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Jennifer Greenburg’s compelling and meticulously researched ethnography of post 9/11 US militarism details the military’s turn to development and humanitarianism as a weapon of counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgency seeks to “win hearts and minds;” as such, the population, and in particular, the household (and Afghan women within the household) emerged as central “sites of military conquest.” At War with Women shows how US female soldiers, with their presumed feminine abilities to soothe, calm, and relate to people (and in the process, gather military intelligence), became central to this counterinsurgency strategy, even as female soldiers were marginalized within military institutions. Moreover, Greenburg shows how attempts to retrain soldiers in what one US Army General called “armed social work” drew on colonial histories, such as the US occupation of Haiti between 1915-1934 and the US War in Vietnam, as models of successful counterinsurgency programs.
In this book forum, four notable scholars—geographers who study the nexus of geopolitics, war, security, migration, and gender—provide critical analyses of At War with Women, attesting to the book’s theoretical and political rigor and import. Lisa Bhungalia focuses on Greenburg’s argument that female soldiers’ carework is not merely a buffer against military violence, but central to it. Scholars have previously distinguished between “kinetic” (physical) and “non-kinetic” (cultural or psychological) military strategies, with non-kinetic strategies theorized as window-dressings that conceal or provide distance from an underlying violence. One of the theoretical strengths of Greenburg’s book, Bhungalia writes, is to provide a “critical corrective for how we conceive of violence” by arguing that female soldiers’ carework is constitutive of violence—the intelligence gathered over cups of tea in Afghan homes, for example, provide intelligence for subsequent bombing raids.
Emily Gilbert also weighs in on Greenburg’s theory of violence, although she raises questions about what it means to call non-kinetic counterinsurgency tactics “violence,” pointing out that “PowerPoints are not the same as clusterbombs.” Gilbert ultimately asks for more analytical clarity on the subject with the aim of better theorizing responsibility and accountability for violence. Gilbert concludes that Greenburg’s books is useful toward a larger abolitionist goal of ending war.
Jennifer Fluri focuses in on one of Greenburg’s main theoretical contributions, the concept of a new imperial feminism that emerged in the context of post-9/11 counterinsurgency strategies. A new military femininity—and the gender essentialisms and racial-civilizational geographies it drew upon—simultaneously constructed a “liberated” western woman (in the guise of the US female soldier) as a contrast to an oppressed Afghan female “other” (who would be liberated by the US military). All the while, US female soldiers were subject to sexual harassment and misogyny within the military itself. Women also struggled to obtain particular benefits otherwise extended to their male colleagues from the Veteran’s Administration (VA) after their deployment—even though Female Engagement Teams (FETs) worked in combat zones—because women were technically banned from ground combat until 2013.
Jenna Loyd rounds out this forum with an essay that situates At War with Women within post-9/11 scholarly debates on imperialism and capitalism, highlighting Greenburg’s innovative and deeply researched contributions to these debates. She also reflects on the importance on the book’s conjunctural analysis, writing that Greenburg has done a “feminist conjunctural analysis of the imperial present.”
In her response, Jennifer Greenburg makes a case for the book’s relevance in unpacking what she calls the “long shadow of the war on terror” as well as disrupting the “status quo of permanent war”—most acutely in the current, genocidal war in Gaza, supported by US aid. The book presents a rigorous model of how scholars might develop counterhistories and counterclaims to contemporary US military and security discourses, toward the larger goal, as Gilbert puts it, of abolishing war.
Lindsey Dillon is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco (UC Press, 2024).
