Ivana Milojević
Genocidal Histories, Presents, and Futures: A Gendered Reading
To ask whether genocide has a gender may, at first glance, appear to be a category error. One is an act of annihilation; the other, a map of identity. Perhaps the connection has been slow to emerge because both genocide and gender are relatively recent arrivals in public discourse.
The term genocide was coined only in 1944 by Raphäel Lemkin. Likewise, the current conceptualisation of gender has its origins in the work of Simone de Beauvoir, particularly her seminal text The Second Sex (1949), in which she famously asserted, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Both are deeply contested terms. For the sake of brevity, this article defines genocide as “a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group” (UN, n.d.). Gender is understood here as distinct from biological sex, and theorised in terms of performativity, fluidity, and intersectionality. In other words, gender is something we do, shaped by the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves. It is not the only expression of our identity, but it is an important one.
The practices of genocide and gendering, however, have existed since recorded history. Yet, the particular manifestations of both genocide and gendered social arrangements are always bound to specific temporal and spatial contexts. In this sense, we can speak of modern genocide – framed within the prevailing moral and legal paradigms – and the contemporary gender power order (Connell, 1987), marked by the uneven distribution of power between genders. Violence is the glue that holds both phenomena together. The power disparities that exist – within both modern genocide and the current gender order – are produced and sustained through direct, structural, cultural, epistemological, and psychological violence. Genocide manifests as an explicit act of violence; it is ultimately supported by the gender power order. The gender power order, in turn, is maintained by both explicit and implicit forms of violence, including the threat of violence. Within the social structure known as patriarchy, neither can exist without the other.
Since the 1990s, sexual violence – including the systematic use of rape, forced pregnancy, and sexual slavery – has been recognised as a tool of genocide. This marks a significant departure from the view of sexual violence as a “by-product” of war, or from gender-blind understandings of genocide that focus primarily on the mass killings of men. Yet, gender’s role as a structural mechanism in genocidal processes is broader and more deeply embedded. While the primary target of genocide may be defined as a “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group,” the planning and execution of genocidal acts are fundamentally gendered phenomena.
At the most visible level, individuals of different genders participate in, and are subjected to, different forms of violence during genocide. More insidiously, structural gender arrangements provide the fertile ground from which such visible expressions of violence emerge. These structural dynamics are not maintained by force alone; they are also upheld by the discourses we construct. For example, a patriarchal reading of the entire human history predominantly presents a story of domination – of one identity group, including one ethnicity, religion, class, or gender, over another. Such narratives – and their metaphorical and mythological scaffolding, including notions such as just war, might is right, fight or flight, or the idea that violence and genocide are timeless human phenomena rooted in violent human nature – serve to perpetuate both genocidal violence and detrimental gender power relations. In that sense, our future is already predetermined, and there is no escape.
Against this backdrop, if we choose to remain within that space – as observers of recurrent cycles of violence, genocidal acts, and their re-enactments – we can stay unchallenged, anchored in dominant renderings of history and, by implication, of plausible futures. However, if we are to alter what is visible – the recurrent litany of destruction, power, and domination – we must reconfigure the system itself, including the narratives, metaphors, and worldviews that underpin it.
The Visible: Male Hands, Human Bodies of Genocide
Throughout recorded history, the vast majority of men have spent their entire lives without killing anyone. Even fewer have partaken in genocide. Being born in a male body does not biologically predispose one to kill other humans. But being born in a male body within a socially and culturally constructed system called patriarchy does.
Historical analyses of genocides consistently show that men are overwhelmingly responsible for initiating and carrying out genocidal violence. All available historical and statistical data confirms that humans of the male gender – or ‘men’ – are by far the principal perpetrators of rape, war, torture, incest, sexual abuse, sexualised murder, and genocide (Glass 2012). More than 90% of criminal and war-related violence is committed by men, making gender a major factor in war–peace dynamics (Galtung 2009).
Likewise, the vast majority of terrorist acts on ‘soft targets’ in the West have been carried out by men. By all accounts, it was all men who committed the murderous rampage on 7 October in southern Israel. Similarly, by all available reports, those who took, held, and released (male and female) hostages have also been men. And of course, the event that changed the course of world history – and arguably enabled some subsequent genocidal acts, such as those committed by the Islamic State throughout Iraq and Syria against the Yazidis – the 11 September attacks in the United States – was orchestrated and executed by 19 men.
This does not mean that women are entirely ‘innocent’. Women commonly support or even encourage ‘their’ men who commit genocide and participate in structural, cultural, and epistemological violence, which acts as a precursor to direct genocidal violence. However, the arms of genocide, still, are male.
Even in Israel – one of the few armies in the world that conscripts women under a mandatory military draft law, and where the number of women in combat infantry units increased by 160% between 2015 and 2021 – women still accounted for a minority: 18% of combat soldiers in 2021 (Shafran, 2021). As of 2025, that number has risen, yet four out of five Israeli combat soldiers remain male (Film Review: Gaza Calling, 2025). Decision-makers in the Israeli government are also predominantly male, comprising approximately 75% of positions in recent years (Israel Democracy Institute, 2023).
A comprehensive research by Joshua Goldstein (2001), found that even though women who do fight tend to make “fine soldiers”, the strict gender division of labour in warfare [and by the implication in genocide]was only transgressed in one historical case: the Dahomey Kingdom (16th–19th centuries), where a large-scale female combat unit served as part of a standing army. Glenn Paige (2009) supports this view, noting that most museums of military history and ethnography provide:
… scant evidence that women, half of humankind, have been major combat killers. Granted that women kill, that some have fought in wars and revolutions, that in some societies women and even children have engaged in ritual torture and murder of defeated enemies, and that women are being recruited for killing in several modern armies. But most women have not been warriors or military killers (Paige 2009, p. 39).
This, Goldstein (2001) suggests, is because peaceful [and gender egalitarian]societies have no need for warriors, while highly sexist ones do not permit female participation in combat. This distinction is critically important for the future of peace: it suggests that peace will only become possible when both the doing of war and the doing of gender are simultaneously transformed.
The Invisible: The Worldview That Kills a Future
A consideration of gender is crucial to understanding genocide, because the crime of genocide is “an historical process that is, at its core, about group reproduction” (von Joeden-Forgey, 2012):
The perpetrators must either annul reproduction within the group or appropriate the progeny in order to destroy the group in the long run. While the perpetrators’ ultimate aim is the material destruction of the target group, the means used to achieve this end tend to target men and women according to their perceived and actual positions within the reproductive process. As part of the killing, then, one finds in all genocides a shared set of tortures involving generative symbols and institutions (reproductive organs, infants and small children, and the bonds that promote family coherence).
Genocides are designed not only to kill a group of people but also to kill their future. The bodies of future generations – those not yet born – are intangible and invisible casualties. Within their inner logic, genocides not only kill men and women; they must also kill the unborn. They succeed in doing so by removing one gender (men) and torturing all (men, women, children) – a systematic tactic aimed at destroying communities biologically, culturally, and socially.
Victims of genocide are therefore both present and future men and women. And yet the rationale behind how and why they are to die during genocide follows a particular gender-polarised logic.
Within the context of patriarchal and dominator societies – acting as a precursor to genocide – men are predominant (direct) violence subjects. As such, they are required to take dominant positions and subordinate women, but they are also required to do the same to other ‘weaker’ or ‘threatening’ men. Paradoxically, this willingness to turn themselves and other men into winners or losers – while competing for resources and power – also makes them violence objects (Gilligan, 2009).
The patriarchal mindset considers each capable male over a certain age a soldier – a potential warrior – irrespective of a particular man’s inclinations, level of military training, or even (in)ability to use weaponry effectively or access it. Patriarchal societies assign the role of fighting in wars to men, and most commonly, especially during wars, they are ‘not given any choice about the matter’ (Gilligan, 2009, p. 59). As James Gilligan writes:
… if they refuse to treat other men as objects of violence, and thereby simultaneously become objects of those men’s violence, they will be shamed and insulted (called cowards) and then turned into objects of their own army’s violence. “Deserters” have traditionally been shot. And just as men are shamed for refusing to treat other men and themselves as violence-objects, they are honoured for being willing to do so.
Due to all men being viewed as soldiers by definition in the context of dominator societies, they become ‘legitimate’ targets during war and genocide. The patriarchal mindset – whether historical or contemporary, and internalised by all genders – thus sees it as somehow more ‘appropriate’ to kill a man than to kill a woman, making men our ‘expendable lives’ (Barry, 2010). The expendability of violence objects – that is, of men, or more precisely men of ‘battle age’ – makes them “the most vulnerable and consistently targeted population group” for violence, “through time and around the world today” (Jones, 2006, p. 201).
Different gender-based roles and differential social psychology for men and women also explain the common experiences of gender-based violence during wars and genocides. For example:
The data available reflect alarming levels of rape during conflict and its aftermath: between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls were raped in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, more than 60,000 in the civil war in Sierra Leone, between 20,000 and 50,000 in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and at least 200,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1996. Though shocking, in most cases these data are serious underestimates of the actual numbers of victims, most of whom never report to authorities. (UN Women, 2025)
Such sexual violence against women (and, through much less frequently, against men) is not merely the action of rogue soldiers, but a deliberate tactic of warfare (UN Women, 2006). The broader context is that of a dominator, patriarchal, and militarised social system that promotes hegemonic, androcratic masculinity and psychologically conditions men to perpetrate violence (Connell, 2005, p. 82, Milojević, 2013, pp. 170-177). Within this context, perpetrating violence remains associated with ‘masculinity’, while suffering violence – whether by males or females – tends to have a ‘feminising’ or emasculating effect (Edwards, 2006, p. 61).
In both scenarios – whether seeking to maintain power or fearing its loss – contemporary hegemonic–androcratic masculinities commonly resort to violence. Violence, in this frame, becomes a means of reaffirming masculinity when it is under threat or perceived to be so. Hegemonic masculinity therefore continually requires both women and ‘subservient masculinities’ to exist as its counterpart (Cook-Huffman, 2010, p. 214). It also demands that women give birth to the so-called ‘cannon fodder’ – a dynamic that helps explain re-patriarchalisation, currently visible in the United States and elsewhere, and the enforcement of strict gender roles in preparation for violence and war.
Even when women reject this assigned role and become soldiers themselves, they must remain exceptions to the general rule of the maleness of soldiers, while simultaneously enacting the maleness of the quintessential soldier. In other words, while the bodies of soldiers may be either male or female, their gender is always male. Once militarised, women soldiers effectively become symbolic men. Like their male counterparts, they must renounce all ‘feminine’ traits – particularly those associated with care, vulnerability, or pacifism. Whatever their biological sex, a soldier has, in patriarchal cultural terms, always belonged to the ‘male’ gender. This phenomenon – where all men are, by definition, considered soldiers – has contributed to the blurring of boundaries between civilians and combatants, with direct implications for how violence is enacted during genocide.
As Kimmel (2005) explains, “as the hegemonic ideal was being created, it was created against a screen of ‘others’ whose masculinity was thus problematised and devalued” (p. 415). In situations of unequal power distribution between men, those who embody patriarchal ‘power over’ ideologies actively seek to dominate other men – especially those with so-called ‘weaker’ masculinities. These subaltern masculinities are frequently racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, or sexual minorities – for example, gay men. Asserting dominance over effeminate or homosexual men becomes especially important in this system. In that process, words such as “wimp”, “sissy”, “girl”, and “gay” are often used interchangeably, reinforcing hegemonic masculinity as exclusively heterosexual (Swain, 2005, p. 222).
While such social systems assign to men the roles of both ‘violence-subjects’ and ‘violence-objects’, the roles assigned to women are those of ‘sex-objects’ (Gilligan, 2001) and ‘beauty objects’ (Wolf, 1991) or – by extension – of ‘mothers’. As mothers are seen to give birth to the nation, their role must be challenged during genocide. Their efforts to create and preserve life are undermined through both direct and indirect actions – for example, by restricting access to food and other necessities essential for survival. The stronger the patriarchy, the more entrenched and resilient this template becomes. Patriarchy breeds and fuels war; war fortifies patriarchy. The cycle remains unbroken.
Within this same patriarchal template, contemporary politics reveals a resurgence of re-patriarchalisation – a global movement that reasserts traditional gender hierarchies under the guise of restoring “order” or “strength.” The current wave of strongman politics, from the United States to Russia, Hungary, and Belarus, revives fantasies of dominance that hinge on rigid binaries: men as protectors and warriors, women as reproducers or moral anchors. The US, as the epicentre of global hegemony, currently sets the tone for this re-entrenchment by undermining any discourse that challenges patriarchal norms.
It should really come as no surprise that the current US administration is targeting women and their reproductive rights, parallel to targeting ‘wokeism’, diversity and inclusion efforts, and those deemed ‘lesser ‘humans’. Nor is it surprising that strongmen like Putin, Orbán, and Lukashenko are attacking LGBTQ+ communities, feminist activists, and so-called ‘domestic traitors’. These gestures are not isolated policy choices but expressions of a shared cultural logic that casts empathy as weakness and equality as threat. Despite appearing in distinct political and cultural contexts, such regimes reproduce the same dominator model of society – one that thrives on polarisation, submission, and the violent enforcement of hierarchy and patriarchy.
These practices, in turn, have influenced a wide range of phenomena – from family relations and childrearing to international relations and even the global economy and our futures imagination (Henderson, 1990, 1995, 1999, 2006; Eisler, 2008; Milojević, 2022, 2024).
To explain this further, the differential gender psychology exists. It demands that men use violence not only for competition but also to undo shame (Gilligan, 2001). For women, however, the psychological mechanism operates inversely:
“Women are shamed not for being too submissive, dependent, unaggressive, and sexually inactive or impotent, as men are, but rather for exactly the opposite traits: being too rebellious, independent, aggressive, and sexually active. Thus, if a woman responds to being shamed by becoming aggressive or violent, that may only lead to more shame rather than, as for men, to less.” (Gilligan, 2001, p. 58)
This insight from Gilligan helps explain the use of the term ‘whore’ as a political weapon – used to discredit women who, for example, advocate for peace. It also helps explain why, in genocides, women are often raped before they are killed. Their protection from this final act of violence – secured by the patriarchal honouring of women’s “chastity outside marriage, and fidelity (and fertility) within marriage” (Gilligan, 2001, p. 60) – must first be forcibly removed. This has also been the case with other acts of political violence – such as when women are imprisoned, sexually tortured, and then killed during periods of state terror and authoritarian rule.
Warrior societies, naturally, feed into and sustain such hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity. To paraphrase Anderson (1991), nations are also imagined in terms of desired masculinities and femininities. In this context, violence:
“becomes a way for men to accomplish masculinity and to maintain positions of privilege within the hierarchy. Masculine identity is often so closely linked to violence that violence may be the glue that holds communities of young males together. Acts of violence serve to both create the male self and to valorise the masculine ideal.” (Cook-Huffman, 2010, p. 214)
To conclude, in genocides, one gender takes away human beings who were physically created, birthed, and predominantly raised by another gender. The former gender also holds more economic and political power to make decisions – including those that result in genocide. If we are to address and prevent genocide, we absolutely must dismantle patriarchal systems of power, transform rigid gender hierarchies, and reimagine masculinities and femininities beyond domination, violence, and binary oppositions.
The Emergent: Our World After Patriarchal Hegemony
History also teaches us that all hegemons eventually disappear – either slowly or abruptly, either relatively peacefully or violently – but they always disappear and so will any current and future hegemon. “I take comfort to know,” futurist and peace theorist Elise Boulding wrote, “that even a super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (e.g., decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire)” (Boulding, 2003).
In my own personal life, it was the superpower hegemony of the once-dominant USSR that ended relatively quickly, impacting all of us living in Eastern Europe – and even beyond. When the superpower socialist hegemon fell, so did some goals and values that were officially proclaimed, such as gender equality. In many parts of Eastern Europe, re-patriarchalisation took place. This is not unprecedented, as macrohistorian Riane Eisler would argue – societies often experience shifts between “dominator” and “partnership” social arrangements, with gender equality and more peaceable societies being characteristic of the latter.
But what of the hegemony of patriarchy and its accompanying worldview that feed into warfare and genocide? If a shift from more egalitarian gender relations towards re-patriarchalisation can take place, so can movement in the other direction. There have always been, and still are, individuals, communities, and societies that align with what Eisler (1987, 1997, 2000) terms the “partnership model,” Elise Boulding calls “hidden peace histories” and “gentle societies,” and George Lakoff (2004) describes as the “nurturant parent” approach. This alternative framework is marked by several features, among which minimal gender-role power differentiation and minimal dominance patterns stand out (Eisler, 1997, 2000; Boulding, 2000).
Unlike the dominator worldview, which prioritises social and cultural technologies that support domination and destruction, the nurturant parent or partnership worldview underpinning a gentle society prioritises those that “sustain and enhance life” (Eisler, 1997, p. 141). Historically more peaceful societies have varied enormously in their cultural, religious, social, and institutional practices (Kelleher, 2010, pp. 383–384). What they have in common is a peace-promoting worldview that manifests in institutional forms and cultural practices of socialisation and nurtures a sense of self that avoids and resolves conflicts non-violently (Kelleher, 2010, p. 382).
A range of such societies – whether in contemporary Scandinavian nations (Eisler, 2000) or rural and small-scale societies (Boulding, 2000) – tend to be organised according to an alternative core configuration:
a more democratic and equitable family and social organisation, a more equal partnership between women and men, and the absence of a structural requirement for idealising or building violence into the social system, as it is not required to impose or maintain rigid rankings of domination (Eisler, 2000, p. 34).
I have previously argued (Milojević, 2012) that:
“The development of a better world throughout the 21st century is directly premised on the re-making of traditional, and patriarchal gender identities. This is because such identities have been complicit in creating hierarchies of domination, of devaluing human life and nature – as these were seen more connected to women and thus ‘feminine’.”
In other words, what is needed are flattened gender relationships; recognition of a multiplicity of genders; and the promotion of nonviolent masculinities, alongside nonviolent and empowered femininities. Instead of calling men who fight (and kill) “heroic,” we should build statues to those who refuse to do so. What is not needed, however, is the temporary and superficial form of ‘gender equality’ represented by the inclusion of women in the military. Rather, genuine gender equality would lead to the disappearance of militarism itself as a means of conflict resolution (Milojević, 2013). To paraphrase Kathleen Barry (2010): unless we ‘remake’ men and women beyond current gender polarities, we will not be able to unmake war and prevent genocide.
What may emerge after patriarchal hegemony is uncertain, even though its transformation is urgent. Such a world must be both envisioned and practiced – in how we relate, how we think and behave, and in the stories we choose to tell next.
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Affiliation
University of Edinburgh
Senior Lecturer in Futures
