Targeting Women in Wars: Gender and Intentional Civilian Death

In this chapter, we critically evaluate the civilian victimization debate through feminist lenses, asking how gender weighs into belligerents’ decisions to intentionally target civilians. After exploring previous feminist contributions to the debate about the meaning and effectiveness of the non-combatant immunity principle, we introduce a theoretical approach to civilian victimization in war inspired by feminist thinking about the gendered nature of war and militarism. We argue that states use “civilian” as a proxy for “women” as a Clausewitzian centre of gravity for state and nation, and therefore attack civilians to attack women to attack the essence of the enemy. We then offer empirical evidence in support of this theoretical interpretation in two forms: statistical work on the relationship between sex, gender, and other factors that the civilian victimization literature has identified as influential, and a case study about the British Blockade of Germany in the First World War. After evaluating the evidence, we argue that belligerents do not attack a gender-neutral category of “civilians” when they attack non-combatants. Instead, they attack women. Still, attacking women is not the whole story: belligerents attack women not as women but instrumentally as proxy for state and nation.