ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an explanation for the way in which gender assumptions became embedded in the principles on which the civilian protection regime rests. The descriptive principle of the civilian/combatant distinction was constructed in part according to the beliefs about the gendered division of the wartime labor. The combination of hyper-aggressiveness and the hyper-rationality that characterizes modern hegemonic masculinity and its connection to the Westphalian state have been well documented. Gender discourses associating men/manhood with soldiering and women/womanhood with the care of children legitimize the universal conscription of adult men and the exclusion of women from military service. The resulting sex-gender structure of the national militaries reinforces the perception that women are separate from war. Kinsella's argument has important normative implications for the protection of civilians and the promotion of the norm in international society, as she recognizes in her concluding paragraph.
