ABSTRACT
The role of women with respect to national security has been ambiguous: defined as those whom the state and its men are protecting, women have had little control over the conditions of their protection. In looking for explanations for the causes of war, realists, as well as scholars in other approaches to international relations, have distinguished among three levels of analysis: the individual, the state, and the international system. For feminists, warrior-citizenship is neither a negative, unavoidable characterization of human nature, nor a desirable possibility; it is a revisable, gendered construction of personality and citizenship. To understand the citizen-warrior as a social construction allows us to question the essentialist connection between war and men's natural aggressiveness. Feminist perspectives on national security take us beyond realism's statist representations. Women's definitions of security are multilevel and multidimensional. Women have defined security as the absence of violence whether it be military, economic, or sexual.
