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Studies, and research fellow at the Center for Defense and Security Studies, at the University of Manitoba in Canada, with fieldwork in Israel, Palestine and Jordan, 2006 [“Feminist Methodologies for International Relations” edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Auskland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pg. 153 EmiW]

Feminist research in the field embodies some of the most significant constraints and opportunities for rethinking the broader conceptions of social science research and its principles of classification, rules, and categories. Long imprisoned within the boundaries of its own realist/ neorealist orthodoxy, the field of International Relations (IR) has yet to grapple seriously with the challenges posed by feminist interventions, which seek to reconfigure the very nature of “knowledge production,” that is, the accumulation, classification, interpretation, and (represen­tation of data.¹ Feminists and other critical scholars have sought a basis for knowledge that does not conform to mainstream IR's rational- objective methodology. However, there is little agreement among them about which methods or techniques are more inherently suitable to the process of generating knowledge that is subjective, reflexive, and consenting to the notion of women as knowers.

AFF AT: Root Cause of War

Patriarchy is not a sufficient explanation for all violence

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 18.

In important ways, all of these approaches challenge the assumptions and worldviews of liberal feminism as well as its positivist/empiricist epistemological foundations. Today, however, feminist theory is engaged in a fundamental reassessment of these approaches and their epistemologies. While, in the 1970s, it was assumed that the various structural causes of women’s oppression could be specified and broken down, this consensus has now eroded. For example, Nira Yuval-Davis has argued that the notion of patriarchy, so important to radical and socialist feminisms, is highly problematic. While it may be appropriate for specific historical periods and geographical regions, Yuval-Davis claims that it is much too crude an analytical instrument in most societies, certain women have power over some men as well as over other women.31
The K selectively misinterprets violence- plenty of times males are selectively killed too

Adam Jones, political scientist at University of British Columbia, 1996 (“Does Gender Make the World go round?” Review of international studies vol 22, number 4, JSTOR)

The gendering of the large-scale atrocities committed by Saddam's forces in Kuwait also receives only selective attention in Enloe's work. She touches on the plight of Kuwaiti and foreign women abused by Iraqi troops, but the wider Iraqi process of detention, torture, execution, and forced removal (probably for execution) of tens of thousands of Kuwaitis-again, judging from human-rights and media, virtually all male-is passed over. Likewise, the Iraqi regime's postwar assault against the Shia -marsh Arabs' in southern Iraq seems to have been highly gender-specific. The troops are arresting all males over 15 and taking them to Radwaniyeh [prison camp]', according to a Middle East Watch researcher. They're never seen again,' and thousands are estimated to have died, often after horrific torture.73 We have noted that feminist explorations of the 'private' sphere and 'security' issues have prompted a concern with society-level issues of gendered violence and conflict. Certain types of violence, though, notably murder and suicide, deserve different gender-sensitive investigation. For example, in the country with by far the highest homicide rate in the world, Colombia, 88.2 per cent of victims are male. Patterns of murder and suicide elsewhere also appear to be disproportionately weighted against males.74 The more amorphous issue of health and life expectancy might also be examined under this rubric. It would be central, for instance, to any understanding of the gendered social impact of political transition processes. Can any generalizations be drawn from the calamitous decline in male life expectancy in the former Soviet Union? Why has it occurred in the midst of political trans formations that have ordinarily been viewed as disproportionately harming women?75 Patterns of political violence also need to be explored for the light they might shed on how 'security' is gendered at the societal level. Preliminary investigation suggests that political violence by state agencies is predominantly, even overwhelmingly, .ll directed against males rather than females. To cite three examples from the author's own area of primary interest: a survey commissioned by the revolutionary Sandinista government after the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua found that 93.4 per cent of those killed in the insurrection were male, a 'predominance . . . [that] is impressive', according to Carlos Vilas.76 Marysa Navarro's study of state terror in Argentina during the era of the Dirty War found that 70 per cent of those killed or 'disappeared' were male.77 A recent report on state terrorism (along with guerrilla and death-squad violence) in the Colombian banana-growing region of Urab- explicitly notes the combatants' readiness to 'wage their escalating war by killing male civilians instead of each other'. '[A]n estimated 677 men . . . have been killed so far this year', mostly unarmed banana workers; 'In this macho society, women are protected and only the men are murdered, leaving about a thousand widows in the region,' according to Church estimates.78
AFF AT: Root Cause of War
Gender is not the root cause/only issue in considering war

Cockburn 10, Cynthia Department of Sociology, The City University London, UK b Centre for the Study of Women and

Gender, University of Warwick, UK (2010) 'Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 12: 2, 139 — 157

Second, war-fighting between two armies is only the tip of the iceberg, as it were, of an underlying, less immediate, set of institutions and relationships that can be understood as systemic. The author most often credited for the term ‘war system’ is Betty Reardon. In her text Sexism and the War System she employs the term to refer to society in its entirety, ‘our competitive social order, which is based on authoritarian principles, assumes unequal value among and between human beings, and is held in place by coercive force’ (Reardon 1996: 10) While this accurately describes many modern societies, the women’s organizations I have studied, in so far as I have come to understand their analysis, do not in the main share Betty Reardon’s reduction of this social order to nothing other than a gender order. Few, I believe, would follow her in a belief that ‘patriarchy . . . invented and maintains war to hold in place the social order it spawned’ (Reardon 1996: 12). Looking at war from close quarters these women activists see all too clearly that other forces are at work in addition to gender.
Associating women with peace disempowers both

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 21.

Calls for studying men and masculinities have been accompanied by a suspicion, voiced by some feminists, of radical feminism's celebration of female characteristics. Besides the obviously problematic slide into distinctions such as good women/bad men, the association of women with maternal qualities and peacemaking has the effect of disempowering both women and peace and further delegitimating women's voices in matters of international politics. However, socialist feminists' claims about the material bases of women's subordination have been important for explanations of the feminization of poverty, a trend that appears to be accompanying forces of economic globalization. Given that feminist IR is attempting to better understand a variety of subordinations confronted by women worldwide, the introduction of race and class as well as postcolonial perspectives, which attend to issues of culture and identity, has been another welcome development. Conventional IR has been very Western great-power oriented; listening to and respecting women’s voices worldwide and recovering the activities of those on the margins-people not usually considered significant actors in world politics-is an important contribution to the discipline.
Associating women with peace legitimises male dominance

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 60.

An example of the negative consequences of associating women with peace is Francis Fukuyama's discussion of the biological roots of human aggression and its association with war. Fukuyama claims that women are more peaceful than men-a fact that, he believes, for the most part is biologically determined. Therefore, a world run by women would be a more peaceful world. However, Fukuyama claims that only in the West is the realization of what he calls a "feminized" world likely; since areas outside the West will continue to be run by younger aggressive men, Western men, who can stand up to threats posed by dangers from outside, must remain in charge, particularly in the area of international politics.79 Besides its implications for reinforcing a disturbing North/South split, this argument is deeply conservative; given the dangers of an aggressive world, women must be kept in their place and out of international politics. The leap from aggressive men to aggressive states is also problematic. There is little evidence to suggest that men are "naturally" aggressive and women are "naturally" peaceful; as bell hooks reminds us, black women are very likely to feel strongly that white women have been quite violent and militaristic in their support of racism. 81 Traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity that sustain war require an exercise of power: they are not inevitable."
AFF AT: Root Cause of War
The caregiver approach to women is flawed—it is impossible to make a generalization about all people of the same gender

Tessler and Warriner 97 Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner, Mark Tessler is a Political Science Professor at University of Michigan, Vice Provost for International Affairs, and a PhD from Northwestern, January 1997. [Cambridge University Press, Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes Towards International Conflict, JSTOR p. 253]

The caregiver approach to international relations stresses empathy and compromise, observing that these values are associated with social roles that in most societies are played primarily by women. Women are the principal caregivers in most cultures, attending to the needs of children, ailing friends, elderly parents, and others. Cultural feminism argues that this has relevance for the international arena. Emphasizing the universal applicability of a predisposition toward nurturance, it links women’s roles as domestic caregivers as a more tolerant approach to relations among communities and states. Men, by contrast, being less involved in care-giving, are said to be less moderate and pacific and more likely to be concerned with hierarchy, hegemony, and justice in inter-communal and international relations. While advanced by some feminist scholars, others express reservations about these hypotheses associated with care-giving, not only challenging the evidence on which they are based but also dissenting from their philosophical and political assumptions. In particular, critics charge that attributions of empathy, nurturance, and caring reinforce traditional stereotypes about women and retard the feminist goal of emancipation. On the one hand, some postmodern feminist theorists insist that there are no “essential components” that characterize all women. On the other hand, some assert that the emphasis on caring is itself misplaced, either seeing this as patronizing or disputing the hypothesized link to public and international affairs.
The motherly approach to women is flawed—not all women are actually mothers, and men are capable of having the same morals as mothers

Tessler and Warriner 97 Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner, Mark Tessler is a Political Science Professor at University of Michigan, Vice Provost for International Affairs, and a PhD from Northwestern, January 1997. [Cambridge University Press, Gender, Feminism, and Attitudes Towards International Conflict, JSTOR p. 254]

A second and closely related feminist discourse emphasizes the concept of “moral motherhood,” which asserts that women as mothers have a responsibility to eliminate violence in the resolution of conflicts. Advancing the concepts of “maternal thinking” and “preservative love,” which are said to be consequences of the social practice of mothering, this discourse distinguishes between “bureaucratic-administrative abstractionism” and an emphatic and loving approach to human relations. Maternal thinking about world affairs thus rejects a distinction between individual and collectve forms of violent conflict, viewing both as equally abhorrent. Elshtain describes the political implications of maternal thinking as “social feminism.” An approach to international relations shaped by maternal thinking, she argues, is significantly more pacific and tolerant than one founded on abstract and hierarchial conception of justice. This discourse, too, has critics among feminist and other scholars. Some argue that men as well as women are capable of maternal thinking, even though the male voice is largely absent in discussions of this concept. Some also raise questions about women who do not have children, noting that they are not considered in the conversation about maternal thinking. Still another reservation, echoing a complaint about the caregiver paradigm, is that an emphasis on motherhood and material thinking reduces women to unidimensional actors and obscures the diversity of the factors that influence their attitudes and behavior.

AFF: War Turns Gender Violence
War has the greatest effect on women

J. Ann Tickner (professor of international relations at USC) 2001, Gendering World Politics. Pp. 49-51.

Despite a widespread myth that wars are fought, mostly by men, to protect "vulnerable" people-a category to which women and children are generally assigned - women and children constitute a significant proportion of casualties in recent wars. According to the United Nations' Human Development Report, there has been a sharp increase in the proportion of civilian casualties of war-from about 10 percent at the beginning of the twentieth century to 90 percent at its close. Although the report does not break down these casualties by sex, it claims that this increase makes women among the worst sufferers, even though they constitute only 2 percent of the world's regular army personnel. The 1994 report of the Save the Children Fund reported that 1.5 million children were killed in wars and 4 million seriously injured by bombs and land mines between 1984 and 1994-" But there is another side to the changing pattern of war, and women should not be seen only as victims; as civilian casualties increase, women's responsibilities rise. However, war makes it harder for women to fulfill their reproductive and care-giving tasks. For example, as mothers, family providers, and caregivers, women are particularly penalized by economic sanctions associated with military conflict, such as the boycott put in place by the United Nations against Iraq after the Gulf War of 1991. In working to overcome these difficulties, women often acquire new roles and a greater degree of independence-independence that, frequently, they must relinquish when the conflict is terminated. Women and children constitute about 75 percent of the number of persons of concern to the United Nations Commission on Refugees (about 21.5 million at the beginning of 1999). This population has increased dramatically since 1970 (when it was 3 million), mainly due to military conflict, particularly ethnic conflicts." In these types of conflicts, men often disappear, victims of state oppression of "ethnic cleansing," or go into hiding, leaving women as the sole family providers. Sometimes these women may find themselves on both sides of the conflict, due to marriage and conflicting family ties. When women are forced into refugee camps, their vulnerability increases. Distribution of resources in camps is conducted in consultation with male leaders, and women are often left out of the distribution process. These gender-biased processes are based on liberal assumptions that refugee men are both the sole wage earners in families and actors in the public sphere.49 Feminists have also drawn attention to issues of wartime rape. In the Rwandan civil war, for example, more than 250,000 women were raped; as a result they were stigmatized and cast out of their communities, their children being labeled "devil's children." Not being classed as refugees, they have also been ignored by international efforts.50 In northern Uganda, rebels abducted women to supply sexual services to fighters, resulting in a spread of AIDS; frequently, after being raped, these women have no other source of livelihood." N, illustrated by the war in the former Yugoslavia, where it is estimated that twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand women were raped in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rape is not just an accident of war but often a systematic military strategy. In ethnic wars, rape is used as a weapon to undermine the identity of entire communities. Cynthia Enloe has described social structures in place around most U.S. Army overseas bases where women are often kidnapped and sold into prostitution; the system of militarized sexual relations has required explicit U.S. policymaking. More than one million women have served as sex providers for U.S. military personnel since the Korean War. These women, and others like them, are stigmatized by their own societies. In her study of prostitution around U.S. military bases in South Korea in the 1970s, Katharine Moon shows how these person-to-person relations were actually matters of security concern at the international level. Cleanup of prostitution camps by the South Korean government, through policing of the sexual health and work conduct of prostitutes was part of its attempt to prevent withdrawal of U.S. troops that had begun under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969. Thus, prostitution as it involved the military became a matter of top-level U.S.-Korean security politics. Crossing levels of analysis, Moon demonstrates how the weakness of the Korean state in terms of its wish to influence the U.S. government resulted in a domestic policy of authoritarian, sexist control. In other words national security translated into social insecurity for these women. 54 By looking at the effects of war on women, we can gain a better understanding of the unequal gender relations that sustain military activities. When we reveal social practices that support war and that are variable across societies, we find that war is a cultural construction that depends on myths of protection; it is not inevitable, as realists suggest. The evidence we now have about women in conflict situations severely strains the protection myth; yet, such myths have been important in upholding the legitimacy of war and the impossibility of peace. A deeper look into these gendered constructions can help us to understand not only some of the causes of war but how certain ways of thinking about security have been legitimized at the expense of others, both in the discipline of IR and in political practice.
AFF AT: Root Cause of War
The majority of violence is against men unlike feminists believe

Jarvis 2000 D. S. L. Jarvis, 2000. [University of South Carolina Press, International Relations and the Challenge of Postmodernism: Defending the Discipline, p 170].

Apart from the problematic nature of identity discourse as a theoretical avenue germane to International Relations, there is much else in postmodern feminist writings that are also questionable. Adam Jones, for example, is concerned about the exclusivity with which women are made the onto- logical essence of gendered analyses, creating skewed commentaries that, rather than frame the important question of gender in more inclusive ways, tends to imprison it amid a radical matriarchal discourse? Unfortunately, this all too often leads to narratives and modes of analysis whose treatment of the facts in international relations is, at best, suspect One of the recur- rent themes in feminist analyses of international politics, for example, is that women everywhere suffer more violence, intimidation, torture, mutilation, and abuse than do men who otherwise perpetrate these crimes. When Ann Tickner attempts to draw attention to the "particular vulnerabilities of women within states," for instance, "the phrase 'particular vulnerabilities' suggests not just an analytically separable category, but a disproportionate degree of vulnerability.""' Yet, if we look at the facts the contrary is true: Feminist Revisions of International Relations 171 men direct the overwhelming majority of their violence toward other men. United States Department of Justice (USDJ) statistics for 1995 and 1996, for example, show that, "except for rape/sexual assault, every violent crime victimization rate for males was higher than for females."'' Moreover, if the incidence of male-to-male prison rape is included in rape/sexual assault fig- ures, then USDJ rape/sexual assault statistics for 1990 show that 130,000 women were the victims of rape, while male-to-male prison rape claimed 290,000 victims.'2' In terms of homicide victimizations, USDJ figures show that of the 21,937 homicides in 1994, females accounted for 20.4% or 4,489 of these, while males constituted 17,448 or 79.5% of homicide vic-tims.' Inner city black male youths, in particular, have fatality rates ap- proaching those for front-line soldiers during the Vietnam War and arc significantly higher than those experienced by black and white female youths combined. As the statistician for the USDJ notes of national crime figures for 1996, in terms of victimization, "the young, blacks, and males were most vulnerable to violent crime." Similarly, British Home Office fig- ures for 1992, show that young men "are more than twice as likely than are women to be killed by strangers" through acts of random street violence. It is young men, notes Lorraine Radford, "who are most at risk from 'stranger-danger," not women."'
AFF AT: Root Cause of War
The kritik ignores violence committed against men