International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

Security

+ Neolib

The “security state” and “neoliberal state” are both legitimated through masculine qualities

True 15

Jacqui True (Professor of Politics & International Relations and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Monash University, Australia. She received her PhD from York University, Toronto, Canada and has held academic positions at Michigan State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Auckland. She is a specialist in Gender and International Relations.), June 2015, “A Tale of Two Feminisms in International Relations? Feminist Political Economy and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda”, Critical Perspectives, Politics & Gender, 11 (2) (2015), pg. 423-424, Accessed: 7/10/16

Bringing a feminist political economy perspective to bear on international security opens up new areas of concern and research. One major area involves rethinking gendered states, in particular, the interface between the “security state” and the “authoritarian neoliberal state” form (Bruff 2014) following transformations in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Both forms of state are legitimated through gender relations. The authoritarian neoliberal state values masculine qualities of competitiveness, risk taking, and rationality as does the security state, and in this way they both support one another. As political economists argue contra ideologies of the free market, neoliberalism does not involve less state but more state orchestration of the kinds of activity that are feasible and appropriate for market and public institutions to engage in. There are opportunities for IR feminist research on how increased defense budgets are prioritized in many countries at the same time as foreign aid budgets are diminished and access to services for noncitizens are virtually eliminated. Feminist research and advocacy has long emphasised the trade-offs between military and social spending and the unequal gender impacts of increased military spending. This debate has renewed currency in the post-GFC austerity climate, given the heavy costs of seeking security against globalized terrorism in the age of social media where anyone can claim links to a global militant movement. Gendered economic structures determine the limits and the possibilities of politics, including security politics, whereas politics is the principal means through which markets are established and transformed. IR feminism must therefore be informed about political economy whatever the issue under study. Examining the connections between military/ security complexes and financial capital will enable us to better understand how patriarchal power works. Given that global political and economic life are practically imbricated and that, echoing Enloe (Stark 2013), IR feminist scholars share a broad curiosity, political economy needs to be part of any and all feminist analysis of international relations.

Violence

Climate Change

The root cause of climate change is anti-ecological constructs of masculinity—transfer to sustainable energy sources only sustains unjust ecological practices

Gaard, G. (2015, April). Ecofeminism and climate change. In Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 49, pp. 20-33). Pergamon. Gaard was a UWRF Sustainability Faculty Fellow in spring 2011, Dr. Gaard is the current Coordinator for the Sustainability Faculty Fellows. Before coming to River Falls, Gaard was an Associate Professor of Humanities at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (1997-2002) and an Associate Professor of Composition and Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (1989-1997)

Implementing the Bali Principles with their queer feminist posthumanist augmentations requires transformative strategies that are both top-down and bottom-up; the responsibilities are both systemic, requiring changes in national and corporate policies, and personal, requiring changes on the part of citizens and consumers (Cuomo, 2011). Some technoscience solutions to climate change can help to mitigate the outcomes of First-World nations' and corporations' unjust and anti-ecological practices, and transform our energy reliance to more sustainable sources, but a queer feminist climate justice approach goes to the roots and calls for equity and sustainability at every level, from citizen to corporation, and it begins with economics. As feminist economist Marilyn Waring observed in her classic work, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (Waring, 1988), the United Nations System of National Accounts (UNSNA) has no method of accounting for nature's own production or destruction until the products of nature enter the cash economy, nor does this system account for the majority of work done by women. A clean lake that offers women fresh water supplies for cooking and crops has no economic value until it is polluted; then companies must pay to clean it up, and the clean-up activity is performed by men and recorded as generating income. Similarly, living forests which supply women with food, fuel, and fodder have no recorded value in the UNSNA until they are logged and their products can be manufactured into commodities for sale—then all related industry and manufacture, usually seen as men's work, is recorded as income generating. In The Price of Motherhood, Ann Crittendon (2001) addresses the shadow economy of women's unpaid labor in reproduction and caregiving, linking the gendered economy with ecological economics. As she explains, “In economics, a ‘free rider’ is someone who benefits from a good without contributing to its provision: in other words, someone who gets something for nothing. By that definition, both the family and the global economy are classic examples of free riding. Both are dependent on female caregivers who offer their labor in return for little or no compensation.” (Crittendon 9) In short, we need a feminist ecological accounting system, capable of tracking and promoting climate justice economic practices at every level, from local to global. Replacing economic globalization (which in practice has meant global corporatization and indigenous as well as ecological colonialism) with global economic justice offers a frontal assault on climate change. Industrialized nations must pay our climate debts both to communities and to ecosystems, as called for in the Bali Principles, and develop economic accounting practices that do not externalize the costs of a just transition onto the environment and communities facing the outcomes of climate change. An economic transition from excessive takings (i.e. “profits”) from women, indigenous communities, the Two-Thirds World, animals, and ecosystems to a green economy requires sustainable jobs of the kind advocated by Van Jones' organization, Green for All. These jobs will include sustainable energy systems, sustainable transit systems, and urban planning guided by environmental justice. The foundations for food justice have been growing for decades in the food cooperative movement which began in the 19th century, and was more recently resurrected in the 1970s. Today's food justice movement includes Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), the advent of rooftop and community gardens exemplified by groups such as Will Allen's Growing Power in Milwaukee, queer food justice farmers and gardeners from Vermont to California, and Natasha Bowens' “Brown Girl Farming” efforts to map food justice so that the food movement is not seen as the domain of affluent consumers but is shaped by the self-determination of women and communities of color (Bowens, 2013). With a posthumanist food justice movement reconceived to include other animal species and to consider their lives in terms of reproductive justice, the animal sanctuary movement—a corrective response of entangled empathy, interrupting the practices of industrialized animal agriculture— may face a new opportunity: freeing up the excessive land space now used by industrialized animal agriculture, smallscale farming and community gardens alike will have more land for farming and for freed animals. This transition away from industrial animal agriculture begins by ceasing the artificial insemination of female animals on factory farms, and possibly returning freed animals to live out their lives adjacent to community gardens and small farms, where they can provide cropping services and fertilizer, giving humans a chance to repay our interspecies debt. Overlapping with food justice, the Transition Town movement, named in 1998 and formally launched by 2005, has spread from its origins in the United Kingdom to countries on every continent, with communities responding to peak oil by building local food security through community gardens and local energy security through renewables. Some groups build on the movement for local currencies based on barter: one hour of anyone's time is equal to another's. As Bill McKibben wrote in his Rolling Stone article, “Do the Math” (McKibben, 2012), social and environmental movements of the kind needed now are often inspired by having an enemy. Pinpointing the globalized fossil fuel industry, McKibben launched 350.Org's strategy of divestment, modeled on the successful divestment strategies that prompted South Africa to end apartheid. Withdrawing financial support from systems destructive of global eco-justice is another necessary but not sufficient method of resistance. While crucial to a just transition, economic boycotts and micro-level community infrastructures providing an alternative to global capitalism through local economics, energy, food, and governance can still be overridden by global-level trade agreements, multinational investments, and other forms of economic or militarized pressure. Withdrawing economic support from these global institutions of ecological domination, investing in systems based on social/environmental/climate justice, and pressuring for equitable representation within the international institutions of governance, are equally crucial strategies.11 The macro-level discussions at the UNFCC must be gender balanced, as was suggested over twenty years ago by the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) in their 1991 Preparatory Conference for the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. There, many of the most salient issues of climate change were both addressed and ignored in these two pivotal conferences (Brú Bistuer & Cabo, 2004). What feminist climate justice scholars also note, albeit as an afterthought, is that these discussions of “gender and climate” have tended to focus only on women. More research is needed on the ways that men around the world have variously benefitted from or been affected by climate change discussions, problems, and outcomes. More research is needed on the gender roles of masculinities in diverse cultures, and the ways these social constructions promote overconsumption, sexual violence and exploitation, the abandonment of family members during climate change crises, and rationalize the de facto exclusion of women from decision-making bodies at the local, national, and global levels. Much has been written confirming the antiecological construction of masculinity (Kheel, 2008). It is time to envision and to recuperate culturally-specific, ecological masculinities that will companion this transition to climate justice (Gaard, 2014), and in this regard, posthumanist genderqueer activists will have much to offer.

Militarism

Empirics prove, securitization privileges the needs of the military, causing every day violence. Failure by the state to endorse empowerment measures is the problem – the alt solves this problem and makes meeting health and security goals less violent

Hans and Reardon 12 [Asha Hans, Betty A. Reardon “The Gender Imperative: Human Security Vs State Security” Routledge, Dec 6, 2012]

Military spending diverts capital and resources away from the provision of healthcare and preventative health services into unproductive, capital-intensive areas. If it can be shown that military spending represents a misapplication of resources needed to protect the real security needs of people, then an argument could be made that those resources should be redistributed to areas such as health and education which would directly meet their needs, thereby increasing human security. Political will could then be garnered in order to ‘enact the required redistribution of fiscal resources, ingenuity, and technology to stem the rising tide of disease and to promote global prosperity and stability’ (Price-Smith 2002: 179). According to SIPRI (2008), military spending has increased in real terms since the early 1990s, with total global military expenditures reaching $1,339 billion at the end of 2007. In many countries, after post-Cold War reductions, military budgets have increased rapidly in the past decade. In both Africa and Asia — areas of the world which can least afford it — there has been an increase of 51 per cent in overall military expenditures since 1998 (ibid.: 10). There have been a number of reports tying military spending to negative social and health outcomes and increased violence. In 1994, the World Development Report (UNDP 1994: 50) found that the internal security of developing nations was much more likely to be harmed than helped by a country’s own military. The report also highlighted that the chance of dying from some form of social neglect (such as an infectious disease or malnutrition) in a developing country was 33 times greater than the chances of being killed in a war of aggression. Hyatt (2006: 320–21) reported a statistical correlation between higher levels of military spending and child mortality, concluding that for every 1 per cent reduction in military expenditures, the infant mortality rate would decline by 2.5 deaths per 1,000 births each year. There is also some evidence that violence can be related to the failures of governments to provide equitable access to healthcare and educational opportunities. J. P. Azam (2001: 442) showed that governments in Africa that failed to deliver the services that people wanted, as a form of wealth redistribution, were much more likely to face violent upheavals and rebellions, while spending on defence caused an increase in the incidence rate of armed rebellion. Conversely, the redistributive effects of public health and education spending worked to reduce outbreaks of violence. However, there is a question as to whether redistribution of state resources to health and education will inevitably result in improved health. There is a distinct possibility that even if there were the political will to enact such a proposition, the additional resources would be transferred to protectionist/state-centred models that may do little to address the determinants of poor health. […] with the Declaration of Alma Ata (WHO 1978), the WHO developed a more horizontal approach to health. A determinants’ approach to health works on the basis that better health can be provided if illness is prevented rather than cured. The Declaration of Alma Ata articulated a multi-sectoral approach to health, which included agriculture, food, industry, education, housing, public works, communications and demilitarization as essential components for improving health. Most importantly, the Declaration recognized inequalities in health status as a major concern, and noted that failure to address those was ‘political, socially and economically unacceptable’ (WHO 1978). It called for the introduction of Primary Health Care (PHC), in which basic healthcare and prevention would be provided by a system of community health workers at the local level. It also drew attention to the world’s misplaced security priorities, requiring governments to redistribute resources that were being spent on arms with the goal of ‘health for all by the year 2000’. Horizontal health systems such as PHC open up new opportunities for community participation in health services, particularly by women and other marginalized population groups. They offer possibilities for women to challenge established hierarchies, improve status by becoming health providers, enhance their own health and the health of their communities, and participate in peace building and human rights-related work within their communities. While the Declaration itself predates the development of the concepts of human security by more than a decade, it does represent a theoretical strand of the health security literature, and is referred to in both the Human Development Report (UNDP 1994: 92) and Human Security Now (CHS 2003: 107). There are already a number of clear cases where the PHC approach has been tried and proven effective (see Werner and Sanders 1997). In Kerala and Sri Lanka, despite tiny budgets and limited resources, life expectancy and morbidity improved through public health and education programs. The barefoot doctors’ programme in China in the 1970s is touted as a major success that underlies the country’s current development. Costa Rica now has better health indicators than many areas of the USA. However, Alma Ata’s underlying message of social liberation as a means of improving health also proved to be its downfall. The CHS (2003: 107) noted the failure of the international community to meet the goals of Alma Ata, ranging ‘from weak political will to economic incapacity’. The result was that ‘public systems have not been adequately developed, and private markets in health care have catered only to those with the money to pay for care’. However, this is only part of the explanation. The idea of PHC was, according to D. Werner and D. Sanders (1997), ‘disembowelled’ by those committed to maintaining the system as it was — the medical–industrial establishment. Werner and Sanders argued that governments were uncomfortable with the broad messages of participation, empowerment and social action. In a number of countries that had introduced successful PHC programmes, such as Nicaragua and Mozambique, health workers were deliberately targeted for elimination. Governments also misused the opportunities presented by PHC to dismantle programmes designed to promote a truly grassroots-based health movement (1997: 20). Another example of the redistribution discourse can be seen in the attempts to contrast global military spending priorities with the failure of the world’s governments to meet their obligations in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Of the eight MDGs, three are directly related to health, and all of the eight have relationships as determinants of better health. All have some connection to the effects that gender has on social development.

Militarization causes physical, psychological, and sexual violence as feminine bodies become the battleground wars are fought on

Hans in 2010 (Asha Hans is the former Director, School of Women’s Studies, and Professor of Political Science, Utkal University, India. She is the author and editor of many publications related to women’s rights, the latest being The Gender Imperative, coedited with Prof. Betty Reardon (2010). Her book Gender, Disability and Identity (2003) is a globally recognized seminal work coedited with Annie Patri. An advocate of women’s rights, she has participated in the formulation of many conventions in the United Nations. A leading campaigner of women’s rights in India, she has initiated many campaigns on the inclusion of women with disabilities in the mainstream women’s movement. She is also the founder of Women with Disabilities India Network. “14 Human Security the Militarized Perception and Space for Gender” The Gender Imperative pages: 384 – 409)

Women on the Line of Control The Line of Control (LOC) between India and Pakistan in the state of Jammu & Kashmir has emerged as one of the most rapidly militarized space in the world. Since 1947 militarization has increased, leaving civilians to bear its undesirable consequences. The price of militarization, needless to say, is met at the cost of other basic needs and has subsequently given rise to increased violence against women. I have tried to listen to women’s experiences of the conflict zone on the LOC, an Indo–Pakistan border, where the army is implementing its programme of ‘human security’. The region selected for study on the border is 100 kilometres long and covers Kargil, Drass and Batalik sectors in Jammu & Kashmir. The area which has experienced low intensity conflict since partition underwent border changes in the wars of 1948, 1965, 1972 and 1999. After the conflict of 1999, women’s voices were documented by the author and the article communicates these women’s concerns and desires for change.2 Among these narrations on the LOC emerged the term of ‘human security’ used by the armed forces as a strategy of peace on the borders. Authored by a commanding officer of the army, General Arjun Ray, it has turned into a full-fledged programme of the Indian Army. To analyse the emerging perspective of a human security paradigm within a militarized environment, the discourse that has emerged is documented here. The high level of violence against women in this zone is not created alone by killings due to incessant shelling but goes beyond it, to physical harm such as rape and domestic and psychological violence. The rape of millions of women in historical and geographical perspectives has been documented globally in the gendered narrative of wars. In that narrative, dominant notions of masculinity merge with the ethnic element. While we cannot rule out rape as an individual act carried out as a prize of war, it is also committed by the armed forces as part of a tactic to defeat the ethnic or religious adversary. Militarized rape is viewed as a distinctive act perpetrated in the context of an institution, the military that is part of the state machinery. The documentation of the mass rapes in the South Asian subcontinent is part of the history of the partition of India and Pakistan. These are narratives of ‘dishonour’ and abductions based on religious grounds, by both the Hindus and the Muslims. The rape of women of ‘our’ community by ‘their’ men figured prominently in the debates and discussions that took place in parliamentary circles (as expected mainly among men). The honour of the community and of the nation was seen to be the trajectories written across the bodies of women and the violation of their bodies, and was therefore tantamount to a violation of the body of the nation, of Mother India (Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998). During partition, though women should have been central in the writing of history, they found little space, and it is therefore not surprising that rape as an instrument finds no reference in the history of the LOC. Post partition, the new border that is the Line of Control was drawn in 1972, as a result of the Indo–Pak war. In that drawing of the temporary border, portions of land changed hands from India to Pakistan and vice versa.3 In this fluid territorial situation the armed forces perpetuated rape on an extensive scale, silenced forever due to the shame the community felt (author’s visit to a village in Kargil in 2002).4 The children of the rapes are now grown up. There is silence over the fate of these ‘wronged’ children fathered by soldiers. It was a personal and a community humiliation. The memories are kept behind a shadow of silence. Their trauma cannot be overlooked, as two whole generations have suffered. For the women the shame and dishonour of rape will always remain, even though they are in their 40s and 50s now. For the village at large it was a community humiliation by a state meant to protect them. For them, independence as understood by the rest of India did not take place.5 Rape exacerbates women’s vulnerability because of patriarchal definitions of women’s purity (De Alwis 2004).6 A purity mapped on their bodies. This purity is not confined to conflict but is carried over from their daily lives. Concepts of virtue and family honour are part of the private, which during conflicts comes into the public through rape. In the social milieu, being raped brings stigma to both mother and child. In this context, surviving rape and bearing a rapist’s child means loss of family, community and livelihood. Women thus have strong incentives to mask or hide their experiences of sexual assault. Sexual abuse continues to occur in the border region of Kargil, but due to the stigma associated with this issue, it is difficult for the community to discuss it openly. Gendered duties, it is seen, also bring gendered consequences. Women and girls are particularly vulnerable to attack when collecting and searching for firewood, as this may take them a long distance from their homes and expose them not only to the danger of anti-personnel mines and unexploded shells but also the risk of sexual attack. The collectivity of women’s bodies in the eyes of the perpetuator as representation of the community cannot be perceived by women in the same manner, for whom loss of self-esteem is a personal tragedy and loss of self-esteem and dignity comprise an important component of human security. The protection from violation of human dignity forms the core principle of human security. Rape has the most long-lasting effect on women’s psyche and the most difficult to heal. Any alternative security system that does not address these concerns of women violates their human rights. Unfortunately, the existing national security system provides no protection to women on this ground.

War

A feminist political economy perspective highlights structural violence and harmful gendered globalized structures—gender equality is directly linked to lower levels of domestic and intra-state conflict

True 15

Jacqui True (Professor of Politics & International Relations and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Monash University, Australia. She received her PhD from York University, Toronto, Canada and has held academic positions at Michigan State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Auckland. She is a specialist in Gender and International Relations.), June 2015, “A Tale of Two Feminisms in International Relations? Feminist Political Economy and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda”, Critical Perspectives, Politics & Gender, 11 (2) (2015), pg. 421-423, Accessed: 7/10/16

IR feminists are exploring the continuum of gendered violence through engagement with the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda. Addressing the protection and prevention of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) specifically requires a feminist political economy approach, not just the mainstreaming of gender within international security issues. UN Security Council WPS resolutions since SCR 1325 in 2000 have progressively narrowed their focus to the issue of the use of sexual violence in conflict and disaggregated this violence from other forms of gendered violence affecting women and girls disproportionately. The slew of Security Council resolutions from 1820 to 2122 have focused on coordination mechanisms for protection within peace operations and legal accountability mechanisms for prevention, but they have not addressed the root causes of the sexual violence, such as the social structures of gender inequality, economic impoverishment, and lack of opportunity. On the demand side, many conflicts involve competition over land and other natural resources, and several implicate large transnational corporations in human rights violations. Indeed, SGBV against women and girls, boys and men may be deployed precisely to dispossess individuals and communities of their land and to remove the agricultural labor force of a community. Because women often do the majority of agricultural work, some conflicts have witnessed armed groups attempting to stop women from being able to work, effectively cutting the food supply of the “enemy” (Turshen 1998). On the supply side, women’s empowerment is a critical part of violence prevention in and outside of conflict. It is true that women of all income groups and in all conflicts experience men’s violence, but when women have access to productive resources and enjoy equal social and economic rights with men, they are less vulnerable to violence across all societies (True 2012). Not surprisingly, countries that value women’s equal participation — and where there are fewer economic, social, or political differences in power between men and women — have lower levels of violence and of intrastate armed conflict (Caprioli 2005; WHO 2005). To illustrate the importance of an FPE perspective on the WPS agenda, consider women’s experiences of multiple forms of insecurity and violence in postconflict Sri Lanka. The conflict was officially over in Sri Lanka in 2009; however, while the war is over, the violence has not ended. The situation of structural violence for minority women, in the north and east of Sri Lanka in particular, exacerbates women’s vulnerability to physical violence, including sex trafficking, harassment, sexual violence, and domestic violence. In the latter stages of the conflict and its aftermath, military forces were responsible for a variety of human rights abuses against the civilian population, including extrajudicial killings, disappearance, rape, sexual harassment, and other violations. In the current climate of impunity, sustained by insecurity and the lack of military accountability, these abuses continue. Thousands of women have lost their husbands and other family members during the armed conflict. For many, this has brought new responsibilities: 40,000 households in the north and east are now femaleheaded. Women are now primary “providers” for their families: they face limited livelihood opportunities in the postconflict context and are typically excluded from official development programs. Moreover, against a backdrop of competing claims and mass resettlement, they are especially vulnerable to land grabs and other rights violations. The militarization of these regions since the formal end of the conflict has compounded the insecurities for minority women. Many, especially widows and the wives of disappeared or “surrenderees,” are vulnerable every day to sexual harassment, exploitation, or assault by army personnel or other militias (see Davies and True 2015). These women are targeted for violence as embodiments of minority group identity and because gendered cultures of stigma and shame generalizes their oppression and punishment across their families and communities. An FPE perspective expands the WPS agenda by directing our attention toward the long-term prevention of conflict and violence. More than gendered interpersonal relations, religious and cultural dynamics, it emphasizes the gendered globalized structures that contribute to violence and conflict, such as gender-biased macroeconomic policies, supply chains, labor markets, and political norms. These structures are modifiable, and where they can be shown to be causal of violence, as in the case of Sri Lanka, WPS policy changes could be devised to significantly reduce the incidence of widespread sexual and gender-based violence.

The impact is try or die – the unmanageable catastrophes of present-day society are all consequences of this patriarchal system – war, violence, and environmental destruction are inevitable

Warren and Cady, 96(Karen Warren and Duane Cady, Professors at Macalester and Hamline, Bringing peace home: feminism, violence, and nature, 1996, p.12-13)

Operationalized, the evidence of patriarchy as a dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c) the unmanageability, (d) which results. For example, in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every three or four women will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment, spouse-beating, and sado-massochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practiced, sanctioned, or tolerated within patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining, factory farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are instances of behaviors maintained and sanctioned within patriarchy. They, too, rest on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to “rape the earth,” that it is “man’s God-given right” to have dominion (that is domination) over the earth, that nature has only instrumental value that environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for “progress.” And the presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to impose dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability. Much of the current “unmanageability” of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d) is then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that reflect historically male-gender-identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, and environmental destruction, and violence towards women, which many feminists see as the logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is often only through observing these dysfunctional behaviors—the symptoms of dysfunctionality—that one can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a dysfunctional system, this “unmanageability” can be seen for what it is—as a predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy. The theme that global environmental crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature. Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for instance, argues that “a militarism and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because they reflect and instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth.” Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning: Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment) which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if not impossible It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in understanding the conceptual roots of various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.