WOMEN WAR and GENDER

INTRODUCTION
Recently, the roles of women in war have received increased attention in both scholarship and political debate. U.S. moms went off to battle in the 1991 Gulf War, to a global audience. Since then, women have crept slowly closer to combat roles in Western militaries. Meanwhile, women were primary targets of massacres in wars in Rwanda, Burundi, Algeria, Bosnia, southern Mexico, and elsewhere. The systematic use of rape in warfare was defined as a war crime for the first time by the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Despite this growing attention to women in war, however, and a surge of recent scholarship in relevant fields, no comprehensive account has yet emerged on the role of gender in war, a topic that includes both men and women but ultimately revolves around men somewhat more than women.
A single case rarely makes or breaks a hypothesis, but many together often can. Only by assembling large bodies of empirical evidence from multiple disciplines ca...