Women at War

I’ve spent years studying how culture shapes economic and social outcomes, especially for women. My work examines how individualistic, market-driven societies tend to foster more egalitarian views, boosting women’s education, workforce participation, and legal rights, as measured by the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law (WBL) index. So, when I turned my lens to war, a topic I’m no expert on, unlike my colleagues Dr. Abigail Hall Blanco or Dr. Christopher Coyne, I expected a grim story.

War’s a destroyer: lives lost, economies gutted by 17.5% of GDP (Costalli et al., 2017), societies upended. Surely, it’s terrible for women. Imagine my shock when I found data suggesting otherwise. Over the last 30 years and across over 165 countries, I noticed a strange pattern. War, especially civil wars with foreign involvement, correlates with jumps in the WBL index, a measure of legal parity between men and women’s access to economic opportunities (scored between 0 to 100).

For example, Saudi Arabia’s score leapt from 32 in 2014 to 80 in 2020. These changes happened during an internationalized civil war that started in 2014. These reforms align with Saudi Vision 2030, launched in 2016 to diversify the economy and increase female workforce participation amid oil price pressures and war costs. A European Parliament briefing notes that reforms in 2019 addressed some gender-discriminatory laws in Saudi Arabia, potentially influenced by global criticism of Saudi’s human rights record during the war with Yemen.

Similarly, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in an internationalized civil war from 2009 to 2020, experienced similar changes in the WBL index, receiving a score of 27 in 2009 to a score of 82 in 2020. A Financial Markets Group discussion paper details the sudden surge in UAE gender legal reforms as driven by economic diversification amid regional instability like the Yemen war. Underpinning these increases in the index for both Saudi Arabia and UAE were legal changes supporting women’s freedom of movement, rights to work, and equality of pay.

South Sudan, Uganda, Congo, and Angola also showed big improvements in legal gender parity post-war.

What’s going on here? War brings violence, displacement, and economic ruin. Why does it also nudge legal rights for women forward? Is it external pressure from the World Bank, United Nations, or other development agencies? Governments needing women to work and pay taxes to rebuild shattered economies? Individual women acting as entrepreneurs in uncertain circumstances? Media coverage amplifying gender disparities? Maybe it’s all of these. To provide context to numbers, let’s explore what social scientists say, using a bit of price theory to unpack this puzzle.

Price theory, at its core, examines how changes in relative costs and benefits shape human behavior and decision-making. In my analysis, I apply this lens to war's impact on women's rights by considering how conflict alters the incentives for governments and societies. For instance, war's devastation—loss of male labor, economic collapse, and fiscal pressures—lowers the price of granting women legal economic rights, as excluding half the population becomes too costly for recovery. It's a rational response to shifted incentives, where the benefits of women's workforce participation outweigh traditional patriarchal norms. By framing war as a shock that recalibrates these trade-offs, price theory helps explain why we see jumps in metrics like the WBL index, even amid chaos.

Women often bear a heavy burden from heightened risks of assault (Cohen, 2013) to economic strain in female-headed households (Buvinic et al., 2013). Yet, social scientists have noticed something curious: war’s chaos can disrupt entrenched gender roles for women, creating new economic opportunities. Anthropologist Cynthia Enloe (2014) emphasizes women’s active role in conflicts, as combat fighters, nurses, and community organizers, though their contributions are often sidelined post-war. Sociologists, such as Jean Bethke Elshtain (1995), document how war thrusts women into new roles, from World War II factory workers to community leaders in modern conflicts. Economists, like Claudia Goldin (1991), show that war-driven labor shortages propel women into the workforce, though gains can be fleeting (Acemoglu et al., 2004).

Recent work by Ingrid Bakken and Halvard Buhaug (2021) shows civil wars boosting women’s labor and political roles, as they fill gaps left by men. War’s a wrecking ball, but it can clear space for women to act, innovate, and lead.

War’s social impact often stems from a demographic shock: the loss of men. Young adult males, typically the primary combatants, face high mortality, creating a gender imbalance. This “missing men” effect turns things upside down. Women expand their roles as providers, decision-makers, and public figures, challenging patriarchal structures. In World War II, U.S. women filled factory jobs, reshaping labor markets. In post-genocide Rwanda, women formed cooperatives and have since claimed over half of parliament. In other civil wars, women’s economic and political roles expand as women substitute for absent men.

In Rwanda, women took on traditionally male jobs like farming, blurring gender lines. Aili Mari Tripp (2015) observes that Sub-Saharan African post-conflict states show less rigid gender divisions, as women’s wartime contributions gain greater recognition and legitimacy. In Haiti and Liberia, transitional governments introduced female police staffing, reflecting new norms (World Bank, 2011). Sirianne Dahlum and Tore Wig (2020) add a twist: empowered women reduce future conflict, suggesting war’s gender shifts could stabilize societies.

This shift isn’t inevitable. War’s economic devastation forces societies to adapt. Women’s entry into labor markets or politics often arises from necessity, not altruism. Yet, necessity can erode rigid laws and norms. War’s disruption raises the cost of not letting women work or start a business. Elites often realize they can’t afford to exclude half the population from economic roles. Chaos can be a strange ally of freedom.

War’s economic devastation forces those in charge to rethink who gets to contribute and how they can contribute. War exposes the inefficiency of excluding half the population, lowering the cost of reform. Women, often excluded, become essential. Governments need tax revenue, and barring half the population from work is bad for recovery. Thus, war prompts legal changes for women’s economic rights, as governments prioritize revenue over tradition. Countries experiencing civil wars, particularly those with foreign troops involved, often loosen legal restrictions on women’s ability to work and contribute to the economy.

Make no mistake. This isn’t about enlightenment; it’s about economics. When incentives shift in wartime, women’s potential contributions are much harder to ignore. Politicians, facing war’s fiscal demands, find it advantageous to unleash women’s additional productivity.

Let’s not kid ourselves—war’s no feminist utopia. It spikes violence against women, as weak post-conflict institutions falter (United Nations, 2022). Education often takes a hit with girls pulled from schools for safety (Chamarbagwala & Moran, 2011). Property losses hit women harder, especially where legal rights are shaky (Brück & Schindler, 2009). Cultural attitudes and legal rights don’t always move in lockstep. While economic incentives from war may spur legal changes in women’s rights, deeply rooted norms often persist, slowing broader social transformation. Post-war, entrenched interests try to push women back to “traditional” roles, as seen in the U.S. after WWII, as policies favored male veterans. Dino Hadzic and Margit Tavits (2020) show that in Bosnia, wartime violence increased female candidacy but not election rates, indicating cultural pushback. War’s disruption, while potent, faces limits when entrenched interests reassert control.

An additional, but not mutually exclusive explanation, is that the World Bank and other development agencies are tying development/conflict aid to gender reforms (UNWomen, 2015). Internationalized wars, under global scrutiny, might amplify the role of development agencies. Paulina Pospieszna (2015) shows that post-conflict democracy aid in Bosnia and Herzegovina pushed for women’s political empowerment. This suggests that WBL changes could simply be the result of agencies like the World Bank essentially paying for legal reforms in fragile, conflict-affected settings. For instance, the World Bank's Gender Strategy 2024-2030 explicitly supports legal reforms to accelerate gender equality, including in post-conflict countries, by financing initiatives to remove barriers to women's economic opportunities and human capital development.

Yet, do these reforms stick? I'm skeptical. While de jure changes—like reformed laws on work equality or mobility—might look impressive on paper and boost WBL scores, they may not translate to de facto improvements on the ground. Externally funded reforms often fail to address deep-rooted cultural norms or institutional weaknesses, leading to superficial changes that don't empower women in practice. If reforms are bought with aid dollars rather than driven by local demand, they risk fading once the money dries up, leaving women with symbolic rights but no real shift in daily realities. It's a reminder that top-down incentives, even well-intentioned, might not endure without grassroots buy-in.

War’s role as a potential social catalyst underscores liberty’s core principle: real change emerges from individual action amidst disruption. Women, thrust into new roles by war’s necessity, demonstrate remarkable agency. Individuals, not governments, are the real engines of change. In conflict zones, women don’t wait for permission; they seize the moment, embodying the entrepreneurial drive that Israel Kirzner celebrated, spotting and pursuing opportunities even in crisis.

For these new freedoms to endure, they must grow from the ground up. While top-down legal mandates from local governments during wartime can take hold because of necessity, those planted by foreign aid agencies are different. External mandates, tied to conditional funding from bodies like the World Bank or UN, often feel imported and detached from grassroots realities, lacking the organic buy-in that makes reforms resilient. They risk withering once the aid fades. Post-war policies should instead focus on cultivating women’s economic and property rights by removing barriers, not layering on mandates. Ultimately, to preserve war’s unintended benefits perennially, we need to empower women to cultivate their own paths in society.

War can ignite meaningful social change by burning down patriarchal barriers. In their ashes, new liberties can be built.

Acemoglu, D., Autor, D. H., & Lyle, D. (2004). Women, War, and Wages: The Effect of Female Labor Supply on the Wage Structure at Midcentury. Journal of Political Economy, 112(3), 497–551.

Bakken, I. V., & Buhaug, H. (2021). Civil War and Female Empowerment. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 65(5), 982–1009.

Brück, T., & Schindler, K. (2009). The Impact of Violent Conflicts on Households: What We Know and What Should We Know about War Widows? Oxford Development Studies, 37(3), 289–309.

Buvinic, M., Das Gupta, M., Casabonne, U., & Verwimp, P. (2013). Violent conflict and gender inequality: An overview. The World Bank Research Observer, 28(1), 110-138.

Chamarbagwala, R., & Morán, H. E. (2011). The Human Capital Consequences of Civil War: Evidence from Guatemala. Journal of Development Economics, 94(1), 41–61.

Cohen, D. K. (2013). Explaining Rape during Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980–2009). American Political Science Review, 107(3), 461–477.

Costalli, S., Moretti, L., & Pischedda, C. (2017). The Economic Costs of Civil War: Synthetic Counterfactual Evidence and the Effects of Ethnic Fractionalization. Journal of Peace Research, 54(1), 80–98.

Dahlum, S., & Wig, T. (2020). Peace Above the Glass Ceiling: The Historical Relationship Between Female Political Empowerment and Civil Conflict. International Studies Quarterly, 64(4), 879–893.

Elshtain, J. B. (1995). Women and War. University of Chicago Press.

Enloe, C. (2014). Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. University of California Press.

Goldin, C. (1991). The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women’s Employment. American Economic Review, 81(4), 741–756.

Hadzic, D., & Tavits, M. (2020). Wartime Violence and Post-War Women’s Representation. British Journal of Political Science, 51(3), 1024–1039.

Pospieszna, P. (2015). Democracy Assistance and Women’s Political Empowerment in Post-Conflict Countries. Democratization, 22(7), 1250–1272.

Tripp, A. M. (2015). Women and Power in Postconflict Africa. Cambridge University Press.

United Nations. (2022). Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. United Nations.

UNWomen. (2015). A Global Study on the Implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325.

World Bank. (2011). World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security and Development. World Bank.

During World War II, the Axis and Allied Powers both launched extensive propaganda campaigns encouraging women to engage in wartime production. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, head of the Nazi Women’s League, wrote in 1940: "Our men at the front do their duty in the face of death—we women at home, with the same unflinching courage, go in whatever direction the Fuhrer indicates."[1] Replace “the Fuhrer” with “Uncle Sam” and the quotation conjures an image of Rosie the Riveter smiling in her Victory Red lipstick. The similarity between the two campaigns is the first red flag. Rosie the Riveter and her friends weren’t there to free women, but to execute a military strategy. These propaganda campaigns were so successful that many still believe WWII was one of the greatest forces for women’s liberation in the 20th century.

My contention is the exact opposite— war does not and cannot liberate. There are two key reasons why. First, war is destructive, not productive. New opportunities, including those that enable women who had previously been confined to domestic employment to enter the broader workforce, require economic growth. War can divert mass amounts of resources into war-related projects, but at best this is a shifting of innovation away from less militaristic projects to more militaristic ones. More realistically, since the technologies and projects invested in during wartime are generally used to destroy people and property, wartime production should be expected to bring about significant social losses. Killing and impoverishment impede economic growth; they do not accelerate it. The satiric economic commentator Frédéric Bastiat said it best when he observed that you can’t make an economy thrive by throwing rocks through windows, regardless of what the glazier might like you to believe. Likewise, you can’t expand women’s economic opportunities by dropping bombs on Berlin, regardless of what Uncle Sam might like you to believe.

In the United States, the process of entrepreneurship leading to new job creation leading to new work opportunities for women had been steadily picking up pace since the early days of the Industrial Revolution—well over 100 years before Rosie the Riveter and “Janes who make planes” came on the scene. To give the war the credit for the work entrepreneurs and women’s rights activists had been doing all that time is to confuse correlation with causation. Post-war economies do not require a labor force with the skill sets that women learned in order to engage in wartime production. It should be no surprise that these experiences did not translate into a permanent upward shift in women’s economic opportunities.

The final stage of the war production plan was for millions of women hired during wartime to be fired or replaced by men once they returned from war. In addition to clear historical records of these mass layoffs, Claudia Goldin’s (1991)[2] analysis of labor force survey data found that the plurality of white married women who were in the labor force in 1950 had either been in the labor force since before the war or entered after the war. Evan K. Rose further clarified the picture of women’s employment during WWII with a 2018 paper[3] that found that the cities and industries most involved in wartime production were not key drivers of women’s labor force participation post-war. In other words, the job opportunities that endured and the women who took advantage of them were in the industries and places that were less affected by wartime production. This evidence supports the argument that women’s wartime employment was transitory and did not change the long-term trends of women’s work.

The second key reason that war does not—and indeed cannot—liberate is that it strengthens hierarchy, not equality. Soldiers and generals alike learn the giving and following of orders. They do not learn skills that would help them to collaborate on equal footing with women they view as their inferiors. Obedience as the highest virtue is reinforced. The ideology of the “separate spheres”— women in domestic roles and men in public roles—may even have gained in popularity following WWII.[4] The women of the 1950s had the right to vote, maintained independent economic rights even after marriage, could attend many colleges, and work in an ever-increasing range of professional fields, but the cultural association of women with domesticity and men with authority was in many ways as strong as ever.

Historically, one of the greatest barriers to women’s participation in public processes has been the absence of opportunities to develop the necessary skills. Mary Wollstonecraft and other early defenders of women’s rights were sharply critical of the fact that women and men received different educations, and that women were often prepared exclusively for their roles as wives and mothers. In Wollstonecraft’s view, the education “…which women have hitherto received has only tended, with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire—mere propagators of fools!”[5] The reason the education women received rendered them insignificant and foolish was because it trained them to be chosen (for marriage) and to be acted upon (as they obeyed their husbands) rather than to choose and to act for themselves.

In short, marriage in the 18th and 19th century was a hierarchy with one ruler and one subject. How could war transform subordination into equality? It is possible that formal women’s rights could be used as a bargaining chip in the international politics of war. A country may change their property laws (with or without changing actual practices), or grant women voting rights to receive money or support from global NGOs. This may or may not be a step in the right direction, but long-term change in women’s rights and social status requires reform of the rules in use, not just the rules in form. Progress for women living under patriarchal oppression requires a re-conceptualization of social and political power. Men and women must become capable of holding power with each other rather than always relying on hierarchy.

Militarization supports the skills that are required to exercise “power over.”[6] Militaries establish strict hierarchies where soldiers are taught that order and success require obedience. For this reason, Wollstonecraft analogized women’s lives under coverture to soldier’s lives in the military. Both experiences stunt moral development and produce a character better suited to hierarchy than freedom:

War creates opportunities for people to become better despots, not better democratic equals.

Sadly, one reason we know this is true is the extent to which intimate partner violence and other forms of gender-based violence increase during war and after exposure to conflict. Men with exposure to war are more likely to become perpetrators, and women with exposure to war are more likely to become victims.[8] This is one of the most extreme adverse outcomes associated with women being encouraged to be subservient and men being encouraged to be aggressive. Increased violence toward women is a critically important reason why the claim that war benefits women should be viewed with deep suspicion. It is also more evidence that war-time habits lead to abuse of power. This cannot possibly support the development of greater mutual sympathy and respect between the sexes.

War does not and cannot liberate. Liberation requires progress, growth, and mutual respect. War produces death, destruction, and despotism. Those seeking to advance women’s rights and opportunities should work for peace.

[1] Quoted in Rupp, Leila J. 2015. Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945. Princeton University Press, p. 130

[2] Goldin, Claudia D. 1991. “The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women’s Employment.” The American Economic Review 81 (4): 741–56.

[3] Rose, Evan K. 2018. “The Rise and Fall of Female Labor Force Participation During World War II in the United States.” The Journal of Economic History 78 (3): 673–711. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050718000323.

[4] Becchio, Giandomenica. 2024. The Doctrine of the Separate Spheres in Political Economy and Economics: Gender Equality and Classical Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51262-9.

[5] Introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman.

[6] Ostrom, Vincent. 1997. The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies: A Response to Tocqueville’s Challenge. University of Michigan Press.

[7] Chapter 1 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman.

[8] Torrisi, Orsola. 2023. “Young-Age Exposure to Armed Conflict and Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence.” Journal of Marriage and Family 85 (1): 7–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12876.

When Anna Walentynowicz was dismissed from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland, in 1980, she probably did not imagine she would spark a movement that would transform women's economic rights across an entire nation. Her spark grew into the Solidarity Movement, an unarmed revolution that reshaped how Polish women could own property, participate in the economy, and shape their futures.

Data from dozens of countries over the past century shows that nonviolent revolutions expand women's actual, day-to-day property rights even when the legal code has not caught up. In the years following a peaceful revolution, women's ability to own, inherit, and control property expanded dramatically. However, when we examine the formal laws on the books, we often see little immediate change.

To understand this phenomenon, we need to clarify what we mean by different types of rights and empowerment. When I talk about "de facto" property rights, I mean women's actual, observed ability to buy land, open businesses, inherit from their families, and make economic decisions, regardless of what the law says. For this, I use property rights for women from the Varieties of Democracy Index (V-Dem). These are the rights that matter in daily life: Can a woman walk into a bank and get a loan? Can she register a business in her own name? Will her community respect her ownership of inherited land?

In contrast, "de jure" rights refer to what is written in the legal code, the formal laws that technically govern property ownership. These might guarantee equality on paper but mean little if social norms, bureaucratic practices, or informal institutions prevent women from exercising these rights. The Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Index (EFW) provides this data.

I have also explored the effects of nonviolent regime change on three other variables from the V-Dem: civil liberties, civil society participation, and political empowerment. Civil liberties refers to women's freedom to move, associate, and express themselves without restriction. After nonviolent revolutions, women gain greater freedom to travel for work, attend meetings, and voice their opinions. These are essential preconditions for economic participation. Civil society participation measures women's involvement in organizations outside of government, labor unions, community groups, and business associations. It increases immediately after a nonviolent revolution, and these civil society institutions are critical for sustained advocacy of female rights. Political empowerment measures women's ability to influence decisions that affect their lives, not just through voting but through activism, organizing, and collective action. This grassroots political power often proves more effective than formal representation in changing economic realities.

Let us see how this worked in the example of the Polish Solidarity Movement. When the movement began in 1980, women made up a significant portion of the ten million members who joined. Women like Alina Pienkowska co-founded strike committees, negotiated with authorities, and became signatories to the historic Gdańsk Agreement that legitimized Solidarity.

These women did not wait for laws to change. Within Solidarity, they established specialized departments to advocate for female workers, securing maternity benefits, childcare access, and workplace protections through collective bargaining rather than legislation. When the government imposed martial law in 1981, women's informal networks kept the movement alive, facilitating communication between imprisoned leaders and maintaining the resistance through underground channels.

Before 1989, under Communist rule, the Polish state severely restricted private property rights. But after Solidarity's peaceful revolution succeeded, the score for women's property rights in V-Dem jumped to perfect, meaning virtually all women could own, inherit, and control property. This score does not mean that property rights are strictly protected like in the EFW, but rather that property rights are equally granted in legal and social settings. This transformation happened primarily through changing social practices, business norms, and institutional behaviors rather than immediate legal reforms.

Women used underground media networks to demand new laws and to show that both women and men privately supported women's economic participation far more than the official Communist narrative suggested. When these preferences became public knowledge through peaceful mass action, social change followed rapidly.

The success of nonviolent movements in advancing women's economic rights stems from several interconnected mechanisms. First, nonviolent movements require broad participation to succeed. This means women must be included as equal partners from the beginning. Women are systematically excluded from most military operations, and this discrimination limits the available number of dissidents within a country. This critical mass of female participation means women's concerns cannot be ignored when the new order is established.

Second, the skills and networks built during nonviolent resistance translate directly into economic empowerment. Organizing a boycott requires the same logistical capabilities as running a business cooperative. Leading a strike committee develops the same leadership skills needed to manage an enterprise. The social capital, trust, reciprocity, and mutual support forged during peaceful protests become the foundation for women's business networks and economic collaboration after the revolution.

Third, nonviolent movements must maintain moral legitimacy, which requires consistency between means and ends. A movement claiming to fight for freedom and dignity while excluding half the population loses credibility. This pressure for internal consistency often forces nonviolent movements to model the gender equality they seek, creating new norms through practice rather than proclamation.

Formal legal reforms often come years or even decades after women's actual economic practices have already changed. The evidence suggests that when women gain real economic power through changed social norms and practices, they eventually accumulate enough influence to formalize these gains in law.

This sequence is intuitive. Changing laws requires access to formal political power, seats in parliament, influence over judicial appointments, and connections to legislative committees. But changing social practices requires only collective action and community agreement. Women participating in nonviolent movements build social power, which they can use to secure formal, legal power.

In the Polish example, the immediate post-revolution period saw women exercising property rights through practice, starting businesses, inheriting land, accessing credit, even as the formal legal code lagged. Only gradually, as women's economic participation became normalized and their political influence grew, did comprehensive legal reforms follow. The trend is present consistently. Nonviolent mobilization creates space for women's economic participation, which generates resources and networks that women use to demand formal rights, which eventually become codified in law.

These historical movements illustrate potential paths for female rights. International development organizations often focus on changing laws, pushing countries to reform property codes, mandate equal inheritance, or guarantee women's business rights. While these legal reforms matter, research suggests informal institutions rule.The more effective path runs through grassroots mobilization and social change.

When women participate in peaceful mass movements, they do not just change governments. They transform the everyday assumptions, practices, and norms that determine economic opportunity. A woman who has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with men in protests finds it easier to stand as their equal in business negotiations. Communities that have seen women lead strike committees find it natural for women to lead companies.

Legal reform is important but sustainable legal change requires a foundation of shifted social norms and women's actual economic participation. Laws imposed from above without this foundation often remain impressive on paper but meaningless in practice. Laws that formalize existing social changes tend to stick because they are backed by constituencies with real power to enforce them.

Women around the world continue to use nonviolent resistance to claim their economic rights. From Iran's "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement to Sudan's revolution led significantly by women, we see the same patterns emerging. These movements do not begin with demands for property law reform. They start with demands for dignity, freedom, and recognition as whole human beings. But in pursuing these goals through peaceful mass action, they create the conditions for lasting economic transformation.

Supporting women's economic rights means supporting their ability to organize, protest, and peacefully resist. It means protecting civil society organizations where women build collective power. It means understanding that messy, bottom-up social change often proves more durable than neat, top-down legal reform.

For women living under systems that deny their economic rights, this research offers hope and strategies. The path to economic freedom does not require waiting for enlightened leaders to grant new laws. It runs through collective action, peaceful resistance, and the patient work of changing minds and norms one community at a time. The peaceful revolutions that succeed in transforming women's economic lives are not just changing rules. They are changing culture. Cultural change, once achieved, proves remarkably difficult to reverse.

The women of Poland's Solidarity Movement understood this. They did not wait for permission to claim their economic rights. They organized, resisted, and created new realities through collective action. In doing so, they demonstrated that peaceful revolutions succeed in advancing women's economic freedom not by imposing new rules from above, but by empowering women to write new rules from below. Moreover, those rules, written through struggle and solidarity, have a way of lasting.

In Three Guineas (1938), famed author Virginia Woolf writes, “[T]o fight has always been the man’s habit, not the woman’s…Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle.” (Woolf 1938: 13).

Without a doubt, fighting wars has historically been a “man’s business.” How do we begin to measure the full cost of this “business”? Discussions of the cost of war almost always include considerations of causalities. Men are far more likely to die in combat-related deaths than their female counterparts. Since 1800, more than 37 million people, mostly men, died from direct participation in conflict.

The financial burden of conflicts is also commonly discussed as a cost of war. The strain war places on economies; how resources are reallocated, deployed, and destroyed; and how the monetary costs of war are paid (or not) is well-studied in economics and elsewhere.

Discussions of other costs exist but are less common. When discussing the psychological or other non-lethal injuries from war and conflict, much literature and popular discourse focuses on the 37 million casualties, things like combat-related “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and the struggles faced by veterans with reintegration into society. There is substantial economic literature—though by no means a consensus—on whether military service enhances or diminishes a veteran’s civilian labor market outcomes.

These topics are undoubtedly important. However, the largely exclusive focus of economists on fiscal impacts and military casualties as the “costs” of war means we have critical omissions in our understanding of the consequences of conflict.

Simply put, the economic literature on war largely ignores women. It fails to understand how women may relate to or experience effects of conflict differently than men.

These omissions are not trivial. While the 37 million combat-related deaths is an eye-popping figure, this number is less than half of the 73 million who died of disease or hunger related to war over the same period. The United Nations estimates that women accounted for 40 percent of all conflict-related deaths in 2022.  If we add to that the untold number of individuals who suffered physical, fiscal, or other damage because of conflict, we quickly realize that our literature assessing the costs of war comes up woefully short.

These underappreciated costs are necessary to examine if we want to understand the full costs of war and conflict. Below, I offer but three areas ripe for study at the intersection of women and war. I highlight what we know, what we don’t, and offer suggestions on what questions might prove fruitful for study through various economic lenses, including public choice and political economy.

Women are often portrayed as passive non-combatants in conflict. Alternatively, if women are discussed as contributing to war efforts, discussions largely focus on women in auxiliary roles or how women navigate the “home front” in war time. But women have, and do, play active roles in war as members of formal militaries and other fighting forces.

Though there are examples of women leading formal militaries or serving in formal combat roles throughout history, the first wide-scale integration of women into combat roles came with the Soviet Union in World War II, in which Soviet women served as machine gunners, pilots, snipers, and tank operators. Israeli women first saw combat roles in 1948.[1] Canadian women could serve as combatants in 1989, and more countries have followed since. The United States opened all combat roles to women only within the last decade.

Women’s direct participation in war and the consequences of their participation is understudied. Some literature suggests that women’s direct involvement in war leads to political enfranchisement, including voting rights for women. While it is often suggested that women’s participation in combat specifically, and war more broadly, may challenge traditional gender norms, literature suggests that war may reinforce these norms as well.

To this author’s knowledge, there is no theory of why or when a country’s political leaders decide to allow women in combat. No public choice or political economy analyses exist. There remains significant debate about the efficacy of integrated combat units in contemporary warfare. All these questions are appropriate for economic analysis, but have yet to be fully understood.

The literature is similarly light when discussing women in alternative combat roles (e.g., as guerillas, revolutionary forces, etc.). Though literature does exist, it comes almost exclusively from history, gender studies, and political science. Though women have participated in guerilla movements across time and geography (e.g., FARC in Colombia, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the Viet Cong and Viet Minh in Vietnam, partisans in Yugoslavia, etc.), there is little to no economic analysis about these women and their impacts from micro or macroeconomic perspectives.

In both these cases—women in formal militaries and other fighting groups—questions of opportunity costs and long-term implications of participation are absent. What are the relevant tradeoffs facing women in joining militaries or guerilla groups? Do former female combatants experience wage benefits, penalties, or other meaningful differences in labor markets post-conflict? In addition, there is little work on potential gender-based differences in “disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration” (DDR) programs. Though these programs have seen extensive study, these programs are modeled around male fighters and historically male occupations, leaving ample room for analyses of access, efficacy and outcomes for women.

The use of rape and other forms of sexual violence in war is well-known and discussed in both historical and contemporary discourse (e.g., “comfort women,” the rape of an estimated two million German women by Soviet forces, Bosnian rape camps, etc.). Despite the attention, the “best” data on gender-based sexual violence (GBSV) is still poor. It remains unclear when, where, or what type of GBSV is likely to be used in war. Though some have tackled the question of when GBSV will be used as a broader military strategy, there is shockingly little work.

Those looking to study GBSV from a perspective of economics or political economy may pursue multiple veins of inquiry. Under what institutional conditions is GBSV likely to occur? Are there meaningful similarities or differences when GBSV is perpetrated by foreign militaries, local militaries, or guerilla groups? Are there specific institutional or other mechanisms that have prevented such actions or lessened the frequency?

In addition to these questions, there is a gap in our understanding of the health effects of GBSV and the long-term economic consequences. We do not know how GBSV in war impacts long-term labor market outcomes. We similarly don’t know the implications for the children of such victims. Are children born out of wartime rape, for example, more likely to face economic or educational barriers? What role does stigma play in these outcomes?

There is further work to be done on GBSV in the aftermath of war, in refugee camps or among displaced populations. Though much of the literature on GBSV focuses on rape, forced marriage, re-marriage, and sex trafficking are similarly relevant and less studied.

Outside of conflict directly, GBSV within militaries and other armed groups—even in peacetime—provides another potential path for research. Questions about rates of GBSV, when such violence is likely to occur, and what institutional or other mechanisms may support or thwart such violence are under-researched and poorly understood but are relevant points of economic inquiry.

If economists have studied the effects of war on women, it’s most likely an analysis of economic impacts. It is well-established, for example, that male labor shortages in war increase female labor force participation in wartime. Studies exist on war’s impact on wages as well as the longer term effects on women’s labor force participation. But these studies are by far from complete. Though some women may join the labor force, the physical destruction that comes with war simultaneously destroys or disrupts many formal labor markets in conflict zones, pushing women into informal employment or employment in black markets. Analyses of these informal or black labor markets are infrequently analyzed with any sort of attention paid to gender.

In a similar way, while we know that displacement because of war has negative long-run consequences, we do not have a clear understanding of how these effects impact women versus men. While refugee resettlement is discussed with some frequency, we know very little about how the gender composition of migrant groups impacts host countries or their economies. Likewise, we do not have a clear understanding of if or how large refugee movements impact gender roles, labor force participation, or other household dynamics within a refugee population.

Literary gaps in the economic literature studying the intersection of women and war are understandable. Data is difficult to find. Even “good” data related to things like military casualties, arms transfers, or military expenditures, are often insufficient for statistical analysis—placing these topics well outside the comfort zones of many economists and our standard modeling techniques. As a result, many may view the questions raised above as falling outside the scope of economic analysis. But this is not the case. Economics is fundamentally about how people make choices, respond to incentives, and how institutions—formal and informal rules—shape behavior.

Economic analysis in these instances is necessary for gaining a fuller understanding of complex phenomena. But we must be open to considering alternative methodological approaches. Analytical narratives or other empirical approaches are key to bringing the economic way of thinking into conversations about these topics. These alternative methods are not only viable, but essential.

War may be a “men’s business,” but women pay a major part of the bill. We owe it to the women of the world to figure out just how much of the tab they cover.

[1] Following the war, women were largely excluded from combat roles until the 2000s.

In her essay, “Women and War: Can Chaos Induce Social Change?” Claudia Williamson Kramer notes “Over the last 30 years and across over 165 countries…[w]ar, especially civil wars with foreign involvement, correlates with jumps in the WBL [Women, Business, and Law] index, a measure of legal parity between men and women’s access to economic opportunities.” She goes on to discuss several examples of this trend, primarily from the Middle East and Africa, positing that these observed changes in women’s rights stem from economic realities as opposed to underlying philosophical changes. She is careful to mention that war is not easy for women, of course, and that war’s role as a catalyst for change highlights that individuals are the real agents of change, not governments.

In my mind, two items in the essay are of critical note and worth more discussion and exploration.

First, Kramer notes that measurements of legal parity between men and women jump during and following war. Indeed, there is an established link between war and the enfranchisement of marginalized groups, including women, following conflict (see Porter 1994). The logic is straightforward; it is difficult to deny political rights to groups of individuals who just participated directly in a war effort. However, this is not universal—and may be a more contemporary phenomenon. It is important to note that 30 years of data captured in the WBL index offers information about a sliver of the conflicts that have been observed globally in the last century, much less across human history. Did the Second Boer War of 1899-1903 increase women’s political and economic parity with men? The Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939? Such arguments would be difficult to make. This is not to say wars have not or cannot move the needle on women’s rights, but it is worth exploring why these changes occurred only with relatively recent conflicts.

It is also possible that war hinders the acquisition of rights and economic opportunities for women. Hochschild (2011), for instance, notes how the momentum of the women’s suffrage movement in England slowed in the buildup to and during the First World War. Suffragists like Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, suspended her efforts advocating for women in favor of generating support for the war. While some women were granted the vote in 1918 (those with property or married to a property owner), voting rights would not come to all English women until 1928. Would these rights have come sooner absent the war?

The second, particularly intriguing question Kramer raises in her piece is the question of “stickiness” as it relates to institutional change and women’s political and economic participation during and post-conflict. She has her doubts. As an economist focused in the area of defense and peace economics, I do as well. At a theoretical level, it’s suggested that institutional change is most likely to “stick” when it is well-aligned with the core values of a society. Institutional change that is endogenously imposed and aligned with the core values of a society is more likely to stand the test of time than exogenous institutions imposed exogenously.

It is worthy of note that Kramer highlights that those conflicts with foreign involvement are especially likely to see increases in their WBL index scores. It seems plausible to me that her suggestion that the emphasis on women’s rights within international aid groups (e.g., the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund) may engender change on paper but not change in practice.

Again, historical examples may be helpful. In her initial article, she mentions the push in the United States following World War II to have women return to more traditional gender roles as well as the implementation of post-war policies favoring men. But there are many more examples across different types of political systems. Svetlana Alexievich, for example, discusses how Soviet women who participated directly in World War II, as tank operators, machine gunners, etc., were socially stigmatized after the war. Parents advised their sons against marrying female veterans, with many assuming the women were “whores.” She writes of “two wars” fought by Soviet women—the war at the front and the “war” to which they returned.

A more recent example would be the complete breakdown of women’s rights following the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan in 2021. Women in the country are no longer able to attend school, are denied participation in much of public life, and have their activities severely restricted. If exogenously imposed rights for women were going to “stick,” it seems as though a twenty-year occupation would have done it.

Kramer highlights questions in desperate need of inquiry. While war can facilitate institutional change—including changes in women’s rights—changes are not promised to be positive nor are they guaranteed to last. Under what circumstances are women’s rights likely to improve—and last? Here there is clearly room for statistical work, longitudinal studies, comparative institutional analyses, etc. But there is also room for other kinds of economic work, analytical narratives and other methods, to help us begin to understand these questions.

We don’t wage wars expecting them to birth liberty or women’s rights. Wars are fought for power, territory, or survival, not to empower. Yet I’ve been struck by a puzzling pattern: war’s ruin can sometimes shift economic incentives, allowing women to gain additional economic freedom and legal rights. My initial essay highlighted how wars, especially those with foreign involvement, correlate with jumps in the Women, Business and the Law (WBL) index, reflecting legal reforms in women’s work and mobility. This Liberty Matters forum, with Jayme Lemke’s stark view of war’s destructiveness, Joshua Ammons’ focus on nonviolent change, and Abigail Hall’s exploration of war’s unseen costs, enriches this puzzle. While war embodies power and destruction, its upheaval can spark unintended openings for women’s progress, aligning with my colleagues’ insights in unexpected ways.

Jayme Lemke’s argument that war cannot liberate is compelling. War destroys and reinforces hierarchy. Her analogy to Bastiat's broken window fallacy is spot on. War's production is illusory, diverting resources from growth to death. I fully concur that combat trains for obedience, not equality, and that violence begets more violence, including against women. Post-war pushback, like U.S. policies favoring male veterans after WWII, shows how hierarchies reassert themselves, stunting women's gains.

Yet, my data suggests war's destruction can sometimes erode those hierarchies. In Saudi Arabia and the UAE, amid Yemen's internationalized conflict, WBL scores surged with reforms in women's work and mobility. These aren't born of enlightenment but necessity. War’s economic ruin, such as labor shortages and fiscal strain, makes excluding women too costly. Governments, needing taxes and labor, loosen restrictions on women out of economic necessity. This isn’t war’s intent, as Lemke stresses, but an accidental byproduct where chaos lowers the price of reform.

Unlike Lemke's view of war as purely reinforcing “power over,” I see potential for “power with” where women seize opportunities, fostering economic gains amid ruin. Still, without grassroots momentum, these shifts may fade, affirming Lemke's warning: true liberation demands peace.

Joshua Ammons' analysis of nonviolent revolutions advancing women's de facto property rights through social practices, not laws, mirrors my findings on war's bottom-up effects. His evidence that successful nonviolent revolutions boost women's civil liberties but not formal politics highlights how peaceful movements transform norms first. My missing men effect is similar. War’s demographic shock pushes women into new roles, blurring gender lines before legal codification. In Rwanda, post-genocide cooperatives preceded parliamentary gains; similarly, Ammons shows nonviolent change elevating women's agency organically.

But war isn't nonviolent, it's destructive. Ammons' point that peaceful movements create durable gains because they're inclusive contrasts with war's coercion. Yet, parallels emerge. Both disrupt status quo, empowering women through necessity. War's violence may reinforce hierarchies, as Lemke argues, but like Ammons' revolutions, it can incentivize de facto shifts that pressure de jure change. My correlations suggest external aid ties reforms to funding, but Ammons' de jure/de facto gap warns these may not stick without local ownership.

Abigail Hall's exploration of war's unseen costs on women—sexual violence, economic burdens, displacement—fills crucial gaps in economic literature. Her call for public choice analyses of female combatants and institutional conditions that lead to Gender Based Sexual Violence (GBSV) align with Lemke’s view of war as hierarchy-reinforcing. Hall's questions about refugee gender composition and Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs highlight how war destroys women's economic agency, aligning with my skepticism of lasting reforms without grassroots support.

Yet, Hall's unseen costs have counterparts in unseen opportunities. War's labor shortages, as Goldin (1991) shows, propel women into work, potentially challenging norms. My data suggests this nudges legal rights, but Hall's point on GBSV reminds us that the process of achieving these gains may come at a horrific cost. War's destruction creates voids women fill entrepreneurially, but as Hall warns, informal markets expose vulnerabilities. Public choice could unpack when war's incentives, like fiscal desperation, favor women's rights versus perpetuating violence.

War is power and destruction, not liberty's architect—as Lemke, Ammons, and Hall illuminate. Lemke's hierarchy reinforcement, Ammons' peace preference, and Hall's unseen costs affirm war's harm. That’s the undeniable cost of war. But, as an economist, I must consider the full ledger: every action, including those advancing women's rights, involves trade-offs. Is there a benefit amid the devastating cost of war? Through disruption, can liberty emerge? Maybe economic necessities can erode economic barriers, bottom-up agency can reshape norms, and global scrutiny can pressure for legal change.

True liberty springs from individual action amid uncertainty. This forum challenges us: how can we harness war’s disruptive potential for women’s rights while weighing the devastating trade-offs of its destruction?

In his opening essay, Joshua Ammons highlights the transformative accomplishments of women and men who “organized, resisted, and created new realities” through nonviolent collective action. The Polish Solidarity Movement and other chosen examples are instances of individuals working for improvement from within an established institutional system. This type of reform has the advantage of retaining the overall stability of the social system, and as such is less likely to be destructive of the foundational institutions that make cooperation possible. Yet, nonviolent reforms often proceed at a slower pace than revolutions, and can require cooperation with parties who have enforced or benefitted from oppression. For this reason, revolution has understandably held an appeal to many reformers.

Claudia Williamson Kramer’s essay instead emphasizes the opportunities that are made possible by the wartime destruction of old institutions and powers. She notes that over the past 30 years, there seems to be a correlation between war—particularly civil wars with foreign involvement—and improvements in women’s de jure legal rights. As both she and Ammons note, these gains may or may not be lasting, and there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding whether or not de facto practices around women’s rights and access to property have changed for the better. Yet, there is certainly an appeal to the vision of Atlas shrugging off the corrupt society holding him back and building anew.

These two visions of social change are a wonderful example of the tension that has long existed in classical liberalism between bottom-up, “spontaneous” reform and the constructivist-style supplanting of less liberal with more liberal institutions. F. A. Hayek often illustrated these two different approaches by contrasting liberal reforms in England with the French Revolution. In Hayek’s view, the English system liberalized through bottom-up experimentation within both markets and common law courts. In contrast, the French Revolution was a bloody winner-take-all affair that resulted in democratic reformation, but undermined the rule of law in a way that ultimately compromised the liberal project of building a free, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan society.

J.M. Buchanan and his collaborators within the field of constitutional political economy challenged this dichotomy between bottom-up spontaneous reform and top-down constructivist reform by raising a third alternative: bottom-up constructivist reform, or in other words, liberal constitutional democracy. Easier said than convened. In order for a constitutional democracy to retain its liberal, citizen-led character, robust systems of checks and balances must be constantly enforced and retuned in order to maintain accountability. This kind of self-governance (i.e. government by the people) takes a great deal of time, effort, and skill.

The lessons of this historical debate are worth remembering when considering whether war-time reforms are likely to lead to a society better capable of protecting women’s rights and freedoms. What are the conditions that enable a society to renegotiate gendered laws and norms, which are often interwoven throughout a society’s institutions and have deep historical roots? Are these conditions likely to emerge during wartime, with its accompanying institutional uncertainty? Or are wartime expansions in rights and protections for women destined to be too top-down and impermanent to be worth their price?

 

I am grateful to Abigail Hall, Claudia Williamson Kramer, and Jayme Lemke for their explorations of war's relationship with women's economic empowerment. Their contributions illuminate different facets of a fundamental tension that my research on nonviolent revolutions has also uncovered: progress toward liberal institutions rarely follows the clean trajectories our theories might predict.

Consider a striking historical irony that encapsulates this tension. Mississippi became the first U.S. state to grant property rights to women—not from enlightened principles of equality, but from a desire to preserve slavery. Judges extended these rights primarily so widowed women could maintain ownership of enslaved people after their husbands died. The alternative—hundreds of enslaved individuals potentially gaining freedom through the legal technicality of a slaveholder's death—was unfathomable to the antebellum court. It would take a civil war to free these enslaved men and women from these widows. This perverse origin story of women's property rights reveals an uncomfortable truth about liberal progress. It often emerges from morally compromised foundations, yet can transcend those origins to serve higher purposes.

Hall's call for alternative methodological approaches when studying war's gendered impacts resonates with researchers studying transition economies. Her observation that good data on military casualties and expenditures remains insufficient for statistical analysis mirrors my experience studying nonviolent revolutions. When examining Poland's Solidarity movement, the quantitative finding that women's property rights jumped on Varieties of Democracy Index (V-Dem)'s scale tells only part of the story. The fuller narrative—of Anna Walentynowicz's dismissal sparking mass strikes, of women like Alina Pienkowska co-founding strike committees, of female activists maintaining underground networks during martial law—reveals mechanisms that regression coefficients cannot capture. These analytical narratives, as Hall suggests, become essential for understanding how women are drivers of institutional change.

Kramer's provocative application of price theory to war's impact on women deserves serious engagement, particularly her insight that war's devastation (e.g., loss of male labor, economic collapse, and fiscal pressures) lowers the price of granting women legal economic rights. This framework helps explain patterns in my own data: nonviolent revolutions consistently improve women's de facto property rights. At the same time, formal legal changes in the Gender Disparity Index show more modest effects. Like Saudi Arabia's Women, Business and the Law (WBL) index leap during the Yemen conflict that Williamson highlights, Poland's transformation emerged from pragmatic necessity as much as principled commitment. The revolutionary disruption made excluding women from full market participation too costly to maintain.

Yet this economic logic alone cannot explain the differential impacts I observe between violent and nonviolent revolutions. Here, Lemke's emphasis on power dynamics proves illuminating. Her distinction between "power over" and "power with" helps explain why nonviolent revolutions show more substantial positive effects across a variety of outputs than violent conflicts. As Lemke argues, militarization reinforces hierarchical command structures, while the participatory nature of nonviolent resistance builds horizontal networks of collaboration. There is some evidence that war can build civic participation, and research by the same author says that out-group discrimination increases. This point is important because while Hall notes that women have been valuable in combat roles, the vast majority of countries exclude women from participation.

The tensions between these perspectives become productive when we recognize instances where new institutions can arise from conflict like Elinor Ostrom identified. Kramer sees these moments in war's economic devastation, Hall in the broader disruptions conflict creates, and Lemke warns of their limitations when achieved through violence. My research suggests nonviolent revolutions create particularly favorable opportunity structures because they combine disruption with broad participation, necessity with legitimacy.

Hall's emphasis on understudied costs reminds us that our accounting remains incomplete. We know little about how wartime sexual violence affects long-term labor market outcomes, or how refugee displacement impacts gender roles. Kramer’s finding that post-conflict gains often depend on external pressure raises questions about sustainability—are World Bank-induced reforms merely autocrats striving to show gender equality with no substantive change, or can they create precedents that represent or foster true equality before the law? These questions remain unanswered for unarmed revolutions as well. The interaction between de jure and de facto rules in times of transition and conflict remains a fruitful area of study.

As I find across multiple countries, changing social practices through mass mobilization often precedes and enables formal legal change. The Mississippi example haunts this narrative: formal rights granted for the worst reasons can still create precedents that future generations repurpose for liberation. Today's property rights for women stand independent of their slaveholding genesis. Similarly, the pragmatic concessions Kramer documents in wartime may outlive their strategic origins if women can consolidate and expand them through collective action.

Lemke's skepticism about war's liberating potential extends implicitly to revolution as well. The path is not linear—Poland's recent restrictions on reproductive rights remind us that progress can reverse. Revolutions and wars, whether nonviolent or violent, conflict with liberalism's focus on stability and marginal improvements. I find, also, that GDP per capita decreases.

What unites our perspectives is recognition that women's economic empowerment rarely emerges from pristine moral victories. Instead, it advances through accumulating precedents, shifting norms, and expanding capabilities—even when these emerge from questionable sources. As Deirdre McCloskey argues, ideas—not perfect institutions—created the Great Enrichment. The women of Solidarity were given the brutality of socialism and transformed their society through collective action.

Perhaps this is liberalism's essential genius: its ability to grow from compromised soil toward higher ideals. The Mississippi judges who granted women property rights to preserve slavery could not have imagined that those same rights would one day enable black women's economic independence. The Communist authorities who negotiated with Solidarity could not have foreseen how women's resistance networks would reshape Polish society. Even we, studying these transitions, cannot fully predict how today's imperfect advances will serve tomorrow's liberation. What we can do is document, analyze, and learn from these complex processes. We can recognize that the path to women's economic empowerment—like the path to liberalism itself—winds through morally ambiguous terrain toward destinations we can only partially glimpse.

The essays and responses in this series highlight an important tension regarding war, liberty, and women. On the one hand, war has the capacity to empower women by disrupting or dismantling formal and informal institutions that exclude them from economic or other spheres. On the other hand, the authors in this series highlight war’s profound and devastating consequences on women. Some of these costs are clear and readily observable while others are long, variable, and difficult to measure.

These tensions surrounding war, and war’s capacity to be freedom-enhancing and freedom-eroding, are not new. In Democracy in America, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville discusses the tense relationship between war and democratic societies. Contemporary scholarship highlights similar dynamics regarding democratic institutions and war [1]. The essays in this series illustrate this ongoing discussion.

Scholars have offered different suggestions for resolving the broader tensions surrounding war and liberty. Is it possible to limit the deleterious effects of war? Many suggest the implementation of additional constraints on government, like increased transparency, more legislative oversight, and augmented legal constraints. But even a cursory glance at history reveals that such reforms are difficult to implement and may have limited efficacy.

In their essays and responses, Ammons, Lemke, and Kramer touch on alternatives worthy of additional consideration. Some scholars assign a critical role to citizen ideology in providing a constraint on government [2]. Tocqueville and others have highlighted how the “art of association” and self-governance provide a mechanism for solving collective action problems while providing a check on the state. To date, however, little scholarship examines how these ideas intersect with gender.

It is abundantly clear from this series that the impacts of war on women requires additional study. Beyond exploring the costs of war, however, it is also worth considering research on the role of women in building and sustaining peace. Elise Boulding’s work provides a fruitful starting point.  In Cultures of Peace, Boulding emphasizes the role of women in fostering peace with their families, communities, and beyond. She also discusses women and their role in civil society and as agents of change. These topics are worthy of detailed exploration.

[1] Bruce D. Porter. 1994. War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics. New York, NY: The Free Press.

[2] Robert Higgs. 1987. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of the American Government. New York, Y: Oxford University Press. 

 

Many thanks to my colleagues Joshua Ammons, Abby Hall, and Claudia Williamson for an engaging discussion of war’s impact on women and women’s rights. In this final reply, I’d like to highlight a few potential directions for future research.

Hall and Williamson both engage with the concept of institutional stickiness—under what conditions will the chaos of war “spark unintended openings for women’s progress,” as Williamson writes in her most recent response? When will changes persist, and when will there be a reversion to initial conditions or even a backlash against change? Detailed case study and ethnographic work are essential to teasing out whether there are underlying conditions that will support the development of new “power with” relationships, as Williamson suggests. This is an example of the opportunity for collaboration between scholars working with different research methods, as highlighted in Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice by Amy Poteete, Marco A. Janssen, and Elinor Ostrom. Doing such work in conflict zones is difficult and dangerous in many ways, and as such also calls for collaboration with researchers living in affected communities.

I would also like to second Ammons’ call for greater attention to nonviolent resistance as a strategy for bringing about social change. As emphasized by scholars from Alexis Tocqueville to Vincent Ostrom, the ability to resolve social dilemmas peacefully cannot be taken for granted. Essentially, we can get better at changing. It takes practice to learn how to negotiate and devise peaceful compromises. Activism and peaceful freedom fighting—including for women’s rights, both in and out of wartime—could be an important way to both combat oppression and facilitate women and men learning to work together. In the long run, the development of this capacity to take collective responsibility for ones’ constitutional environment without relying on the state has the potential to support genuine democratic institutions, including universal political and economic rights. If social changes happen before these lessons are learned, the relevant individuals may not have the ability to preserve what has been gained.

This research agenda on nonviolence calls for empirical work but also brings new energy to the development of theories of liberalizing social change. In particular, the idea of getting better at changing has important implications for the conundrum of illiberalism within a liberal system. In essence, the problem is this: Liberalism requires a cosmopolitan acceptance of others’ right to choose their own values, even when they are different from our own. Yet, even if we limit ourselves to the acceptance of values that can co-exist with a rule of law and do not violate fundamental human rights, some of those values are likely to be fundamentally illiberal. As a consequence, commitment to the principles of liberalism may require the toleration of some degree of illiberal values, as Chandran Kukathas explores productively in his book The Liberal Archipelago.

If change can be induced non-violently (which does not mean easily or quietly), the presence of illiberal islands in the liberal archipelago becomes more palatable. Instead of debating whether or not to coercively intervene in illiberal institutional environments—as Hall correctly observes has not worked out well for the women (or indeed most of the men) of Afghanistan—we can focus on keeping open the pathways of change. By creating exit options for individuals and facilitating nonviolent activism, we can continue to expand our capacity to change and peacefully share those skills with others.

This forum has deepened our understanding of war's complex relationship with women's rights, revealing striking commonalities among our perspectives. Jayme Lemke, Joshua Ammons, and Abby Hall each underscore war's inherent destructiveness—echoing my own acknowledgment that conflict is no architect of liberty—while grappling with the paradoxical opportunities it creates.

We all recognize that disruption, whether from war or revolution, can erode entrenched hierarchies and economic barriers, but at immense human cost. Lemke's distinction between “power over” and “power with” aligns with Ammons' emphasis on nonviolent movements fostering inclusive, bottom-up change, much like my observation of war's “missing men” effect blurring gender norms organically. Hall's focus on unseen costs, such as gender-based violence and displacement, complements this by reminding us that any gains may be fleeting without alignment to societal values, a concern I share regarding the stickiness of reforms tied to external pressures.

We all express skepticism about the durability of these changes. Ammons notes de facto shifts often precede de jure changes but can reverse; Lemke warns of wartime reforms' top-down impermanence, drawing on F. A Hayek and James Buchanan; and Hall cites historical reversals, like post-WWII Soviet stigma or Afghanistan's collapse. This convergence highlights a core tension: progress from compromised origins. Yet, we agree that true liberation demands grassroots ownership over coercion.

Looking forward, these insights chart promising research paths. We need longitudinal studies tracking de jure/de facto gaps post-conflict, integrating public choice to unpack when fiscal desperation or international aid yields lasting change versus superficial compliance. Comparative analyses of violent versus nonviolent disruptions could reveal conditions enabling “power with” amid chaos. Hall's call for analytical narratives and alternative methods, like exploring female combatants' roles or DDR programs' gender impacts, offers tools to humanize statistics. 

Ultimately, this dialogue affirms that women's agency drives progress, even in ruin. By harnessing disruption's potential while prioritizing peace, future work can guide policies fostering resilient, equitable institutions. 

These essays have discussed the costs of conflict on women in fine detail, but it might be helpful to examine this from a broader view. Wars and violent revolutions arise from fundamental human aspirations: expelling foreign occupations, removing dictatorships, achieving self-determination, and pursuing transformative social change. These motivations represent legitimate grievances demanding resolution. Yet, conventional wisdom presents a false binary—that societies must choose between violent resistance and passive submission to oppression.

This dichotomy persists despite overwhelming historical evidence of a third path. The Solidarity movement expelled Soviet influence from Poland. The People Power Revolution removed Ferdinand Marcos's dictatorship in the Philippines. India achieved independence from British rule. South Africa dismantled apartheid, primarily through sustained nonviolent pressure. Regime change, expelling foreign armies, and major social change (like anti-apartheid) are the justifications for most modern wars, and these motivations are a requirement to enter the dataset on nonviolent revolutions that I use in my research. Economics, at its core, examines the costs and benefits of alternatives given constraints. When we apply this framework rigorously to conflict resolution, the superiority of nonviolent action becomes clear. That is why a former Lithuanian defense minister said, “I would rather have this book [Civilian-Based Defense] than the nuclear bomb.”

Why does the myth of inevitable violence persist? Government institutions systematically fail at entrepreneurial discovery, including recognizing alternatives to violence. This failure reflects deeper issues about how lasting change actually occurs.

Informal institutions—the cultural norms and practices that emerge bottom-up—often matter more than formal rules imposed through force. War may change laws on paper, but lasting institutional change requires cultural shifts that cannot be imposed through violence. The Kirznerian entrepreneur we need isn't the military commander but the grassroots organizer who recognizes opportunities for peaceful transformation.

The war in Afghanistan was sold partly as advancing women's rights, and briefly, it appeared to succeed. But economics teaches us that alternatives matter. Genuine expansions in women's property rights historically emerged through peaceful interjurisdictional competition rather than violent conflict.

My research demonstrates that we should expect nonviolent revolutions to produce greater and more durable gains in women's de facto property rights compared to violent conflicts. These de facto rights prove more important than de jure rights for long-term development. While external force may temporarily impose a regime that helps women, nonviolent action wins in the long run.

Economic freedom drives growth. Cultural values emphasizing individual autonomy advance women's economic rights. John Stuart Mill taught us that the subjection of women often includes limiting their ability to participate in markets and their autonomy. Domestic abusers know this is effective. While the shock of war may generate some temporary, unintended benefits in the labor market, we must explore more sustainable bottom-up solutions that facilitate what Elise Boulding calls “cultures of peace.”

How do nonviolent movements succeed where violence fails? Voluntary associations—from women's clubs to modern NGOs—provide public goods without violence. International trade creates positive-sum alternatives to zero-sum conflict. These mechanisms preserve economic capacity while building new institutions.

How can women challenge the warfare state? Whistleblowers expose government abuses precisely because normal channels fail. Women can protest. For example, Fanny Garrison Villard and Eva Macnaghten, members of the Women’s Peace Society and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in the 1920s, were hugely influential in promoting free trade and peace.

The entrepreneurial pathways to peacemaking show how bottom-up discovery processes identify and implement solutions that centralized violence cannot achieve. Look at Homegirl Cafe, which employs women who have experienced violence or are formerly incarcerated. This isn't merely theoretical—it's demonstrated repeatedly in successful nonviolent movements worldwide.

The choice between violence and submission is false. The real choice is between war's documented devastation and the transformative potential of organized nonviolent resistance. Applied to conflict, economic logic is inescapable: the case for peace represents not just a moral ideal but an economic imperative.

Current resource allocation reveals our collective failure to internalize this lesson. Military expenditures exceed these nonviolent methods. This misallocation persists because policymakers fail to recognize that peaceful preparation for peace offers more than violent preparation for war. Defense planning faces knowledge problems. Society needs Kirznerian entrepreneurs who identify these opportunities for peace and make their visions a reality.

Our task as scholars is to ensure this alternative remains visible, viable, and victorious. This isn't merely an academic exercise but an urgent contribution to human flourishing. The evidence demands we apply the lesson that bottom-up solutions consistently outperform top-down interventions to humanity's greatest challenge: transcending violence itself.

When economists ask what makes their discipline uniquely valuable, it's the consistent application of economic logic to real-world phenomena. That logic, properly applied to conflict resolution, yields an inescapable conclusion: nonviolent action dominates violent alternatives on every meaningful metric—economic, institutional, and human.