Book Review: Omar El Akkad's "American War"

This week, I'll be taking a look at Omar El Akkad's dystopian novel American War. While normally on this blog I'd be evaluating a nonfiction work, I feel that while Akkad's novel is fictional, it is grounded firmly in our present reality. Akkad takes us on a journey through a second American Civil War that breaks out in 2074 over the passage of the Sustainable Futures Act (SFA), which Congress passes to ban the use of fossil fuels as climate change has taken away coastal lands and made other states uninhabitable (the capital of the United States has moved inland to Columbus, Ohio after Washington D.C. is lost to the sea).

Basically, it is a part of a plan to push the whole country towards powering itself by either solar, wind, or nuclear power and minimizing further damage/land loss from the heat or flooding from sea level rise. However, the South does not take well to what it sees as a dictate from the federal government and the government's militarized response to a large protest against the SFA. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas manage to temporarily break away from the Union (continuing to burn the banned fossil fuels), with the former three states forming the Southern Free State. Of course, the government won't let these territories go easily and this struggle between the two sides and their respective factions provides the background for the personal struggles of our characters caught up in all this chaos.

In this context of bloodshed, cruelty, and hyper-partisanship, in which the United States uses the worst aspects of its foreign policy domestically as part of the war effort (drones, Guantanamo-like prisons and interrogation techniques for captured Southern insurrectionists/terrorists, militaristic responses to protest, contempt for Southern refugees or displaced persons in Southern refugee camps), is how our central protagonist, Sarat Chestnut, grows up. Sarat comes of age in the refugee camp known as Camp Patience with her mother Martina, sister Dana, and brother Simon, where living standards are low and refugees are dependent on aid that comes by ship from the faraway rich powers such as China and the Bouazizi Empire (the latter a unity of the African and Middle Eastern countries that fought today's Arab Spring, its capital in Cairo). {This inversion of circumstances between what used to be "developing countries" and more powerful "first-world" countries is an intriguing mechanism Akkad uses to humble the reader and instruct them in the horrors of war.}

Sarat is not aware of the larger context of her world until the mysterious character Albert Gaines, who provides the education Sarat has missed out on and opening her eyes further to the injustices committed against the Red (the South) by the Blue (the North). Basically, Gaines is analogous to a terrorist recruiter, shaping Sarat to be an assassin for the Southern cause. The event that pushes Sarat off the proverbial edge into terrorism is a massacre that takes place at the camp by Northern-allied militias as retribution for a killed Northern general. In this way, the larger destruction of the world by natural and man-made disasters echo the kind of pain Sarat feels and wishes to unleash upon all those who have wronged her. Anyone see a link to today's terrorism in the form of IS? After the massacre, Sarat is captured and sent to the Guantanamo-like Sugarloaf Detention Center, in which the North uses the horrific and discredited methods of torture used in the contemporary War on Terror in order to extract confessions from Sarat about various crimes she didn't commit. She is finally released after seven years, where she returns home to find her brother married and with a kid (her nephew Benjamin Chestnut, who provides the introduction and ending narration to his aunt Sarat's story). Around the same time she is released, the North has won the civil war.

"So Gaines pulled his ancient hunting rifle from its rack and set her to sniping soda cans on fence posts...Onto the tin cans her mind painted the faces of those Northerners that night in Patience, at at the hallucinated sight of them she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who'd ruined her. Rage rapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy." (El Akkad, 2017, p. 189)

Ultimately, even when Sarat appears to be healing and adapting to life outside of Sugarloaf, her many types of trauma cannot be buried. When Gaines's friend, a Bouazizi Empire agent known as "Joe" invites Sarat to exact her revenge upon the North and South alike via the release of a deadly virus at the Reunification Ceremony in Columbus. Sarat accepts and sends her nephew (with whom she had a complicated relationship, but genuinely loved) away ahead of time to the remains of Alaska in the neutral state of New Anchorage and does the deed, wiping out millions of people. That sends the country into ten further years of devastation from the plague before the remains of the American nation are able to pick up the pieces in the early 2100s.

In conclusion, whether or not you agreed with the lengths Sarat went to in getting retribution for the suffering she endures throughout the novel, El Akkad does a superb job of showing readers the devastating human and environmental costs of modern-day warfare in his vision of a proud America reduced by natural forces and in-fighting (as both domestic and international political and military conflicts have already taken a huge toll before climate change then wallops the country) to what today would be considered a developing nation-state. All in all, this book is a must-read, a warning against the continuing costs of contemporary short-term-oriented military, political and environmental policies.


Works Cited:

El Akkad, Omar. (2017). American War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Book Review: Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side"

While there are many threats to democracy these days (including rising populism, political party polarization, and income inequality), excessive executive branch powers tend to pose as great a threat as the latter factors. Many in America (myself included at one point) may think that ultra-powerful presidents or prime ministers only exist in the developing world and that democracy in the United States is unshakably stable and strong (and could never falter). However, Jane Mayer illustrates in her 2009 book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals that this assumption is not the rule by examining the case of 9/11 and how the United States nearly undermined its own constitution (and perhaps the War on Terror itself) in its governments' response to the terrorist attacks in 2001. In this book, Mayer offers a cautionary tale that even the strongest democracies are vulnerable when responding far outside the law in an atmosphere of fear and anger present in crisis situations.

In crisis situations, governments tend to respond with force in order to broadcast an image of reassuring strength to its fearful citizens at home and abroad. President Bush's declaration of a global "War on Terror" to be fought by the free world, with the United States at the spearhead, is a textbook example of this phenomenon. Such a brazen attack on any country, let alone a country considered a great power in the international system, puts great pressures upon government (from the political elite to the citizens) to do whatever it takes to prevent a similar atrocity from taking place in the future. Combating and preventing terrorism by itself can be seen as a noble pursuit, especially for a democracy like the United States that prides itself upon upholding and expanding the values of freedom and liberty around the world, values that terrorism tends to suppress. However, this suppression of important law-and-constitution-based values on the part of terrorism goes both ways, as Mayer reveals in her account of how the intelligence community and the executive branch responded to 9/11.

The powers that be within the Bush administration at the time, especially President Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney, faced in terrorism in all its difficulty: an enemy not present in a unified army underneath the recognized authority of a nation-state but rather pockets transcending state borders, no clear leader/formal power structure, and the use of tactics that routinely violate the internationally agreed upon rules of militarized conflict set out in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The fateful decision was made for the United States to conduct this global campaign outside of the perceived-to-be cumbersome rules of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions in executive permissions allowing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather the all-important intelligence guiding the War on Terror through what were termed as "enhanced interrogation" methods (Mayer, 2009, p. 142). In other words, many terrorist suspects were transferred around extralegal CIA prisons around the world, including the most notable and infamous of them all, Guantanamo, and subject to horrific torture through methods like simulated drowning (i.e. waterboarding) at the behest of the executive branch.

Besides the obvious moral lines that were crossed in this authorization of extralegal methods of interrogation, imprisonment, and intelligence gathering from executive branch-designated "unlawful enemy combatants" (i.e. making humans feel subhuman) were the all important political and militaristic ramifications: these techniques (originally part of the government-sanctioned SERE program where trained medical professionals oversaw military training designed to protect soldiers against torture as POWs) were not only unlawful under established sources of domestic and international law and gave the executive more powers than is safe, but jeopardized the military in the fact that the information gathered under the use of torturous interrogation proved to be unreliable. Why? If you're being subjected to these methods, you probably would say anything in order to make it stop. Also, those within the intelligence community who may have had expertise in say, terrorism, Middle Eastern culture, and the Geneva Conventions were often alienated by the CIA's practices, producing a harmful divide among domestic and international government agencies that would be able to more effectively fight terrorism when not involved in bureaucratic schisms.

Ultimately, a program meant to protect soldiers was twisted and abused horrifically by the CIA, damaging the United States' moral standing worldwide and, ironically, harming international efforts to address terrorism by radicalizing populations faster than terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda themselves. However, the taint went up to the highest levels of government, up to the President and Vice President, who unwittingly or not, expanded executive powers beyond what is safe for a democracy based on the rule of law and the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. As the free world continues to fight against terrorism, Mayer recommends that leaders in the United States and elsewhere heed Friedrich Nietzsche's counsel that "he who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself" (Mayer, 2009, p. 261).


Works Cited:

Mayer, J. (2009). The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. New York: Anchor Books.

Book Review: Farida Jalalzai's "Women Presidents of Latin America"

Why are women executives (prime ministers or presidents) so rare in the world today? Why do many women presidents tend to come to power in Latin America? These questions provide the foundation for women’s executive studies scholar Farida Jalalzai’s book Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? Specifically, this book focuses on Latin America to understand why more powerful elected women executives have come to power there, contrary to many observations of women presidents coming to power more often as part of a political dynasty. In her systematic analysis, Jalalzai investigates these seemingly unique cases by examining the terms of four Latin American women presidents: Michelle Bachelet (Chile), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), Cristina Fernandez (Argentina), and Laura Chinchilla (Costa Rica). 

In going about the investigation of the four women presidents, the book utilizes a progressing topical analysis, with the first chapter examining the biographies of each of the presidents and the last chapter examining the substantive representations of each president. Early on, the reader is warned about the sparse primary materials available in the field of women’s executive studies, a recently emerging field at the intersection of women’s studies and political science. Therefore, Jalalzai is dependent on the use of a mix of primary and secondary materials, including interviews with the presidents themselves, close presidential advisors, politicians in the president’s party, politicians in opposition parties, and with Latin American scholars. This reliance on interviews is mitigated using election data, government sources, media articles, and opinion poll/survey data including prominent polling organizations such as Latino Barometro. Additionally, the book is lent a stronger foundation from the fieldwork conducted in the various countries examined that shows the perspectives of people outside the political and scholarly elite. While the overall research design is largely qualitative compared to quantitative, this synthesis of various qualitative sources nevertheless presents a comprehensive look at the cases of Latin American women presidents that serves to advance the study of women presidents forward.

Now, I turn to a closer examination of the book’s findings and assumptions. As aforementioned, the book is organized in a topical fashion, with each chapter focusing on the examination of various sub-questions related to the main question of why Latin America has produced the most powerful democratically elected women presidents and if this trend is still dependent on familial ties. While there are many different sub-questions addressed throughout the narrative, the more important questions for me as a reader were: Do women presidents provide different kinds of leadership (especially in terms of policy) than their male counterparts? In addition, are women executives still constrained by limited paths to power (i.e. through close familial ties and in atmospheres of political instability) or does the case of Latin America open new avenues of political opportunities for women?

Jalalzai provides a foundation to answer these central questions by focusing the first few chapters on the global trends involving women executives before examining the unique political context of Latin America. This provides a backdrop in which to explore the rise of these women presidents (or presidentas). While this made the book relatively slow-going, the background chapters proved helpful for readers with little familiarity with the scholarly work in the field. From the first few chapters, Jalalzai finds that these presidentas came to power in democratic systems with highly exclusive party-centered nomination processes and some degree of familial ties to political leaders in ruling and opposition parties leftover from rebel coalitions. While not overly dependent on familial ties, the women were still constrained by traditional gender roles in how they governed once in office (especially in terms of policy leadership), despite these countries allowing executives significant legislative authority. Often, the presidentas blended “masculine” and “feminine” styles of leadership whereby alternating between a hierarchical and collaborative leadership style, with the exception being Cristina Fernandez, who utilized more of a “masculine” style (Jalalzai, 2015, p. 147). However, using traditional gender binaries in relation to expected governance styles proves slightly problematic in terms of reinforcing harmful stereotypes about women politicians.

Continuing through the book, this highly engaging regional case study was at is best when looking at the policy objectives of the presidentas in the last chapters. Jalalzai finds that contrary to previous assumptions, the presidentas did not always promote women’s descriptive or substantive representation as much as symbolic representation. Descriptive representation relates to whether representatives in a government body are proportional to the represented population, whereas substantive representation goes a step further in asking to what extent representatives advocate the policy priorities of their constituencies. A mixed picture emerges in that the presidentas seemed to offer more significant levels of symbolic representation rather than descriptive or substantive forms of representation for women, in which half of the presidents made gender parity in their cabinets a priority without reaching the parity benchmark due to constraints such as public opinion or party opposition. Overall, political dynasties continue to have smaller, yet lingering influences on how women govern.

Overall, it is the variation uncovered in the presidentas’ leadership styles and policy priorities that truly was a strength of the book in its challenging of the assumptions of the traditional gender binary as it relates to governance or leadership style. However, this proves methodologically challenging for the field going forward. Therefore, the development and incorporation of a wider variety of indicators for measuring the different types of representation would be important for future study, as acknowledged by the author. Essentially, it remains difficult to develop a robust set of criteria for analysis and testing of the interactions of gender with politics. However, this book presents rigorous analysis criteria that can be improved by other scholars in the field. Moreover, like previous works, Jalalzai does not include non-democratic contexts in the evaluation of womens’ paths to power and their actions once in office. I feel like the book could have enhanced its comparative study by examining countries in Latin America that are not classified as democratic to further test the robustness of central tenets of the field in a case study of a region that seems to already be exhibiting anomalous patterns challenging the established literature. Additionally, it would be interesting to see if a woman’s ability to gain office is helped or hindered by non-democratic political systems. Lastly, because the field of women’s executive studies is relatively new, the book had to rely on blending findings of research from the politics, gender studies, and psychology fields.

In conclusion, Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? provides a critical and important systematic contribution to the field of women’s executive studies despite the methodological challenges outlined above. In effect, this means that the book’s questions were not definitively answered or solutions to the issues it raised presented. Rather, the book merely contributed to an ongoing debate among gender and politics scholars. However, this did not make the book any less instructive or intellectually satisfying, as Jalalzai wrote in a way that was accessible for general as well as scholarly audiences interested in the women’s executive studies field. In the end, Jalalzai’s case study of Latin American presidentas will provide an essential cornerstone of the field as it continues to mature.

Works Cited:

Jalalzai, Farida. (2015). Women Presidents of Latin America: Beyond Family Ties? New York: Taylor & Francis.

On Women Presidents and Prime Ministers

In memory of the 2016 presidential election campaign featuring Democrat Hillary Clinton (the first woman nominated for president by a major political party in the United States) and Republican Donald Trump, I thought I'd share some research I conducted on women executives (presidents and prime ministers) worldwide in the hopes of shedding light on obstacles women in politics still face today.


Politics has long been a masculine domain in which men often populate positions in the various governmental and non-governmental power centers of the world (Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai & Krook, 2010). Thus, commonly held images of presidents and prime ministers often are men, especially in countries of great geopolitical significance, such as the United States (Jalalzai, 2010; Wiliarty, 2008). With the onset of the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, feminist groups increasingly put pressure on governments, political parties, and international organizations like the United Nations to more broadly recruit women to legislative and executive posts (Skard, 2014). Despite international, regional, and country-level movements for gender equality, progress has been slow and uneven in getting women involved in politics, especially when considering the number of women achieving the position of president or prime minister starting in the 1960s (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). As of 2014, the world saw 73 women executives, while women’s average representation in legislatures was 18% (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009, p. 5; Skard, 2014, p. 36-37). Parallel to the slow incorporation of women into positions of power around the world is the emerging scholarly study of these women executives (Skard, 2014). Because of the small samples of women executives worldwide and a male-dominated political science discipline, most of the literature tends to focus on case studies and women’s initial recruitment to legislatures and has only recently started to branch out in alternative directions (Skard, 2014). Therefore, this paper will survey the wide variety of literature to shed light on this discipline’s differing perspectives on women executives.

As alluded to, women’s executive studies is a discipline that has struggled to emerge within the mainstream political science and governmental studies fields (Skard, 2014). Therefore, rather than occupying space in a single discipline and due to the relatively recent nature of the field, women’s executive studies has adopted a multidisciplinary approach drawing from the fields of politics, gender studies, and psychology to build a strong core knowledge base from which to engender theoretical maturation (Skard, 2014). Moreover, this multidisciplinary knowledge has mostly drawn from the United States or Western experience, hampering the field’s ability to produce generalizable knowledge applicable to women leaders outside of the Western context (Jalalzai, 2010). To date, most of these approaches have focused on the factors leading to success or hindering success for women candidates and have rarely evaluated these women once attaining office, hinting at a disciplinary priority in boosting women’s representation in high executive positions worldwide by first promoting greater numbers of women in legislatures (Fleschenberg, 2007; Jalalzai, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2004). The latter strategies to boost women’s representation in government by expanding the pool of women candidates available for office at the legislative level are most clearly presented within the conceptual framework of the “political recruitment model” (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 5-6). This model explains specific strategies to increase the probability of election for women candidates during the various stages of the election process: “eligible to aspirant” (aspiration for office), “aspirant to candidate” (becoming a candidate for office), and “candidate to elected” (the election campaign) (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 5-6).

Per the logic of the political recruitment model, for women to advance successfully through the various institutional barriers to achieve representation in an executive office, it is important to enlarge the pool of women candidates (Krook & Norris, 2014). By increasing the pool of women available for political parties in the legislature, there is an increased probability of a woman then being chosen by a party in the future to run for the highest executive seat (Jalalzai, 2010; Krook & Norris, 2014). These strategies are often broken down further into “quota” and “non-quota” strategies (Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 3). Similarly, Buckley (2013) identifies “international party equality strategies” and “external party influences” such as socioeconomic disparities as interacting to create a multiplicity of formal and informal barriers for both aspirant candidates and official candidates. Some of these strategies potentially more successful for promoting women’s legislative representation at the various stages, including targeted policy designed to reduce discrimination against women in institutions like the legislature, gender quotas, and fundraising networks are seen to be most effective when working with different actors across the three stages (Krook & Norris, 2014). The most influential actors in the second and third steps of the political recruitment model, political parties, serve a critical gatekeeper function in candidate recruitment and nomination processes that have the potential to exclude women candidates, divert critical campaign resources from women candidates once selected to run, or more or less support coercive legal measures like gender quotas (Buckley, 2013; Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2008; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Reynolds, 1999; Skard, 2014).

For example, it has become a rule of thumb among scholars that left-wing liberal parties are more likely than right-wing conservative parties to support state legal interventions like gender quotas due to the former’s overall ideological preference for gender egalitarianism in society (Buckley, 2013 Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014). Despite this, the coercive nature of gender quotas remains controversial, provoking many challenges (often from conservative parties), such as in the High Court of Ireland case Mohan v. Ireland & Anor (Mohan, 2016). In Mohan v. Ireland & Anor, Fainna Fáil party member Brian Mohan brought a suit to challenge a 2012 provision mandating that Irish political party candidate lists be composed of at least 30% women (Mohan, 2016). His challenge relied on the argument that legislative measures trying to boost women’s legislative representation in Ireland towards gender parity were hurting the individual rights of citizens like himself to participate in the political process (a woman candidate was chosen to run in his place) while boosting the group rights of historically marginalized groups like women (Mohan, 2016). Generally, like closely related affirmative action policies, gender quotas have been critiqued as contrary to the democratic process as well as related interventions to implement more proportional electoral systems seen to enhance minority group representation (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014; Reynolds, 1999).

Aside from the controversy inherent in gender quotas, these quotas are often most effective when designed to have requirements for a certain number of women on party ballots and where they are placed on ballots along with enforcement mechanisms (Schwindt-Bayer, 2009, p. 13). However, as Krook and Norris (2014) acknowledge, “non-quota” strategies have not “been subject to systematic documentation or research” unlike gender quotas that involve penalties for parties or legislative bodies for not achieving a certain percentage of women within their ranks or on candidate lists (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014, p. 3). In addition, quotas have differential impacts depending on the national context concerned (Krook & Norris, 2014). For example, wide-reaching institutional change like gender quotas are more likely to be put into place in new democracies because of the fluidity of institutional design in the constitution-building stage in comparison to the institutional rigidity of an established democracy like the United States (Buckley, 2013; Krook & Norris, 2014; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). Also, missing from the literature is a comparative analysis of the long-term trends from the simultaneous use of quota and non-quota strategies in the 100 plus countries that have instituted gender quotas since the adoption of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action for the promotion of gender equality in politics partly because of the relatively recent nature of international efforts to promote quota strategies as a way of achieving gender parity in legislatures (Krook & Norris, 2014).

In practice, achieving a “critical mass” of women or gender parity (50% of representatives being women per women’s presence in a population) in legislatures or electing a women president or prime minister has been difficult due to a host of institutional barriers of a social, economic, and political nature, despite the fact that women who achieve executive office often get there by advancing through the party ranks (Adler, 1996; Jalalzai, 2010; Jacquette, 1997, p. 3; Krook & Norris, 2014; Skard, 2014). This is because socioeconomic factors as well as institutional barriers often go hand in hand, often becoming most salient for the highest political offices, like that of president or prime minister, which requires women to acquire greater qualifications than their male counterparts (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). One of the main parent disciplines of women’s executive studies, gender studies, is one of the primary areas that has generated the most information in the field about women candidates’ social barriers that operate in conjunction with institutional barriers to make this path to office more difficult for women in comparison to men (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). Specifically, gender studies knowledge incorporates feminist insights about how gender roles and stereotypes differentially impact male and female candidates (Jalalzai, 2010). Farida Jalalzai (2010) in the examination of gender stereotypes and their influences on how, why, and if women are elected as presidents or prime ministers, demonstrated the effects of gender stereotyping in the development of a typology of presidential system positions and their degree of powers.

The first typology of presidential systems recognizes four types of political systems: unified presidential, parliamentary-presidential dominance, parliamentary-presidential corrective, and parliamentary with weak or figurehead presidents (Jalalzai, 2010, p. 142). Integrating the degree of powers associated with a presidential position in the latter typology of political systems, Jalalzai (2010) categorizes the degree of powers from most to least powerful in the categories of dominant president, powerful but not dominant president, and a president with minimal powers (p. 142). Of the 20 cases of women presidents examined in the study, Jalalzai (2010) found that women were overrepresented in the political systems with power-sharing presidents and prime ministers (as is the predominant pattern in European political systems) and underrepresented in political systems affording presidents greater powers (such as unified presidential systems). Jalalzai’s (2010) findings were corroborated in Müller-Rommel and Vercesi’s (2016) study of European women prime ministers. The corollary drawn from these conclusions is that women are often elected to prime ministerial positions or as weak presidents in dual presidential-prime minister systems in part due to the perceived advantages women have in a governing environment that requires consensus-building versus unilateral decision-making present in systems with powerful presidents (Jalalzai, 2010; Müller-Rommel & Vercesi, 2016).

This builds off a biologically deterministic argument that posits that women are more collaborative by nature and lack the capacity for adversarial and decisive decision-making that men possess and by implication makes men natural leaders (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai & Krook, 2010). What this kind of biological argument fails to explain is those few women who have achieved executive posts with high levels of power and who are over-represented in Latin America and Asia (Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Tobar, 2008). What explains their rise in comparison to the rest of the world? Are certain regions of the world predisposed to electing (powerful) women executives? While women presidents and prime ministers overwhelmingly have emerged within Western countries (around 48%) in Europe and the Americas along with a concurrent majority of the literature on women executives, often overlooked are comparative studies of other regions (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014). Even when comparative studies have been conducted between world regions, Skard (2014) notes that these analyses have “mainly covered certain aspects of the women’s careers” prior to their ascendance to an executive post in a case-study fashion (p. 3). Some women’s executive scholars have tried to remedy this lack of study of other world regions outside Europe in the increased conduct of comparative or regional studies of world regions (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002).

In her examination of the Latin American context, Jalalzai (2015) focuses on the terms of five Latin American women presidents: Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Cristina Fernandez of Argentina, and Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica in trying to understand the factors behind the increased frequency of powerful women national leaders emerging from Latin America (Skard, 2014). These presidentas were analyzed to assess their impacts on symbolic, descriptive and substantive representation, in effect trying to fill the literature gap of comparative studies and lack of focus on the achievements of women leaders once in office while trying to uncover the factors behind the seeming anomaly of more powerful, elected women presidents in the region (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014). A mixed picture emerged in that the presidentas seemed to offer more significant levels of symbolic representation rather than descriptive or substantive forms of representation for women (women’s proportional representation in legislative and executive bodies and promotion of women’s policy issues, respectively), in which half of the presidents made gender parity in their cabinets a priority without reaching the parity benchmark due to constraints such as public opinion or party opposition (Jalalzai, 2015). Additionally, not unlike other women leaders who emerged around the world, these women leaders arose in a democratic political system with exclusive, party-centered nomination processes, uneven levels of socioeconomic development and (to a lesser degree) possessed familial ties to political leaders in ruling and opposition parties leftover from rebel coalitions of democratization movements (Jalalzai, 2015, p. 60, 100-101).

Teasing out these tenuous factors under-girding most of the women leaders’ ascensions to power are further studies on the Asian context, where the second most women leaders have emerged (Skard, 2014). In Asia, not unlike Latin America, women inhabiting political dynasties played critical roles in the leading of democratic transitions from formerly autocratic regimes, even in Islamic majority countries such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan that tend to negatively regard active female participation in the public sphere (Jalalzai, 2004; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). Essentially, during these movements these women leverage the gender stereotypes of motherly figures to present a “less threatening” and “weak” persona that does not threaten “ambitious opposition rivals” (p. 538). Rather, these women leaders were perceived as acting upon “their apparent non-partisanship, self- sacrifice and even inexperience” which “emphasized the moral character of the struggle against dictatorship” and recast the women as acting acceptably in the public sphere within their societally-defined roles of mothers and daughters seeking to heal a nation’s wounds and “seeking to win justice for their martyred fathers or husbands” (Thompson, 2002, p. 538, 540). However, the actions of female leaders during the unsettled times of revolution within the frame of the feminine script of moral authority figure are ultimately undermined when the moment of crisis has past and democratic consolidation begins (Jalalzai & Krook, 2010; Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). Perceptions of women being reformers despite their “dynastic origins” begin to fade as women leaders consolidate their power along dynastic lines as well as perceptions of them being merely temporary transitional or symbolic figures increase (Thompson, 2002, p. 540).

Not unlike their counterparts in Latin America, women leaders in Asia, such as former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, faced sentiments that women were merely symbolic leaders carrying on the policies of their fathers or husbands (Thompson, 2002). As Thompson explains, “kinship ties to the male martyr not only helped overcome traditional barriers to political leadership, they also linked female leaders to their husbands’ or fathers’ martyrdoms,” which undermined the agency of the female leaders as patriarchal ideals pressured female leaders to act as symbols while ceding power to a close male relative (Jalalzai & Krook, 2010; Thompson, 2002, p. 546). Thus, while women leaders’ connections to prominent political families, especially in countries where the democratic transitions have involved high levels of clientilism, has proven key to overcoming institutionalized gender stereotyping to propel women into office (Thompson, 2002). However, it has proven to be a short-term benefit and a long-term handicap for women leaders attempting to govern (Skard, 2014; Thompson, 2002). In analyzing other contexts from which no or little women executives have emerged, such as the Middle East, the Caribbean, Pacific island states, the United States, and China, other handicaps seem to be a colonial legacy, the weakening of civil society, and religious fundamentalism (Skard, 2014, p. 451-459). These latter factors harm women’s political representation due to the inherent gender inequality in patriarchal societies (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014).

Yet other studies have focused on political-psychological perspectives, analyzing whether certain personality types and family contexts tend to produce women more likely to aspire to and have the necessary characteristics optimal for a demanding political environment (Steinberg, 2001). Steinberg (2001) finds that “first-born women, like first-born men, are overrepresented among political leaders” who came to power in the time-period of 1960-1989 (p. 89). Knowing that most women executives have hailed from countries with relatively high standards of living, Steinberg (2001) posits that women leaders who were first born may have had parents that invested significant time and resources into them and were then “socialized into” aspiring to public sphere professions that required both female and male role models in a male-dominated public sphere (p. 101-102). These women, who are most likely to “identify more strongly” with traditionally masculine ascribed traits of “power and authority” as first-borns then are more likely to go on to take traditionally “male positions” (Steinberg, 2001, p. 95). Skard (2014) corroborates Steinberg’s (2001) study by noting that 90% of women examined within the book (66 presidents and prime ministers) held at least a post-secondary education (if not further tertiary education) and a long-term professional career in positions within or outside political parties as lawyers or university professors before ascending to office (p. 465). Extrapolating this logic, one expects a first-born leader (regardless of gender) to be predisposed towards the use of force rather than diplomacy in a national or international crisis (Steinberg, 2001, p. 107).

Scholars such as Falk and Kenski (2006), Caprioli and Boyer (2001), and Ann Tickner (1999) have pushed the frontiers of women’s executive studies by focusing on the intersections of international relations with women leaders in examining their conduct in times of conflict. Not only do the few existing studies show that women executives face significant obstacles domestically in running a country, but also face significant pressures at the international level as well, especially the rare women leaders ascending to power in socioeconomically more powerful (or G-8) countries with powerful executive positions such as Germany’s Angela Merkel (Jalalzai, 2010; Tickner, 1999; Wiliarty, 2008). These obstacles are often exacerbated when women face crisis decisions during their tenures, including overcoming the gendered and racialized perceptions of scholars like Francis Fukuyama that “women are not able to deal with today’s threats” from nations headed by “aggressive younger men unsocialized in the ways of mature democracies” in Africa or the Middle East (Tickner, 1999, p. 6-7). However, there is no evidence existing suggesting that men are more militaristic in their governing styles than women. In fact, Caprioli and Boyer (2001) find that the pressures women leaders face when trying to prove they belong in the masculine domains of high politics may drive women to respond militaristically when dealing with interstate crises in order to assert their legitimacy.

In their examination of women leaders utilizing the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) data set from 1945 to 1994, it was found that women occupying states with less gender equality (as proxied by the legislative representation of women) found that these leaders were more prone to the use of violence during international crises (p. 514). Conversely, those women (and men) leading states with higher levels of gender equality were less likely to use violence and at the very least, showed greater restraint when using violent force compared to diplomacy to resolve a crisis (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001, p. 514). This is thought to be due to the moderating influence of women’s viewpoints on domestic and international crises on the state’s governing apparatus as women achieve more legislative and executive representation in a democratic context, a key result that interventions such as gender quotas seek to achieve simultaneously with the objectives of gender equality, improved quality of democracy, and improved international security (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Schwindt-Bayer, 2009). At a certain point, women achieve a high enough representation (gender parity) to overcome perceptions that a man would be better equipped to handle “terrorism” or “homeland security” crisis situations because of their innately high levels of emotional control, decisiveness, strength, and forcefulness, characteristics typically associated with masculinity (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Falk & Kenski, 2006, p. 1). Ultimately, having more women at the table improves the quality of decision-making, especially when faced with these critical decision-making junctures to respond with either military force or diplomacy, irrespective of the gender of the leader concerned (Falk & Kenski, 2006).

Overall, as this literature review demonstrates, the emerging discipline of women’s executive studies has developed relatively unevenly, depending on the academic disciplines a study draws upon (Skard, 2014). These disciplines, such as political science, psychology, and gender studies, infuse into the disciplinary foundation of women’s executive studies differing methodologies and knowledge bases which produce somewhat of a scholarly dissensus on the best way to study women national leaders or proscribe solutions to these pressing issues outside broad platitudes to change both institutions and culture (Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014; Steinberg, 2001). Nevertheless, the discipline has reached scholarly consensus about favorable conditions that seem to correlate positively with an increase in the amounts of elected women national leaders including democracy, proportional electoral systems, increased standards of living, economic or political crises, high levels of education, extensive professional or political careers, and the support of parents for political careers (Skard, 2014; Steinberg, 2001).

Similarly, as demonstrated above, the discipline has a dearth of studies of a comparative and comprehensive nature (that is, looking at all world regions and the time periods before, during, and after the term of a woman leader) and a concurrent overabundance of case studies analyzing careers of women leaders prior to their election as national leader (Jalalzai, 2004; Jalalzai, 2010; Jalalzai, 2015; Skard, 2014). Thus, overcoming the disciplinary and methodological barriers above will better equip this promising new intersectional discipline to elucidate and provide workable, specific solutions to promote women’s involvement in politics within governmental institutions locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally in coordination with efforts to affect cultural changes more conducive to gender equality (Jalalzai, 2010; Skard, 2014).  

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