Laura Sjoberg Books

Laura Sjoberg positions gender and gender subordination as key factors in the making and fighting of global conflict. Through the lens ofgender, she examines the meaning, causes, practices, and experiences of war, building a more inclusive approach to the analysis of violent conflict between states. Considering war at the international, state, substate, and individual levels, Sjoberg's feminist perspective elevates a number of causal variables in war decision-making. These include structural gender inequality, cycles of gendered violence, state masculine posturing, the often overlooked role of emotion in political interactions, gendered understandings of power, and states' mistaken perception of their own autonomy and unitary nature. Gendering Global Conflict also calls attention to understudied spaces that can be sites of war, such as the workplace, the household, and even the bedroom. Her findings show gender to be a linchpin of even the most tedious and seemingly bland tactical and logistical decisions in violent conflict. Armed with that information, Sjoberg undertakes the task of redefining and reintroducing critical readings of war's political, economic, and humanitarian dimensions, developing the beginnings of a feminist theory of war.

This publication reveals the stories of female perpetrators of sexual violence and their place in wartime conflict, legal policy, and the punishment of sexual violence. More broadly, the author asks, what do the actions and perceptions of female perpetrators of sexual violence reveal about our broader conceptions of war, violence, sexual assault, and gender? This book explores specific historical case studies, such as Nazi Germany, Serbia, the contemporary case of ISIS, and others, to understand how and why women participate in rape during war and conflict.

Disordered Violence looks at how gender, race and heteronormative expectations of public life shape Western understandings of terrorism as irrational, immoral and illegitimate. Caron Gentry examines the profiles of 8 well-known terrorist actors and looks at the gendered, racial, and sexualised assumptions in how their stories are told.

From Pakistan to Chechnya, Sri Lanka to Canada, pioneering women are taking their places in formal and informal military structures previously reserved for, and assumed appropriate only for men.

Builds on and expands Gentry and Sjoberg's landmark work on violence and gender.

Focusing on feminist perspectives, this book critiques traditional just war theory by highlighting gender biases and advocating for alternative standards that prioritize women's experiences and political marginalization. Laura Sjoberg utilizes this feminist framework to examine the wars in Iraq post-Cold War, offering insights that challenge conventional notions of justice in warfare. The work aims to reconstruct just war principles to incorporate empathy and a deeper understanding of gender dynamics in conflict situations.