ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the most important historic contender against realism's discursive hegemony, just war theory, with similar questions in mind. Rethinking realism using feminist questions defamiliarizes its central categories: the male homme de guerre retains his preeminent role, to be sure, but we recognize explicitly the ways in which his soldierly virilization is linked to the realist woman's privatization, and so on. The evils of the social world are traced in a free-flowing conduit from masculinism to environmental destruction, nuclear energy, wars, militarism, and states. Just war discourse, like realism, has a long and continuing history; it is a gerrymandered edifice scarred by social transformation and moral crisis. Hannah Arendt's attempt to rescue politics from war deepens an important insight of just war theory—underdeveloped in the theory itself—by insisting that the problem lies not only in the compulsions of international relations but in that ordering of modern, technological society just war thinkers call a "false" or "armed" peace.
