Renowned scholar-activist Cynthia Enloe lays out the lessons that women activists have drawn from their immediate experiences of war. 

Twelve Feminist Lessons of War draws on sharp insights of women as survivors, activists and scholars from Ukraine to Sudan and Myanmar to show how diverse women's experiences of war must be taken seriously if we are to prevent and shorten wars and make gender justice central to recovering from wars.

Women's wars are not men's wars. Wartime shapes the gendered politics of marriage, prostitution, journalism, economics, childcare, domestic violence and rape. Enloe's razor-sharp analysis highlights how understanding this can prevent wars and even end them.

With fresh, fierce and vital thinking, she shows that by paying more attention to the wounded and the women who care for them, we will be more realistic about the long 'post-war'; and that by listening to feminists on the ground, in Ukraine and elsewhere, we will better understand what is happening to our world.

Marsha Henry and Amanda Chisholm join this discussion about Twelve Feminist Lessons of War and add their own expertise and insights as researchers in the fields of gender, military, peace, war, and security.

Please join us for an evening of engaging conversation that will be followed by an audience Q&A and reception.

Meet our speakers and chair

Cynthia Enloe is a feminist activist, researcher and teacher. She is Research Professor at Clark University in Massachusetts and internationally known for her work on women in the military, in the global garment, banana, diplomatic and banking industries, and in domestic service. Her 15 books, including Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, have been translated into Chinese, French, Icelandic, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. She has been awarded honorary doctorates from universities around the world, and regularly appears on international news channels. In 2018, Cynthia Enloe was chosen as one of the 100 names written on the Gender Justice Wall at the International Crimes Court in The Hague.

Amanda Chisholm is a reader in gender and security at King’s College London in the Department of War Studies. Amanda’s research focuses on the privatisation and decentring of global war-making. Her work is located at the nexus of feminist international relations, global political economy, and security studies. She employs ethnographic methodologies to examine the racial and gendered aspects of private military and security companies’ (PMSCs) global operations. Her work is concerned with how gendered and racial logics sustain difference, assign value and reproduce hierarchies amongst these workforces and the ways in which these security market relations involve household labour. Amanda’s most recent book is a distillation of the past 14 years of ethnographic research with Gurkhas and other private security actors in Afghanistan, the UK, and Nepal. Entitled, The Gendered and Colonial Lives of Gurkhas in Private Security: From Military to Market.

Marsha Henry is Associate Professor at the Department of Gender Studies at LSE. Dr Henry's research interests focus on gender, peace and security; gender and militarisation; gender and development; and intersectional feminist methodologies. Over the past 20 years, her research has concentrated on documenting the social experiences of living and working in peacekeeping missions. Her book on this two decades ethnographic-inspired research, The End of Peacekeeping: Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention will be out this spring with University of Pennsylvania Press.

More about this event

This book launch is being hosted by the Department of Gender Studies and is a part of our 30th Anniversary calendar of events. The department pioneers intersectional, interdisciplinary and transnational teaching and research, addressing the tenacity of gendered power relations and gendered inequalities in times of global transformations. Established in 1993, LSE Gender is the largest Department of Gender Studies in Europe.

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