Jennifer Greenburg, "At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War" (Cornell UP, 2023)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Jennifer Greenberg about her book titled...

At War with Women, Military, Humanitarianism, and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War, published by Cornell University Press in 2023, which focuses on the post-911 era of the U.S. military, where there's been a whole bunch of things happening with military things, humanitarian things, insurgency things, counterinsurgency things, and gender has been involved in all of that, perhaps.

not in ways that the US military initially planned, right? This is also the era of lots of debates about women's roles in combat.

And yet, even before that was allowed, women were involved in places that were seeing combat in places like Iraq and Afghanistan in ways that the military thought was helpful and maybe even feminist or liberal or what exactly is going on here is one of the very many interesting questions that this book asks. So, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me to tell us about the book. Thanks so much for having me.

Could you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Sure. So my name is Jennifer Greenberg. I am a political geographer currently serving as a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. And I wanted to write At War With Women for several reasons.

The first was that the post 9-11 wars have really defined the first part of my intellectual life and development. My first week of university was when the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center happened in 2001. And the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan reshaped everything, especially the field I was interested in of international development.

So after university, I worked in the development world before I did my PhD for several American NGOs and in international grant making. So this was sort of in the mid 2000s. And I was really struck by how the post 9-11 wars had reframed development as anti-terrorism. And I wanted to understand the longer colonial history that the more recent shift grew out of.

And as I developed into identifying as a feminist scholar, I was also really struck by how women's rights were used to justify the Afghanistan war. And I wanted to understand how this discourse played out in practice. So that's a very interesting collection of reasons to pursue this investigation. And especially that piece at the end, right? How did this play out in practice? How did you figure that out? What kinds of methods have you used for this?

Yeah, so I used a combination of ethnographic and archival methods for this project. The most fascinating access in my fieldwork I had that I really just stumbled into was through a series of interviews I started to do at the U.S. Agency for International Development at their Washington, D.C. headquarters.

And at that point, I was really just trying to figure out what this new office did that appeared during the post 9-11 war. It was called the Office of Military Affairs and was this direct institutional link between the Department of Defense and the government in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government-led development work that the U.S. does. So it turned out that a lot of what they were doing was training people

training military personnel on bases, essentially bringing development experts onto military bases, often contractors, and teaching soldiers how to use these so-called development best practices to fight counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. So a lot of my fieldwork was shadowing ethnographically observing these trainers into what grew into this multi-sided ethnography of six interconnected military bases.

And then as I spent more time on these bases, I was able to get permission to see what came before and after these development contractors would parachute in and out. And this gave me an embodied way to understand ethnographically this institution, the U.S. military, that is often treated as a monolith or kind of a black box in the critical military studies literature. And to understand in practice this process I was really interested in of U.S. hegemony.

And then on the historical and historiographical and archival component of the book, that actually grew out of the ethnography. In military classrooms, I kept seeing how colonial histories were being actively used in the present to demonstrate particular military tactics or ideas or messages, or at times to show young audiences that this was not the first time that the U.S. military had fought a war like this.

So I ended up following a lot of the history I saw actively used in the present into colonial archive. And this method in particular allowed me to address questions of historiography and how imperial paths can actively inform the present. Okay, that's definitely helpful and to establish kind of the way you're going back and forth in time as well and finding those links.

So thinking then about kind of not just what was happening, but why things were happening the way that they were in this sort of post-11 period. Obviously, there's the immediate move by the U.S. military into Iraq and Afghanistan. But counterinsurgency, these ideas around kind of, quote, stabilization, are important.

going under a lot of stress, right, in these first few years and are changing rather a lot. So can you take us to kind of 2006, just after 2006? What is the US thinking there around counterinsurgency stabilization? And how does this, in fact, link a lot more into older imperial histories than we might initially realize? Yeah, so I'm glad you pinpointed 2006 because that's a really important turning point.

when in that year, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps released the first version of its counterinsurgency field manual with the kind of public university press version the next year. And this was when the military really admitted that its previous strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan was not working and was in fact fomenting war insurgency. So by 2006,

We saw top military brass referring to non-governmental organizations as, quote, force multipliers, really seeing development as this weapon that could be wielded to win over populations into counterinsurgency. And this was also when we saw the U.S. Agency for International Development, often through private contractors, going on to these military bases I spoke a bit about earlier and providing these trainings.

And one example of the institutionalization of this in a chapter of the book talks all about this was something called the district stabilization framework, to use that stabilization word that you asked about.

which was a very technical handbook complete with somewhat elaborate social science tools in the form of surveys and matrices to allow military personnel to map out the expected outcome of how a development project could ameliorate factors that they thought were contributing to insurgency. And so this category of stabilization became very important because it actually ended up

becoming somewhat unhinged from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars specifically and from counterinsurgency as a military strategy. So I think counterinsurgency is still very important for all kinds of reasons. But if we're just looking at military doctrine and

What military personnel think is the most kind of important forms of strategy today. Over the last 10 years, it's really fallen out of fashion, right? People aren't talking all about counterinsurgency anymore. But this idea of development as a counterterrorism tool remains.

And the institutions and bureaucratic infrastructure, like the office I mentioned earlier, new sources of funding that link the Department of Defense to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which filters into all kinds of work that isn't just the U.S. government going out there. That's one of these long shadows of the war on terror that remains.

Yeah, that's really interesting to understand. And especially how, even with kind of all this new bureaucracy, all these new technologies, there's still kind of older imperial ideas that are embedded within this, I suppose. And not just kind of, or just at the sort of big picture kind of theoretical level. I wonder if we can talk sort of more

more practically, you know, you discussed right at the beginning, the on-the-ground nature of this investigation. So if we look specifically at pre-deployment training, so before contractors or military actors get sent anywhere, they undergo training, what sorts of things did you see that related to these questions of development, of imperialism, of gender in this training?

Yeah, so in these trainings, I think the interaction between the contractors and the military personnel became this way to really deeply understand the contradictions of what it meant to be military personnel, what they were calling in this time of an NGO with guns, or this weaponization of development and humanitarianism.

And in these interactions was also really possible to see shifting gender meaning and specifically how the meaning of gender was shifting and being formed by its relationship to war and imperialism. That these trainings were a way to understand all those contradictions. And then even more broadly, that these were also contradictions breaking apart the shape of U.S. hegemony, U.S. power in the world more broadly.

So, to answer your question, these contradictions played out in training when soldiers were asked to adapt to this turn to counterinsurgency. And contractors were teaching them things like how to do a village needs assessment or where to construct a well or a school with the explicit idea of changing how the occupation was perceived, the so-called winning hearts and minds that we probably remember hearing a lot about during this time period.

And because of the way the military was reassigning people to different jobs,

There were a lot of men in combat roles that were not actually going to be deployed for infantry and artillery, the job that they were technically in anymore, or at least at this time. So they were being retrained to do this so-called armed social work, to essentially interact with civilians. And many of them weren't happy about it. It wasn't how they defined their identity as a Marine or a soldier anymore.

And the way that they pushed back against the contractors was very much in terms of defending a pre-established identity of combat masculinity. And contractors, in turn, were often framed as feminized, regardless of their own gender identity, with a feminization of the material they were teaching, this feminism.

saw a allegedly softer, kinder, gentler mode of war also being a way to reject how these men, for these men, how their job and these wars were changing.

And so just to kind of sum up, I think what's important from the trainings were these two things. One, that gendered ideas of military labor were really important, and I argue remain important, to understanding how a broader crisis of U.S. military power was being negotiated at this time, and a crisis we could think of as ongoing. And then secondly, that although official military policy at this time

Purported to adopt this idea of what I was calling armed social work, in practice, this very technocratic and contractor-heavy way that the information actually came into military ears left it open to be challenged in the trainings I observed, again, pointing to the importance of practice, of what I was able to see.

And so troops really drew on established associations between combat and masculinity to reject this idea of an armed social worker. And the result was that combat masculinity was not at all overturned so much as reinforced during this time period.

Very interesting things happening in those classrooms. I wonder if we can continue to stay in them for a little bit. Can you tell us how history was used in this counterinsurgency training? Yeah, I'm so glad that you asked about this because it's such an important way that this material was being learned and the contradictions I spoke about a bit and learned.

And this imperial history of development, long being used to crush anti-colonial counterinsurgencies, really came into play as a sort of defense against the challenges soldiers and especially Marines brought in response to being trained in development and humanitarian response. So one example of this was in a Marine Corps training I observed for disaster response.

So this was, again, a group of men, all men, that had been reassigned from infantry and artillery. And they were given a fictitious country and disaster scenario.

And then we're now sitting around these tables with the help of USAID contractors and we're being asked to war game how they would respond to a disaster using a planning process that actually came from going into battle. So they were using the kind of multi-step system and language that actually was part of how they fought war and did, you know, kind of directly violent things.

And on break between this very technical bureaucratic exercise, the group that was being trained would go outside and they would chew tobacco and spit and erupt into these frustrated, expletive-laden complaints that simply put, this just wasn't their job. This wasn't what they were supposed to be doing. It wasn't what they signed up for. And the trainers were well aware that they hadn't won over their audience.

So this is where the trainers, both military and contractors, would bring in these historical examples of how development has long been used to crush these anti-colonial counterinsurgencies all over the world.

And they were intended to show that things like not just the disaster response they were doing, but also military coming in and training other countries' police and paramilitary forces, or using development as this really explicit counterinsurgency weapon. These were all part of the history and identity of the men in that room. And a lot of the people in this room had been deployed to Haiti in response to the 2010 earthquake.

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And some of them, the more senior people, had even been in the military long enough to remember when the U.S. had intervened in Haiti in the 1990s.

So Haiti was the sort of obvious example to use, also drawing on the long history of the U.S. intervening over more than a century. And in this particular instance, instructors used this very famous Marine figure named Chesty Puller and the biography of whom was read by a lot of people in that room. And Chesty Puller had deployed to Haiti during the first occupation in the early 20th century.

So what I saw was a military instructor, not a contractor, showing yellowed, grainy photographs from the Marine Corps archive of Chesty Puller training a gendarmerie in the 1920s in Haiti that was used to put down an armed peasant rebellion.

And Haiti wasn't the only place that this happened. So I saw instructors drawing examples from Vietnam, from Kenya, from Algeria, and also not just places, histories of U.S. imperialism, but British and French imperial examples as well from the middle part of the 20th century. What was really important was that these case studies were from the perspective of the colonizer or the imperial army.

And this is really how I started to build in an archival component of my project. So in Haiti, you know, if I saw the military instructor, you think Chesty Poehler as the kind of protagonist, what I was able to do was spend six months in an archive in Port-au-Prince and kind of using newspapers and other documents to speak back to this colonial perspective and map out how Haiti, as well as other imperial sites,

became these laboratories to create tactics that we eventually see used in the Iraq and Afghanistan war. That's really interesting to think about, especially, of course, as a historian, as many of our listeners are historians, thinking about how history is used and why and why particular examples are chosen is really interesting to understand.

I wonder if we can talk a bit more, though, about ways in which gender was brought into some of these discussions or some of these ideas of U.S. counterinsurgency at this point. We've mentioned it a few times, but can you tell us more about how and why all these ideas of U.S. counterinsurgency focused on conceptualizing female soldiers as kind of, quote, emotional spurts of war? What sorts of

tropes or histories was this drawing on and why did the military see this as useful?

Yeah, this is really important. So the shift I spoke about earlier to counterinsurgency when you asked about 2006 and the way that that shift happened through actively bringing these imperial histories into the present and grappling with associations between masculinity and combat. This was also a shift in the way women's labor was used within the military.

And the counterinsurgency manual really highlighted how the household was the key terrain on which these wars were going to be fought and fought in this new way. And military theorists at this time were writing a lot about the household as this important and also missing site of information crucial to winning hearts and minds.

At the same time, the military was very aware that the men could not enter households or interact with women in any other context without being disrespectful. This was also important in terms of intelligence gathering. If you imagine special forces at this time going out door to door, I think it's actually really important to distinguish here the kind of popular descriptions that

into New York Times, BBC-style coverage of counterinsurgency as the supposedly kinder and gentler mode of war, kind of a public relations component of the shift we talked about earlier in 2006. So, for example, seeing stories of schools being built in Afghanistan. In my research, these were outweighed in personal experiences I heard from women attached to Army Ranger units

who would go out door to door in the middle of the night and break down people's doors looking for weapons or people with an Army Rangers team. So it wasn't all just this kinder and gentler mode of war that what was happening, you know, if not numerically in terms of prominence, but, you know, what I think what was strategically considered war.

very important at this time period were these kind of door-to-door raids and these very violent, um,

And physically violent and overtly violent tactics that were certainly pretty far away from the kind of building school public component. So one woman who figures prominently in my book, who I call Edith, described how she went out on these missions and was traumatized by this experience herself because she couldn't help but imagine how her own family would react to their door being broken down at two or three in the morning.

So to your question about the military purpose of women like Edith being attached to the team,

She was there with one other woman precisely to calm down the victims of these night raids, to try to keep everyone a bit quieter and reassure people. So while the ranger team was questioning the household about someone they were looking for, she would try to reassure women and children and any other members of the household that everything was going to be okay, that she'd hand out candy, moderate her voice.

And other women like her were often able to get some of the intelligence that the team was after through these kinds of tactics. So in terms of the gender tropes you asked about, the way women were deployed on these teams was a version of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild famously called emotional labor, where the person doing the labor has to induce or suppress feelings to sustain this outer countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.

So in this case, a hot child was writing about flight attendants, the sense of being cared for in this convivial or safe place. But if we apply that to thinking about female cancer insurgents like Edith, they also described hiding their inner feelings during home rape, like with what Edith described, imagining what it's like for a family to experience their door being broken down in the middle of the night, but suppressing their inner horror and emotion to meet job requirements.

And this is precisely what Edith described, performing this militarized type of emotional labor that was very important to this counterinsurgency term you asked about. And other women also talked about counseling the male soldiers they were deployed with. So behind all of this is an assumption of what I call women becoming emotional experts of war. Yeah, that's definitely a lot to ask any one person to take on.

How then does this idea of being emotional experts of war link to obviously one of the key terms in the title of imperial feminism, new imperial feminism in this context? Yeah, so they're certainly linked. The term new imperial feminism stands for this coming together of a few different dynamics, which help us to understand broader struggle over U.S. hegemony.

So I argue that a particular version of liberal feminism went to war in Afghanistan, in which Afghan women's rights were used initially to justify this invasion. And then during the war, the changing role of women within the U.S. military also came to be seen within the United States as one barometer for equal rights.

And I mentioned before that this time period you referred to when women were being deployed in combat was also a time when military policy technically banned them from these roles. So some of these first women, like Edith, were really being seen by the general public in popular reporting and mainstream media as breaking the so-called brass ceiling of the roles women were allowed or not allowed to be in in war.

But if we look at their actual experiences, this is where what I call a new military femininity, which is very much related to being this emotional expert of war, becomes really important. Essentially, this expectation for women to adopt these conservative gender regimes and especially deploy this sort of emotional expertise.

And this was at play certainly in the home raids that I described. But these gendered expectations also came out when female counterinsurgents held medical clinics or worked on projects to support women's small enterprise development. And it's interesting as well that some of these women were doing these self-same things. At one point in their deployment, they'd be kicking down doors. And at another point, they'd be doing these allegedly humanitarian projects.

And I also really saw that military women doing things like medical clinics or holding meetings with groups of Afghan women to see how to support enterprise development

Military women in those roles really came to understand themselves as modeling a liberated Western womanhood. They would describe how when they entered an Afghan home and took off their helmet and the women there would see their long hair and their womanhood through their hair.

that the Afghan woman they were interacting with, according to their military woman's perception, would have never seen a woman like that before. And it would open her eye to what a more liberated definition of womanhood could look like. So these military women really came to see themselves as a sort of ambassador for women's rights.

And what this points to for me is a particular liberal definition of feminism that's very limited in its definition of gender through sexual rights and really neglect of race, class, and other postcolonial geographies, these different axes of power that gender is formed through, including imperialism. And this version of feminism is

At the time I was writing the book, Guido has not and will not get us to a critique of U.S. imperialism that is adequate to understand gender and power more broadly in the post-911 period. So I argue in this book that this imperial feminism was also crucial to understand what is often thought of as a large-scale crisis.

or a shift in U.S. power in the world. And that through this lens of asking about the gender and racial formations that work within the practices of war, we can see how these big geopolitical shifts that often seem really abstract actually play out in practice with material effects.

Yeah, the linking of the big picture idea and the kind of practical inside a particular room implications are very clear in what you've been telling us so far. And it's especially interesting to think about kind of these military women reporting. It sounds like kind of some pride and like, look what we're doing. This is so great for feminism. But as you said, it's a really narrow and kind of quite specific definition of it. So do we even want to go as far as thinking about these female U.S. soldiers?

as being perpetrators of imperialism and racism, victims of imperialism and racism, both of those things at once.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's where the concept of imperial feminism is important to me, because I think it does get to the way in which these women were both victims and perpetrators. And, you know, that's not to point a finger at them necessarily, you know, a lot of us often are both victims and perpetrators of big structural prophecies.

But to focus on this specifically, I think Edith provides a really good example of how the women in this book both perpetuated these gendered forms of imperialism. You know, as you just talked about, kind of seeing themselves as these Western liberators and having particular racialized views of Afghans as children and unable to take care of themselves and themselves experienced abuse within the military.

You asked about the gendered assumptions that went into how women were deployed in these wars. And although they were placed in some of the most dangerous positions out there, and they often didn't have a choice, right? Like Edith going door to door alongside army rangers on a home raid when she hadn't been trained to do this. This was also at a time when women weren't technically allowed to be directly technically assigned to combat Edith.

So Edith was technically a supply clerk. Her regular job was keeping track of her unit supplies on a basis.

But she was temporarily reassigned to do this very dangerous job, essentially with no paper trail. And then she'd be put back in her supply clerk job. She'd kind of come and go. So when she returned home for her deployment, her peers didn't believe what she'd been doing. And when she went to get medical treatment for injuries that were sustained during her deployment after she'd retired from the military, including post-traumatic stress,

She was told by a clerk at the Veterans Administration Hospital, the VA, that there was no way a woman would have been doing what she described. And this was also at a time when to get treatment for post-traumatic stress, for PTSD, you had to prove that your injury was service-related. You had to prove that something had happened during your service that caused that injury. And that has actually changed.

But what hasn't changed are the sorts of gendered assumptions of what women would and wouldn't have been doing. So that's a particular example of her being kind of both perpetrator and victim at the same time. You had also, I think we had also spoken earlier about racism in relation to all of this.

And I talked a little bit about imperial feminism deploying these particular forms of cultural racism toward Afghan people that imagine them as children. And importantly, when some of the women I profiled this book,

also experienced forms of white supremacy in the military. I interview a Black woman who I call Claudine, who talked about a time at West Point when 16, and this was in 2016, before Black Lives Matter, when 16 of the 18 women graduating from the West Point class of almost a thousand people took a picture of themselves and it was posted online with their fifth wave.

And she explained the photo as just kind of symbolic of cleaving together. That's what the raised fist meant to survive their experience at West Point. More than the symbolism that may come to mind of black power that we might think of with a raised fist. But an investigation was opened against all of these women for undertaking what was seen as political activity in uniform.

And we are recording this conversation on January 7th, almost exactly four years after the January 6th, 2020 Capitol riot, which unraveled into a lot more information about right-wing extremism and white supremacy within the U.S. armed forces. So one interesting finding I came away with from my research was that this idea of everyone as green is

which was a reference to the olive drab of military uniform, as opposed to black, white, or Asian, was a form of colorblind racism I saw deployed within the U.S. military that really acted to disavow the sorts of experiences that someone like Claude Jean had of white supremacy, and which we can see now really clearly after January 6th certainly exists within the armed forces.

and provide kind of a structure of both racism and sexism that a lot of the women I write about are operating within, being both these kind of victims and perpetrators. In the summer of 1994, four teens entered an abandoned building in Gravesend, Brooklyn. It was the last time they would be seen alive. With few clues and no witnesses, the case went cold. But for Anthony Brewer, the brother of one of the victims, the search never stopped.

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That's very interesting to understand. And as you said, you know, it's not one or the other. It's not black and white. Very few things are right. It is this much more complex form that's obviously more interesting to analyze and talk about as well. Is this sort of thing still continuing? Obviously, the U.S. is no longer in Iraq. The U.S. is no longer in Afghanistan. Women in the U.S. are allowed to be in combat roles there.

So are gendered warfare, gendered expectations of counterinsurgency, are those continuing? Yeah. I mean, I think it's really important to consider how even with the formal withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan,

The war on terror has expanded geographically and it's morphed in its form. So one great source for this is the Cost of War Project at Brown University, which I am a contributor to, has produced a map that shows how counterterrorism operations have expanded to 78 countries as of the close of 2023, close to 40% of all of the countries on the surface of the earth.

And by far, the biggest category of these operations is training. The US military goes out and trains other militaries all over the world. And this is an area where although the exact teams I write about, as you said, have disbanded by 2016, the female engagement teams fed that I talk about in the book, they don't exist in the same form anymore. Right.

But versions of them, these all-women teams, have kind of continued to be used and experimented with to train other countries' militaries, including places like Ukraine. Jordan is another site where this has come up over the past couple of years. If we think about the major global conflicts in Russia and Ukraine and in the Middle East, that would be one area where I think this is really important to track what that will look like into the future.

So that's gendered counterinsurgency and what happened to the self-same team. But I'm glad you asked about gendered warfare because I think it's really important to think about it that way and that being really important into the future and taking on new forms.

One area that it is not unfortunately not decreased in importance is in incidents of sexual violence within the US military and in war zone, you know, this is still hugely important. I

One of my newer publications with Costs of War Project found that actual incidences of sexual assault within the U.S. military are two to four times higher than official Pentagon reports. So that's just to kind of shine a light on how gender and sexual violence are related to one another and that gendered ideas of labor within the military are part of this.

And that this is also related to how women and gender are perceived within the U.S. military, that this month we will know more about incoming President Trump's nomination and his nomination for Secretary of Defense for Pete Hegseth in particular. He has gone on record saying that there should be a return to a ban on women in combat. Nobody really takes that seriously, but I think that

I think that another area where...

He doesn't think that transgender service members should be within the military. That is an area that we've seen kind of flip-flop in the time period, the very kind of end of the period that this book is about. And then after where Trump in 2017 reversed Obama's inclusion policy of transgender soldiers. And then one of Biden's first acts as president in 2021 was to revert back to Obama's policy of including transgender service members.

And Trump will very likely reverse this again to exclude transgender people from the U.S. military. So I think it's really important to think of that more broadly is, again, you know, how we can see the way that gender and sexuality are exposed.

extremely important to how the military understand itself in kind of a reflection of broader power dynamics. And then what this will mean, you know, for the people serving within the military themselves, of kind of like a reversion to these retrograde ways.

When you talked about being kind of both victims and perpetrators of imperialism at the same time, I think these are all areas, sexual violence, women in combat, transgender service members, where we can think about how this continues into the future.

Yeah, definitely a lot to look out for going forward. And I wonder on that note of the future, if we can finish our interview with a discussion about your future. Obviously, the book is out in the world. Is there anything you're currently working on or looking to work on, whether or not it's a book, whether or not it's on this topic that you'd like to give us a brief sneak peek of?

Sure. Yeah. So I, one of the main things I'm doing right now is I am directing a project in partnership with the Cost of War Project at Brown and different media and kind of local community group actors. And this was funded by the Carnegie Corporation. And the project is called Understanding and Reimagining U.S. Beliefs About Militarism.

And we're using a combination of media analysis, national polling, and the sort of ethnographic conversation-based method that I talked a little bit before to work in different field sites within the United States that each have a particular relationship to military spending or the military-industrial complex. And we're trying to better understand the taken-for-granted assumptions that

that bolster this political economy of war and militarism in the United States. So that's been an exciting project that I hope culminates in 2020.

really specific and material and media facing ways to counter some of those assumptions that lead, I think, a lot of public opinion in the United States to think about the US military as good for the economy or keeping people safe and to have a more critical orientation toward the war machine. The second thing that I'm working on is a book that I want to write next.

Um, that if we think about sort of where at war with women ended in your question of what a new imperial feminism means. And I talked a bit about, um, how a particular version of liberal feminism that went to war, we kind of really can see, you know, the, the harm and the violence of that and the inadequacy of that getting us to a critique of us imperialism. Um,

What I want to do now on this project I'm calling humanitarian insecurity that is really rooted in the way that humanitarianism has taken shape both kind of theoretically, conceptually, and also structurally through war and violence. And Haiti is a prominent place where we can see that happening. I want to start from anti-imperial Haitian feminist critique of U.S. imperialism to better understand this concept

category that I'm calling humanitarian violence. So that's really a project that runs through the political geography linking Haiti to the United States. Both of those sound really interesting. Thank you for the sneak peek and best of luck with both projects.

And of course, while you're doing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled At War With Women, Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War, published by Cornell University Press in 2023. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.