Sex and World Peace

"Yes. Again, data are important to this argument. Valerie Hudson and her team can show you right up front that the presence of conflict maps quite consistently onto the extreme subordination of women. In other words, those societies where women have the fewest rights are also the ones that have the most war, the most hunger… they are more likely to be fragile states, more likely to be run by autocrats. The worst governed and most belligerent forces in the world are states where they subordinate women to an extreme degree. That’s something you couldn’t have said with any certainty even 15 years ago, because you simply did not have the numbers to show it. So that’s a very big deal. That’s mostly because of the effort to collect more and more international datasets on everything. You can make the analysis because we have a big dataset on conflict and another on gender, right? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other thing is that they can, as you say, articulate it out into particular cultural practices. Now it’s very important to understand at this point that different cultures don’t have different gender practices. The practice of gender subordination is pretty uniform across the world, it’s not an idiosyncratic thing. So you can look at a fairly extensive collection of countries and identify, for example, the countries that have an honour system with regard to gender—where a man’s honour is dependent on the chastity of the women in his household, for instance. This is actually very common still in the world today, and has been practically uniform in world history. So the question then becomes: how does one go about fostering the change that not only equalises women, not only because it equalises women, but because you’re going to have less conflict. For a whole chain of reasons. It’s a deeply, deeply researched book, drawing from research across many fields. Because that’s the other thing that’s really important. It’s not just one field where these conclusions are emerging, it’s pretty much across every field that has considered the question: what about women? Unfortunately economics is the last to the game. Or maybe business is even further behind. But it’s been researched for decades in other fields, and that’s what Valerie Hudson and her team outline. There’s certainly a case to be made for that second point. But consensus does seem to be emerging that it’s the way that a country treats its women that causes the rest of it; it’s a continuous feedback loop, in that the more women are mistreated, the more of a cascade of bad stuff leads on from that—systematic rapes, hunger, excessive fertility… which in turn feeds back into the culture both genetically and in terms of population and resources, which in turn keeps the cycle going. One of the things that keeps it happening is that if somebody is seen to trespass against a person—or country—the first thing that happens is that person lashes back, violently. There’s no attempt to discuss it, to settle it peacefully. Just immediate violence. That obviously keeps some of the cycle going. And that reflects both the temperament of the men on the ground and the collective temperament of the country."

"Valerie Hudson, a political scientist, and her colleagues have looked at the critical relationship between sexual equality and international conflict. Her earlier book, Bare Branches, looks at sex ratio imbalance—how when you have too many men and not enough women it can lead to increasing conflict, authoritarianism, and mercenary action. If men lack reproductive access they are anxious to raise themselves in status and get enough money for marriage so that they can create their own families. “Gender imbalances…have huge implications for peace, development and stability in society.” Related work that she’s done looks at patrilocality and how, when women are sold away or forced to move from their family members, they become particularly vulnerable to abuse. People might think about violence against women as a domestic issue. What Hudson shows is that where there is gender inequality, where there are too many men and not enough women, there are large-scale social consequences. States become unstable. In Sex and World Peace they look at many of these kinds of phenomena. For example, in countries where women are not treated as well you get higher rates of aggression—more first strikes in war, higher rates of escalation and more money spent on weapon production. Gender imbalances form an impetus for going to war externally so that men do not become so restless at home that they turn against and topple their leaders. So gender imbalances, Hudson shows, have huge implications for peace, development and stability in society. The normative implications of this book include changing laws and practices to increase sexual equality—changing marriage, divorce and custody laws; inheritance laws and property rights. A lot of aspects of family law affect society, and therefore international relations. For example, most arable land in the world is owned by men but worked by women. When women work their own land, the land is much more productive. So food insecurity challenges could be overcome if we could change laws so that women could actually own the land that they farm. The demographic transition, whereby women have fewer children, is a critical part of any economic development plan. Draconian policies in this regard are obviously part of the story of how China has come so far economically. So helping with family planning is one normative implication. Allowing women to borrow even small amounts of money is another normative implication. We learned from the experience of the Grameen bank in India that women are much much much more likely to repay microloans, because when you give men loans they tend to buy cigarettes and rounds at the local pub while women tend to invest in their businesses. And when women get loans they are likely to have fewer children and they are more likely to educate the children they have, particularly if those children are girls. There are a host of downstream implications and applications to Hudson’s work. When you reduce aspects of patriarchy you get way better outcomes from society in general. This book is a very powerful reminder that women must be more equal if you want to engender peace and prosperity for everybody."