Gendering the cult of the offensive

Security Studies

Volumn 18, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 214-240

  Wilcox, Lauren ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 70449574240     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410902900152     Document Type: Article

References (158)

1. Stephen Biddle, Rebuilding the Foundations of Offense-Defense Theory, Journal of Politics 63 no. 3 (2001): 741-74.
2. See, for example, Robert Jervis, Cooperation under the Security Dilemma, in Offense, Defense, and War, ed. Michael E. Brown et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 3-65, 167-214
3. George Quester, Offense and Defense in the International System (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1977)
4. Jack Levy, The Offensive/Defensive Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis, International Studies Quarterly 28 no. 2 (June 1984)
5. Charles Glaser and Chaim Kaufmann, What is the Offense- Defense Balance and Can We Measure It? in Offense, Defense, and War
6. Stephen Van Evera, The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War, in Offense, Defense, and War, 69-118
7. Stephen Van Evera, Offense, Defense and the Causes of War, International Security 22 no. 4 (1998)
8. Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Biddle, Rebuilding the Foundations.
9. Van Evera, Offense, Defense and the Causes of War, 263.
10. Van Evera, Cult of the Offensive, 69.
11. Van Evera, Cult of the Offensive, 72.
12. Van Evera, Cult of the Offensive, 73, 77. The existence of a cult of the offensive has recently been challenged in the literature on WWI and the offense-defense balance.
13. Kier Lieber, The New History of World War I and What it Means for International Relations Theory, International Security 32 no. 2 (Fall 2007): 155-91. The impact of Lieber's piece for my argument is discussed below.
14. The security dilemma describes a situation in which means taken by one state to increase security render other states more insecure. Jervis, Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma, 169.
15. The security dilemma describes a situation in which means taken by one state to increase security render other states more insecure. Jervis, Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma, 46-50.
16. Sean Lynn-Jones, Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics, Security Studies 4, no. 4 (1995): 675-77.
17. Sean Lynn-Jones, Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics, Security Studies 4, no. 4 (1995) 664-65.
18. Kaufman and Glaser, What is the Offense Defense Balance, 284-85.
19. Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984)
20. Van Evera, Offense, Defense, and the Causes of War, 228.
21. Keir A. Leiber, War and the Engineers: The Primacy of Politics over Technology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
22. Jervis, Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma, 21-22. In this case, the second and third parts of my argument (that gender constitutes offensive military polities and the protection racket) are more relevant in explaining how gender is constitutive of the offense-defense balance.
23. Ted Hopf, Polarity, Military Balance, and War, American Political Science Review 85, no. 2 (June 1991): 475-93.
24. Lynn-Jones, Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics, 681.
25. Van Evera, Offense, Defense and the Causes of War, 263.
26. An objective offense-defense balance is problematic from a feminist perspective for a number of reasons. First, it assumes there is a context in which going to war is rational, as in certain windows of opportunity. The main problem is in properly discerning the most and least advantageous times. Feminists have challenged the legitimacy of the realist assumptions that underpin this logic. See, for example, Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 27-66
27. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Also, feminist epistemologists have critiqued the assumption of an external reality that exists outside the socially embedded processes of language and knowledge production. Thus, one cannot easily separate objective reality from knowledgeable practices of a given time and place.
28. See, for example, V. Spike Peterson, Transgressing Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender and International Relations, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 21 no. 2 (1992): 183-206
29. Birgit Locher and Elisabeth Prügl, Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart or Sharing the Middle Ground? International Studies Quarterly 45 (2001): 111-29. However, the implications of these critiques for the offense-defense debate will not be taken up in this article as the goal is to show the relevance of feminist theory to extant work in security studies.
30. Wendt, Social Theory of International Relations, 77-91.
31. Alexander Wendt, On Constitution and Causation in International Relations, Review of International Studies 24 no. 1 (1998): 105.
32. V. Spike Peterson and Jacqui True, 'New Times' and New Conversations, in The Man Question in International Relations, ed. Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 16.
33. Peterson, Transgressing Boundaries, 194.
34. Locher and Prügl, Feminism and Constructivism, 123-24.
35. See R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 76
36. Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 53-56.
37. See, for example, Iris Marion Young, The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State, Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society 29 no. 2 (2003): 15-35.
38. Jervis, Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma, 35.
39. As mentioned in note 17, the distinction between social facts and brute facts is contested by many feminists who argue that both social and brute facts are the product of the social construction of reality. However, for the purposes of engaging with offense-defense theory, the implications of this argument will not be addressed.
40. Biddle, Rebuilding the Foundations, 746.
41. Feminist work in IR that takes up this critique includes Ann Tickner, What is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions, International Studies Quarterly 49 no. 1 (2005): 1-20
42. Ann Tickner, You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminist and IR Theorists, International Studies Quarterly 41 no. 4 (1997): 619-23
43. V. Spike Peterson, Transgressing Boundaries.
44. Locher and Prügl, Feminism and Constructivism.
45. See also Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds., Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
46. The feminist literature on the masculine underpinnings of science and technology is quite vast. A few influential works include Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Science and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
47. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
48. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
49. Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New York: Gotham Books, 2006), 22, 59, 88.
50. Rachel N. Weber, Manufacturing Gender in Military Cockpit Design, in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), 372-81.
51. Auguste Beernaert, quoted in, James Brown Scott, The Proceedings of the Hague Peace Conference (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 288.
52. See Linda Robertson, The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 324-26.
53. For the use of World War I and offense-defense theory, see Van Evera, The Cult of the Offensive
54. Jack Snyder, Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984, in Offense, Defense, and War, 119-57.
55. For a critique of World War I uses, see Jonathon Shimshoni, Technology, Military Advantage, and World War I, in Offense, Defense, and War, 195-223.
56. For an argument that the German war planner actually knew that the state of technology would favor the defense and lead to a protracted war, see Lieber, The New History of World War I.
57. Van Evera, Cult of the Offensive, 71.
58. Marshall Foch and Clément Falliéres, quoted in, Van Evera, Cult of the Offensive, 72, 71.
59. Michael Howard, Men Against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914, in Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, ed. Steven E. Miller, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Stephen Van Evera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 8.
60. See also John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 79-111.
61. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 137-38.
62. Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of World War I (New York: Berg, 2004), 94-95.
63. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive.
64. Van Evera, The Cult of the Offensive. This point is controversial in the literature as Lieber argues that German war planners planned for an offensive war in spite of knowing that the technology in termsof machine guns as well as logistics would most likely lead to a lengthy and bloody war. Lieber maintains that despite this the Germans undertook such a war because they felt it was their best chance for regional domination. Regardless, the cult of the offensive argument as well as my explanation of the gendered logic that underpins it would still hold for Britain and France. Furthermore, even if the Germans did not misperceive the defensive strengths of the available military technology, their instigation of a war they knew would have serious costs even if successful could be understood in terms of gendered discourses of the offense or gendered ideologies of nationalism.
65. Lieber, The New History of World War I, 177-83.
66. Van Evera, The Cult of the Offensive, 72.
67. Snyder, Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 130.
68. Francis Fukuyama, Women and the Evolution of World Politics, Foreign Affairs 77, no. 5 (1998): 24-40.
69. Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 143-58.
70. See Francine D'Amico and Laurie Weinstein, Gender Camouflage: Women and the US Military (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 5
71. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (1987; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
72. Hooper, Manly States; 81-82
73. Goldstein, War and Gender, chap. 5.
74. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 237.
75. Johanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
76. Enloe, Maneuvers, 245.
77. Peterson, Transgressing Boundaries, 194.
78. Barry Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
79. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive, 123.
80. See also Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of World War I, 97.
81. David Englander, Discipline and Morale in the British Army, in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe During the First World War, ed. John Horne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 126.
82. Hooper, Manly States, 80-87.
83. See also Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
84. Goldstein, War and Gender, chap. 5.
85. Goldstein, War and Gender, chap. 5.
86. Holger H. Herwig, Germany, in The Origins of World War I, ed. Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 150-87
87. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867-1918 (London: Arnold, 1995), 158-59. This belief was not limited to Germany but was common in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early nineteenth century.
88. See also Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
89. Herwig, Germany, 168.
90. Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1876-1918, 205-16.
91. Carol Cohn, War, Wimps and Women: Talking Gender and Thinking War, in Gendering War Talk, ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 227-46
92. Carol Cohn, Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 no. 4 (1987): 687-718.
93. Cohn, War, Wimps and Women, 232.
94. See, for example, Glaser and Kaufmann, What is the Offense-Defense Balance, 288-89.
95. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 319-21, 323-26, 338-42.
96. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 68.
97. See John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 94-97.
98. See John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 99-117.
99. George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 8
100. Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 239.
101. Stephen Van Evera, Hypotheses on Nationalism and War, International Security 18 no.4 (1994): 27, note 42.
102. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation. (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 43.
103. Joane Nagel, Ethnicity and Sexuality, Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 107-33.
104. For further examples of the ways in which feminists have questioned nationalism and for greater detail about the differences between anti-colonial, post-colonial, settler-state and other types of nationalisms, see Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996), 45-63
105. Jill Vickers, Feminists and Nationalism, in Gender, Race and Nation: Global Perspectives, ed. Jill Vickers and Vanaja Dhruvarajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2002.
106. Anne McClintock, Family Feuds, Gender, Nationalism and the Family, Feminist Review 44 (Summer 1993): 62.
107. Robb, British Culture and the First World War, 5.
108. V. Spike Peterson, Sexing Political Identities/Nationalism as Heterosexual, International Feminist Journal of Politics 1 no. 1 (1999): 48-49.
109. See also Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
110. Joane Nagel, Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 no. 2 (March 1998): 242-69. This logic is also aptly demonstrated in the case of the Spanish-American War in Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood.
111. Robb, British Culture and the First World War, 32-36
112. Ilana R. Bet-El, Men and Soldiers: British Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity, and the Great War, in Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870-1930, ed. Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), 73-94.
113. Susan Kingsley Kent, The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism, The Journal of British Studies 27 no. 3 (1988): 232-53.
114. Elshtain, Women and War, 111-12.
115. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
116. Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Women-Nation-State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
117. Peterson, Sexing Political Identities, 39.
118. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 90-100.
119. Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 35.
120. Elshtain, Women and War, 3-13
121. Iris Marion Young, Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime, Hypatia 18, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 224.
122. Elshtain, Women and War, 140.
123. Young, Feminist Reactions, 230.
124. See Robertson, The Dream of Civilized Warfare, 115-54 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003)
125. Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 288-90.
126. Adams, The Great Adventure
127. Goldstein, War and Gender, 275-76
128. Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 281-84.
129. See, for example, Adams, The Great Adventure
130. Herwig, Germany, 150-88
131. Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), 236-42
132. Pat Thane, The British Imperial State and the Construction of National Identities, in Borderlines, 30-31.
133. Angela Woollacott, Gender and Empire (Basingstroke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 75-77
134. Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 48-51.
135. Bet-El, Men and Soldiers, 78-79
136. Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 237-39.
137. Mark Hewitson, Germany and the Causes of the First World War (New York: Berg, 2004), 54.
138. For example, the legitimation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan to protect Afghan women from Afghan men.
139. The Bryce Report was an attempt to verify accounts of German atrocities in Belgium in 1914. It was published in 1915 as the result of an official investigation commissioned by the British government and led by James Bryce. The report is considered to be a prime example of wartime propaganda due to its exaggeration of actual atrocities as well as lurid and sensationalistic accounts of the atrocities.
140. Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How the U.S. Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996)
141. Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War (Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education, 2002), 16-19
142. Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 273-77.
143. Bet-El, Men and Soldiers, 82.
144. Helen Kinsella, Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War, in Power in Global Governance, ed. Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 264.
145. Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 127-49.
146. Anne Orford, Muscular Humanitarianism: Reading the Narratives of the New Interventionism, European Journal of International Law 10 no. 4 (1999): 679-711.
147. Abouali Farmanfarmaian, Did You Measure Up? The Role of Race and Sexuality in the Gulf War, in The Geopolitics Reader, ed. Gearóid Ó Tuathail (London: Routledge, 1998), 286-93.
148. Steve Niva, Tough and Tender: New World Order Masculinity and the Gulf War, in The Man Question in International Relations, ed. Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 109-28.
149. See, for example, Laura Shepherd, Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan Post- 9/11, International Feminist Journal of Politics 8 no. 1 (March 2006): 19-41.
150. Miriam Cooke, Saving Brown Women, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 no. 1 (2002): 468-70.
151. See, for example, Zillah Eisenstein, Feminisms in the Aftermath of September 11, Social Text 20, no 3. (Fall 2002): 79-99
152. Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, Sex, Gender and September 11, The American Journal of International Law 96, no. 3 (July 2002): 600-05
153. Jan Jindy Pettman, Feminist International Relations After 9/11, Brown Journal of International Affairs 10 no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2004): 85-96
154. Young, Feminist Reactions.
155. Van Evera, Causes of War, 192.
156. Lieber, The New History of World War I
157. Jack Snyder and Kier Lieber, Defensive Realism and the New History of World War I, International Security (Summer 2008): 174-94.
158. Snyder, Defensive Realism, 177.