Countering China And Russia
The Hidden Advantages of Women, Peace, and Security
Kathleen McInnis, et al. | 2024.11.14
This brief lays an analytic foundation for considering gender analyses, and Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) programs, as strategic enablers for accomplishing key Department of Defense (DoD) priorities.
Introduction
Deterrence — essentially, utilizing instruments of power to convince an adversary to refrain from taking a particular course of action — is a core aspect of the United States’ strategy to halt the advance of authoritarian regimes across multiple domains. In order to better organize the DoD’s deterrent posture, the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) puts forward an intriguing construct: tailored, integrated deterrence. Integrated deterrence is, at its core, a way of reminding the DoD about the fundamentals of deterrence: namely, that it is a psychological calculation rather than a particular widget or program. In order for an adversary to be deterred, it must believe that a course of action that it is considering is not worth pursuing. The key components of strategies that dissuade adversaries from undesirable activities are capabilities, such as the actual military and other elements of national power, and credibility, namely demonstrations of the political will to act in the event a red line is crossed.
The central challenge before the DoD — and the U.S. government more broadly — is to better tailor its deterrent strategies through more creative employment of military ways and means. This requires a better understanding of the psychologies of power and vulnerabilities within adversary regimes. In other words, building deterrence strategies that actually affect the psychological calculations of most U.S. adversary authoritarian regimes requires taking a much more serious look at their power structures and concepts of power, both of which are heavily gendered.
The central challenge before the DoD — and the U.S. government more broadly — is to better tailor its deterrent strategies through more creative employment of military ways and means.
Gender as a Conceptual Lens
“Gender” does not mean “women”; rather, gender is a way to express and promulgate core notions of identity and power at individual and structural levels. “Gender” as a conceptual lens is not limited to women and women’s representation. Although women often play important roles in challenging authoritarian power structures — as recent events in Iran demonstrate — they do so in opposition to the reactionary gender roles prescribed for all citizens by authoritarian regimes. While women are often drivers for thinking about gendered aspects of security questions — if not catalysts for social change — analytically focusing on one gender misses the bigger societal and structural pictures of which gender is a key part.
Methodology
To understand how WPS and gender-related approaches might help illuminate more effective approaches to building tailored, integrated deterrence strategies, CSIS initiated a multipronged project that incorporated a mixed methods analytic approach in its research design. Over the course of one year, CSIS
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convened six working groups with leading gender, regional, and strategy experts; -
conducted dozens of research interviews; -
traveled to both U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) and U.S. European Command (EUCOM) theaters to engage with experts and planners at operational or theater levels; and -
designed, ran, and analyzed a tabletop exercise to “stress test” and validate insights derived from working group discussions, interviews, and study trips.
Research interviews were conducted utilizing a grounded theory approach; that is, theory was designed based on the information shared by interlocutors. In this case, participants were asked to share their views of the major problems they grappled with on a daily basis without reference to gender or WPS efforts. Theories on the utility of gender analytic approaches and WPS programs were constructed afterward.
What Do Authoritarians Want?
What do authoritarians want? The short answer: power. They use gender scripts and repertoires to consolidate and maintain power; however, in so doing, they offer the United States opportunities to fracture, exploit, or contradict those scripts in ways that serve deterrent strategies. Authoritarian scripts often involve the repression of women and marginalized gender groups and the simultaneous promotion of what it means to be a desirable and powerful man, which may reflect both how authoritarian regimes acquire power and what they believe power is.
Russia, Gender, and Women
Women’s equality is written into Russia’s constitution, and women in Russia occupy a relatively more equal social position than their counterparts in other authoritarian contexts. Yet, as of 2024, it is clear that Vladimir Putin’s brand of authoritarianism relies on strict differentiation between men and women. Russian women occupy a significant place in the labor market, and, in general, they are more educated than Russian men, but the legal and social differentiation of men and women has increased in Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Feminist activists and gender equality advocates have been vocal opponents of the invasion.
The legal and social differentiation of men and women has increased in Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
In the Soviet era, Russian laws supported gender equality, but then, as now, women’s social role was heavily centered on their childbearing and childrearing capacity. Although many women held jobs outside the home, they were banned from professions that might threaten their reproductive health, and pronatalist policies featured heavily in Soviet economic plans. Indeed, especially today, Russian women are encouraged to bear children to counter the nation’s declining birth rate — a statistic associated with decreased competitiveness in the global economy. Cloaked in the language of “traditional values,” Moscow’s sustained campaign against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) rights can also be understood in light of its pronatalist stance.
This emphasis on “traditional values” has not always been a part of Vladimir Putin’s political arsenal. He began emphasizing cultural traditionalism (and restrictive gender roles for men and women) toward the end of his second term as president (2007–2008) and ramped up the rhetoric significantly after returning to the presidency in 2012. Along with his performance of virile masculine virtues in public spaces and photo opportunities, Putin began drawing starker lines of contrast between Russian “civilization” and the West. The close connections and affinity between Putin’s regime and the Russian army — an organization notorious for the brutality not only of its battlefield tactics, but also of its barracks culture — further underlined the importance of aggressive, “macho” behavior in legitimizing Putin’s abrogation of political opposition. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the violence of the war and domestic violence have been mutually reinforcing.
These restrictive visions of gender cut across Russia’s many social, ethnic, and cultural divides. In places where support for Putin might be limited because of his regime’s actions in the past — Chechnya, for example — promoting this version of violent, dominating masculinity is a way to consolidate support in certain quarters (and divide potential opposition by casting the regime’s role in “natural” and “nonpolitical” terms). Public memory of the chaos of the 1990s makes calls for order (even if restrictive) appealing across Russia.
China, Gender, and Women
Women in twentieth and twenty-first century China have found their social and legal position highly dependent on the internal politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): despite robust official rhetoric about communism’s equality principles, men remain socially and legally advantaged over women. As of 2024, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China is undergoing a period of rising discrimination against women and inequality between men and women. Indeed, the CCP has been intensifying its crackdown on feminist activists and is increasingly reliant on the subjugation of women to maintain its hold on power. This is evident in the proliferation of unchecked gender-based violence, emphasis on “harmony” in response to dissent, and the performance of stereotypical masculinity by Xi and other high-ranking officials.
Rising economic uncertainty in China in the early 2020s has been accompanied by new policies pushing women into traditional roles of wife and mother in the home and making it far more difficult for women to obtain a divorce. Concern over a “masculinity crisis” has led to crackdowns on certain kinds of popular music, clothing, and other forms of expression deemed too “feminine” for Chinese men. At the same time, official rhetoric in support of Xi Jinping has focused on his paternal and masculine qualities, painting him as an ideal type of husband and father. Mirroring the CCP’s characterization of the Chinese state as a familial unit, this rhetoric makes space both for increasing the centralization of power in the CCP and for collectively enduring potential economic downturns. Sexist elements of Confucianism tend to replace the more egalitarian language of Marxism in these displays.
As of 2024, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China is undergoing a period of rising discrimination against women and inequality between men and women.
At the same time, China’s economic uncertainty will be directly impacted by women’s choices. Decades of the infamous one-child policy have produced severely declining birthrates in China, threatening a demographic contraction that will likely lead to greater instability. Efforts to both encourage and shame women into marriage and childbearing have had little discernible effect thus far, and, among younger generations, women — and to a lesser extent even men — express solidarity with feminism and gender equality. Most significantly, Chinese women were at the forefront of protests in China against the CCP’s draconian Covid-19 policies. The CCP’s campaign to shut down feminist dissent networks was only partially successful, as their previous anti-dissent campaigns focused on the threat of male dissenters. Women’s criticism of the regime poses a more complicated threat to the CCP’s dominance of the political discourse in China, in part because of the efforts the CCP has made to exclude them from the political realm and because of the growing popularity of feminist ideas among ordinary young women.
In other words, as Xi strengthens his grip on power in Beijing, the CCP is fomenting concerns that boys are being “feminized,” and it has chosen not to place women in CCP leadership positions, a move that appears to contradict decades of Chinese policy promoting gender equality. Indeed, Beijing’s vision of a strong China now includes returning women to traditional gender roles — such as pushing them into marriage and childbirth — and cracking down on feminist activism. Much more directly, the Xinjiang crackdown has an extremely strong gendered element — specifically the elimination of Uyghur masculinity and the mass sterilization of women, combined with the imposition of Han men on Uyghur households.
A Dictator’s Gender Playbook
Both Beijing and Moscow are weaponizing aspects of gender to advance their own strategic aims — and in somewhat similar ways. Indeed, there almost appears to be a gender-oriented “Dictator’s Playbook” with the following elements:
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Women support national strength by serving as wives and mothers within the politically stabilizing institution of marriage
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Western ideas about sexuality are a threat to national strength
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Power means domination over other countries
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Young people are weaker than the generation the leaders came from, especially young men, and a demographic crisis looms without change
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Women in power are deceitful and threatening
These gender-driven positions are spilling over into the politics and strategic priorities of third-party states. As elites in Georgia, for example, are expanding cooperation with both Moscow and Beijing, they are simultaneously targeting women political leaders and rolling back progress on gender equity. Conversely, upward of 60,000 Ukrainian women have been on the front lines of the country’s war against Moscow, enhancing the resilience and resistance capabilities of Ukraine overall in the face of an overwhelming adversary. Interviews on the ground in Ukraine in August 2023 suggested that investments in civil society — and in particular women’s groups — since 2014 helped create a sufficiently prodemocratic Ukrainian identity that, in turn, contributed to a ferocious national will to fight. In Iran, which engages in gender apartheid, a powerful protest movement has been challenging the authority and legitimacy of the Ayatollah’s radical Islamic regime — a protest movement that was sparked and carried forward by women and girls.
The question is: If U.S. adversaries are using similar gender-conservative playbooks, what might these gendered activities mean for U.S. strategy broadly, and for tailored, integrated deterrence specifically? In other words, gender appears to represent a critical societal fault line for contemporary authoritarian regimes — and a key, if perhaps underappreciated, mechanism for mobilizing prodemocratic forces and national will to fight. This leads to an interesting proposition: might gender-related tools, and primarily those associated with the WPS toolkit, provide the United States and the DoD with key vectors for tailoring its integrated deterrence strategies.
Strategic Concepts: Using WPS and Gender Analyses as Strategic Enablers for Building Competitive Advantage
As one interlocutor over the course of the study noted: given the manifold strategic advantages that WPS programs and capabilities can present for the United States, it may be time for the DoD enterprise writ large to consider gender as a significant dimension of competition rather than as a set of abstract concepts. While a number of components, for example INDOPACOM, have already taken and are promulgating this conceptual approach, the concept of gender as a domain needs to be understood throughout all of the DoD’s echelons.
If gender is a dimension of competition, WPS tools then logically become a DoD strategic enabler — that is, a mechanism for more effective accomplishment of DoD activities and priorities. Accordingly, by considering the interrelated problems of strategic competition and tailored, integrated deterrence within a gender perspective, this brief underscores a number of ways that the DoD can leverage WPS as a strategic enabler to build advantages:
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WPS as a flanking maneuver. China and Russia have both ceded this space by ignoring WPS initiatives — that is, by not participating in decisionmaking processes to elevate women’s engagement in peace, political, and security discussions. As a result, this gives the United States, and the DoD specifically, opportunities to outflank Chinese and Russian activities in the Eurasian and Indo-Pacific theaters, if not globally.
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WPS as a mechanism to expand the competitive space. WPS represents unique opportunities to interact and engage with partner and allied nations in a theater that is entirely absent China’s participation. For instance, WPS opens pathways for enhanced dialogue between the United States and say, Japan, via Track 1.5 dialogues that have positive externalities that span beyond the WPS mission. To that end, WPS represents a key vector for shaping allied and partner perceptions that is presently underutilized.
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WPS as a mechanism for crisis assurance and communication on other non-WPS national security matters. Among democratic states, WPS creates positive spaces that are often viewed as not politically controversial. Accordingly, the United States ought to consider how WPS spaces might create vectors for communicating broader policy messages to key allies and partners in theater.
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WPS and gender as a strategic offset vis-à-vis Russia’s numerical superiority in a warfighting context. A recent CSIS report found that “European states are likely to face significant challenges conducting large-scale combat missions, particularly in such areas as heavy maneuver forces, naval combatants, and support capabilities such as logistics and fire support.” Much like during the Cold War, Russia has a vast supply of manpower that it is willing to expend on the front lines in Ukraine (and elsewhere). During the Cold War, that numerical advantage was offset by U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nuclear weapons. As it is unlikely that the United States will want to utilize nuclear weapons in a contemporary contingency unless absolutely necessary, U.S. allies and partners in the EUCOM area of responsibility (AOR) must be able to call upon their entire populations to resist and deter Russian aggression.
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WPS and gender as a tool for societal resilience vis-à-vis an expansionist Russia. As one strategy expert noted, “deterrence is ” In other words, the ability of a society to withstand attacks by aggressors is a key aspect of deterrence strategies, and it informs issues like continuity of governance and operations planning. As discovered during a research trip in August 2023, women’s groups in Ukraine were — and are — critical in building national-level societal cohesion and resistance to authoritarian aggression. Designing gender-informed strategic offsets and societal resilience strategies requires incorporating gender perspectives centrally into national security and societal resilience planning and preparedness operations, rather than as an afterthought.
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Gender treatment as a key strategic competition indicator or warning. Democratic backsliding in order to cater to authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia is almost always accompanied by gender-based harassment and the undermining of women’s rights. Given that almost all contemporary authoritarian regimes double down on these gender-based playbooks, it is worth exploring how the utilization of gender by U.S. allies, partners, and adversaries can inform indicators and warnings about regime trajectories.
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Women fighters as strategic assets. Much as women in Ukraine have been critical on the front lines in the war against Russia, Kurdish women’s units were fierce fighters against the Islamic State. Further, the reputational damage to misogynistic Islamic State fighters being forced to fight — and lose — to women made such women’s units strategic rather than tactical assets. This suggests the need to more meaningfully consider the utility of women and women’s units within combat formations to create military advantage.
It is worth underscoring that these concepts are primarily focused on women and the application of the WPS toolkit. However, given that many contemporary authoritarian regimes use a militaristic, misogynistic version of masculinity to consolidate and promulgate power, considerable further work should be done to understand how different masculinities and different genders might intersect with efforts to implement NDS objectives and tailor deterrent strategies.
Testing the Utility of WPS-Informed Approaches in DoD Scenarios through Tabletop Exercises
What might applying these concepts in practice look like? How might a WPS or gender-forward approach modify approaches to operations, activities, and investments (OAIs) in key theaters? And do practitioners agree with the premise that such WPS-informed approaches might generate strategic advantage for the United States? To discern answers to these questions, CSIS designed a series of tabletop exercises (TTXs) that allowed players to develop new OAIs associated with global competition against China and Russia. The following insights were gained through that activity.
First, according to player assessments, gender-linked OAIs produced greater advantages in long-term competition. As one participant noted, “if you have one country or society that is willing to mobilize 100 percent of its people and one that is only willing to mobilize 49 percent of its people, one’s got a big advantage over the other.” In the words of another player, “the quantity that our adversaries have when it comes to an actual contingency . . . given their numerical superiority, just the mass they can throw at these problems . . . ensuring that all of society and our allies and partners [are] able to mobilize, to resist and to deter, [to] defend all these things is going to be essential.”
Second, there was no meaningful difference between the treatments with respect to escalation risk. In other words, players believed that gender-informed competition mechanisms and OAIs constituted a net positive. Gender-informed competition, especially activities that linked civil society groups and showed that U.S. partners had a great capacity to mobilize diverse constituencies, supported integrated deterrence and campaigning.
During the TTX discussion, participants ultimately concluded that U.S. adversaries, particularly China, were likely to view any action as escalatory by virtue of the fact that Beijing is likely to be hostile to any form of increased U.S. activity. Escalation might therefore be better conceived as a given rather than something to be avoided. Further, one participant noted that the United States might do well to design activities that would force adversaries to respond. A number of participants maintained that a command post exercise that tested whole-of-society mobilization in the INDOPACOM AOR might be one useful way to do this while simultaneously building capacity.
The discussion of escalation led to contemplating whether supporting women’s groups might lead to authoritarian backlash. Women’s groups, and women individually, are often targets for repression and retaliation; in any number of instances when women rise in status under authoritarian regimes, conspiracy theories circulate that their power is a result of U.S. backing. In order to minimize such risk, efforts to engage women and women’s groups should be treated carefully and with the overall intention to do no harm.
Third, there was no major difference with respect to how players assessed long-term competitive effects and regional prioritization for OAIs between the two treatments. Both treatments saw groups prioritize preparing partners as the optimal long-term strategy in support of integrated deterrence and campaigning (48 percent in gender-linked OAI treatments, 45 percent in non-gender-linked treatments). Regionally, across the treatments players focused on activities in INDOPACOM (75 percent in gender-linked OAI treatments, 67 percent in non-gender-linked treatments). Last, there was a similar distribution with respect to complementary interagency activity. Across both treatments, players emphasized combining military competition with diplomacy and measures designed to inform and influence targeted populations.
The only meaningful difference between treatments was with respect to intelligence. In treatments with gender-linked OAIs, players appear to have assessed that working with civil society groups gave them increased situational awareness, as they less frequently selected intelligence activities. This is likely due to a sense that WPS-linked activities helped them better understand the operational environment.
In other words, what became apparent from the TTX is that planners assess that WPS has a key role to play in great power competition. This is because WPS can help mobilize diverse constituencies in partner states (capacity) and increase the ability of the United States to counter malign actions in the gray zone (capability) — especially since the United States is often blind to adversary operations designed to hijack civil society. WPS represents a way to more effectively counter authoritarian strategies to compete with, if not undermine, U.S. positioning and leadership.
Applying the Insights: The European and Pacific Deterrence Initiatives
The European Deterrence Initiative (EDI) and the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) are flagship programs designed to better organize DoD programs and capabilities intended to communicate U.S. and partner red lines to Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Because they are also theater-specific programs with dedicated congressional authorization, oversight, and funding levels, they provide key insights into how the DoD implements its deterrence strategies over multiple fiscal years. Critically, gender and WPS are rarely, if ever, referenced in discussions about EDI and PDI — which creates opportunities for usefully reconsidering how such approaches might inform OAIs for the EUCOM and INDOPACOM theaters. Combining insights from all the research conducted over the course of the study, some ideas for recalibrating PDI and EDI investments with a gender-informed approach emerge:
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Exercising. Within INDOPACOM, the DoD could increase the number of exercises with partner units that have a higher number of women entering their ranks — such as the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and Philippine forces during the annual Balikatan exercise — to show how to build partner capacity while signaling the expanding role of women in defense, something China will struggle to match.
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Increased presence. The DoD can use permanent and rotational forces to demonstrate to allies and partners in theater the power and utility of women in combat, as well as in combat support and combat service support Likewise, both Moscow and Beijing are utilizing regressive gender roles as mechanisms for consolidating state power. The United States might consider using its increased forward presence to demonstrate other more democratic and meritocratic gender roles that can undermine adversary morale and cohesion.
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Network-building. The DoD can work with women’s groups in countries like Papua New Guinea to build information-gathering mechanisms for monitoring Chinese economic coercion and infrastructure projects that are damaging to the region. Doing so might simultaneously empower women within local societies and create new mechanisms for countering China’s economic expansionism and elite capture strategies.
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Posture and military construction. As the United States adjusts its posture in the EUCOM and INDOPACOM theaters, choices of where and how bases and facilities are constructed will have effects on local Conducting a gender analysis, and understanding local gender dynamics, can help inform strategies for using military construction monies in a manner that will engender the greatest level of local support for U.S. presence.
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Enhanced prepositioning. A key aspect of EDI and PDI is the forward stationing of key equipment and materiel that could be utilized in a crisis or contingency. Host nation support — that is, the ability of a given country to support U.S. forces during peacetime and war — includes a nation’s ability to ensure that U.S. forces are able to land, access such equipment, and move in a crisis. Considering women and women’s networks more centrally in prepositioning and host nation support activities may build complementarity between EDI or PDI and building whole-of-society resistance and resilience strategies.
Conclusions and Recommendations
War is a centrally human endeavor; gender is a core aspect of individual identity and of the human experience. Omitting gender, and gender perspectives, from defense planning and operations creates enormous blind spots toward adversary weaknesses and opportunities with allies and partners. If the DoD is to build its deterrent strategies in a tailored manner, considering gender more centrally in its war and defense planning is essential. A number of recommendations flow from the above analysis:
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Additional resources. Many of the applications of WPS for tailored, integrated deterrence purposes as outlined above are conceptual rather than resource That said, the current funding levels for WPS activities — particularly those involving allies and partners — is unlikely to be sufficient for these purposes. It is outside the scope of this brief to develop a concrete budgetary recommendation; partnering with Congress, the DoD should establish a WPS/Strategic Competition pilot fund for actioning these activities that includes an assessment of the resources required to increase their scale.
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Leverage gender advisers. The DoD has established a cadre of gender advisers (GENADs) across its command structures. In addition to the WPS-related training, education, and partner support work these GENADs perform, components should bring them into key planning and other processes to ensure that their perspective and ideas can be integrated into operational and strategic approaches.
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A broader gender lens. While women and women’s issues are often the starting point for considerations of gender, at the end of the day “gender” also includes how men view Do men living under repressive authoritarian regimes in Russia, China, or Iran agree with the policies of gender apartheid — and the promotion of hollow, militaristic versions of “manliness”? How do women in these societies relate to men? What are men’s own aspirations and how do they realize them?
Taking the WPS agenda forward toward countering and deterring authoritarian regimes requires situating women within the broader societal context of which men are a part. Considering gender and WPS in this way is not to “weaponize” or “militarize” these toolkits. Rather, it is a way to acknowledge that women have been, and will be, decisive when it comes to countering authoritarian expansionism. Women are active, and at times critical, agents in both war and peace; smart strategy will better incorporate women — and all genders — more fully into the tailored deterrence strategies needed to prevent war from occurring. Many authoritarian adversaries are weaponizing gender against U.S. interests; it is past time for the U.S. government, and the DoD within it, to develop sufficiently gender-informed responses. Viewed in this light, applying a gender perspective to the problem of strategic competition is a necessary step toward accomplishing the UN-supported vision for Women, Peace, and Security.
Kathleen J. McInnis is a senior fellow and director of the Smart Women, Smart Power Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.
Benjamin Jensen is a senior fellow in the Futures Lab in the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
Audrey Aldisert is a research associate in the Defense and Security Department at CSIS.
Alexis Day is an associate director of the Smart Women, Smart Power Initiative at CSIS.