Sex
and World Peace - Book
Valerie M. Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and
Chad F. Emmett
April, 2012
Cloth, 304 pages, 11 color maps, I figure, 17 tables
ISBN: 978-0-231-13182-7
$26.50 /
£18.50
Sex and World Peace unsettles a variety of assumptions in
political and security discourse, demonstrating that the security of women is a
vital factor in the security of the state and its incidence of conflict and
war.
The authors compare micro-level gender violence and macro-level state
peacefulness in global settings, supporting their findings with detailed
analyses and color maps. Harnessing an immense amount of data, they call
attention to discrepancies between national laws protecting women and the
enforcement of those laws, and they note the adverse effects on state security
of abnormal sex ratios favoring males, the practice of polygamy, and
inequitable realities in family law, among other gendered aggressions.
The authors find that the treatment of women informs human interaction at all
levels of society. Their research challenges conventional definitions of
security and democracy and shows that the treatment of gender, played out on
the world stage, informs the true clash of civilizations. In terms of resolving
these injustices, the authors examine top-down and bottom-up approaches to
healing wounds of violence against women, as well as ways to rectify
inequalities in family law and the lack of parity in decision-making councils.
Emphasizing the importance of an R2PW, or state responsibility to protect
women, they mount a solid campaign against women's systemic insecurity, which
effectively unravels the security of all.
About the Author
Valerie M. Hudson is professor and George H.W. Bush Chair
at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M
University. Her research concerns foreign policy analysis, security studies,
gender and international relations, and methodology, and her articles have
appeared in such journals as International Security, Journal of Peace
Research, Political Psychology, and Foreign Policy Analysis.
She is the author or editor of several books, including, with Andrea Den Boer, Bare
Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population,
which won the American Association of Publishers Award for Best Book in
Political Science and the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Best Book in Social
Demography. She was named one of Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global
Thinkers of 2009. Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill is professor emeritus of psychology at
Brigham Young University and the last director of its Women's Research
Institute. She is a fellow in both the Association for Psychological Science
and the American Psychological Association. Her research focuses on interpersonal
violence and peace. She is a coauthor of Peaceabilities: Compelling Stories
and Activities That Develop Abilities of Children to Live Peacefully with
Others and coeditor of A Chorus for Peace: A Global Anthology of Poetry
by Women. Mary Caprioli is associate professor, Head of the Department of
Political Science, and Director of International Studies at the University of
Minnesota Duluth. She pioneered a new line of scholarly inquiry between the
security of women and the national and international behavior of states and
confirmed the link using quantitative methodology. She is an associate editor
for Foreign Policy Analysis, an editorial board member for the Peace
and Conflict Report, and an advisory board member for the Minorities at
Risk Project. She is also a member of the International Group of Experts for
the UNSCR 1325 Research Group of the government of Sweden. Chad F. Emmett is an
associate professor of geography at Brigham Young University focused on
researching the peaceful sharing of space between Israelis and Palestinians,
Christians and Muslims, men and women, and other supposedly opposing groups. He
is the author of Beyond the Basilica: Christians and Muslims in Nazareth.