This transatlantic roundtable launched the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Gender, War, and the Western World since 1600, a comprehensive historical overview of the entangled relationships among gender, war and military culture, and remembered one of its three editors, Sonya O. Rose (1935-2020), who died weeks before the book was published.

The roundtable focused on the intersection of gender, war and citizenship, which is not only one of the major themes of the Oxford Handbook, but also of Sonya Rose’s work. It starts from her suggestion to think of citizenship as “a framework that serves as a basis for claims-making.” Citizenship, she wrote, is a discursive framework that enables people to make various political and other claims and shapes political subjectivities that get enacted in the process of claims-making. Deeply marked by gender, race and class, this framework of citizenship produces exclusions—and offers tools to contest these. War often comes with a particularly intense discourse and politics of citizenships, in which claims made by, and on, people get linked to the issue of national survival. The roundtable explored the politics of citizenship in the context of military and war and asked how transformations of modern warfare have affected notions of citizenship and gender, and vice versa how historical and changing notions of citizenship and gender shaped military and war.

The discussion was moderated by Karen Hagemann and featured Stefan Dudink, Kimberly Jensen, Susan R. Grayzel, Thomas Kühne, and Richard Smith.

With generous support from Henry H. Arnhold and Verlag C. H. Beck.