T

he endless wars out of which At War with Women was written are unfortunately ever-present today. In Afghanistan, where the book ends, food insecurity, acute childhood malnutrition, and poverty are much worse today than before the post-9/11 wars. Jenna Loyd draws attention to this aftermath of war through data from the Costs of War Project, also showing how women’s rights—a key justification for the US invasion of Afghanistan—are today classified as “heavily restricted,” just as they were before the US invasion. The wars have come home as US military officials reckon with worsening sexual assault and sexual harassment data. Speaking to National Public Radio in June 2023 about why the US Army struggles to meet recruitment goals, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth described how “in the intense years of the war on terror, we may not have been focused on that [sexual harassment and sexual assault] as much as we should have.” Since I finished writing At War with Women, there has been a marked shift in official US geopolitical rhetoric to preclude US “boots on the ground” in favor of foreign military assistance. The question of military aid has become even ever more urgent as it enables civilian slaughter in Gaza. Yet this same official rhetoric claims the war on terror has ended to usher in a new era of “great power competition” with Russia and China. Such amnesiac claims are detached from the empirical reality that the US government conducted counterterrorism operations in 78 countries in the period 2021-2023 and 85 countries 2018-2020. This is a geographical expansion of the war on terror.

In the face of endless war, how must we reckon with the long shadow of the war on terror? How can we work against amnesia by identifying colonial and Cold War forms of imperialism reappearing amid crises of capitalism at the outset of the twenty first century? How can geographical thought help to disrupt the status quo of permanent war? This generous review forum raises these and many other critical questions for the present moment of danger. Before responding to some of the key points raised here, I want to first express profound gratitude to Jennifer Fluri, Jenna Loyd, Emily Gilbert, Lisa Bhungalia, and Lindsey Dillon for their sustained engagement and thoughtful responses. I have learned from each of you about imperial violence and the politics of difference. It is a gift to collectively deepen these understandings

To use Loyd’s words, At War with Women is a “feminist conjunctural analysis of the imperial present.” Toward this aim, I especially appreciate the question Fluri raises of whether, given my empirical material, feminist political geography in fact needs some new terminology to discuss what I and others refer to as “imperial feminism.” Fluri wonders whether attaching imperialism to feminism muddies the word feminism, “which is already fraught with misunderstanding and misuse.” Indeed, many of the problematic, violent, and militarized uses and abuses of feminist language I write about are “situated within many of the principles of Western-liberal feminism,” but they “are not feminist in practice” (Fluri, this forum). I would like to amplify the language of gendered imperialism, which accurately describes the gendered forms of power through which imperialism is here organized and sustained. To add to this welcome set of questions, I raise here what we are to do with many of the women I write about who perpetuate colonial forms of power and military violence through understandings they explicitly describe as feminist. I wonder still whether the language of liberal or Western-liberal feminism retains value to distinguish between uses of the word feminism that, as Fluri writes, engage with (and disrupt) differential power geometries, and those that in fact “trade on other women’s suffering, oppression, or subject positions for individual or even collective gains.” Such distinctions seem especially important to make in the face of gender inclusion policies such as those At War with Women describes that can actually reinforce conservative gender regimes in practice.

As Bhungalia writes, At War with Women “holds in intimate relation the overtly violent and lethal dimensions of counterinsurgency warfare and their more humanitarian, liberal, and specifically gendered components.” Gilbert is concerned that this intimate relation risks collapsing forms of violence, to which I hope to draw readers’ attention to the emphasis I place on how we must understand the tea drinking, the PowerPoint, the microfinance project as making possible the air strike, the displacement, the night raid. These forms of violence are not the same, but holding them in relation to one another allows, as Bhungalia writes, a “critical corrective to how we ought to conceive of violence,” allowing the book to “ultimately reject the notion that somehow militarized humanitarianism and development are instruments that regulate and buffer state violence, nor are these mechanisms of concealment for violence, rather they constitute projects and practices that are themselves deeply implicated in the continued production of violence.” The inseparability of humanitarianism from violence is fundamental to understand where carceral violence is rooted within the landscapes of refugee resettlement Loyd discusses, or how hegemonic understandings of categories such as economy and society obscure how such categories have been formed through militarism.

Behind Gilbert’s concern is a wonderful claim that in deconstructing various forms of violence we might arrive at an argument to abolish the military and warfare. I welcome this demand and agree it has become an especially difficult set of claims to develop since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now as genocidal war ravages Gaza. At War with Women is about the gendered forms of violence that shore up military power. I think we must understand these forms of power as crucial to the crisis of US hegemony we are living through today as to reveal the points where pressure for change might be most effectively applied. I am reminded by Gilbert’s welcome abolitionist argument of the moment during the Summer 2020 protests following George Floyd’s murder when President Trump posed with a Bible outside of St. John’s church alongside Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Milley later apologized for the photo following public outrage that he had violated military separation from civil society and civilian politics. Yet even in this moment when police abolition was regularly covered in every mainstream media outlet, there was virtually no public conversation about abolishing defense spending. I was struck in this moment by the level of consent in the United States to spending half of the federal discretionary budget on the Department of Defense. To answer Gilbert’s question, we must better understand how such consent has been established and how meanings of “safety” and “security” have been coopted such that they are often synonymous in popular culture with militarized definitions of “national security.” Demanding more—demanding abolitionist futures—means understanding and disrupting the basis of consent to war and militarism. Building abolitionist futures amid the wars and planetary crises of the current conjuncture is as challenging as it is vital.

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Jennifer Greenburg is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Sheffield. She is currently directing the collaborative research project, “Understanding and Reimagining US Beliefs about Militarism” in partnership with Brown University’s Costs of War project, Purdue University’s Policy Research Initiative, and several nonprofit and media peace movement actors. Alongside At War with Women, her publications have appeared in Antipode, Political Geography, Gender, Place, and Culture, and other academic and popular outlets.