Fukuyama: Women and the Evolution of World Politics

Fukuyama, F., 1998. Women and the Evolution of World Politics. Foreign Affairs, 77(5), 24-40.

“In other words, female chimps have relationships; male chimps practice realpolitik” (25).

While earlier civilizations were clearly distinct from our modern civilization, they were still brutally violent. Much of this violence was the act of males. While there are examples of female leadership, the core of aggression comes from men. “The line from chimp to modern man is continuous” (27).

As the world becomes more equally distributed vis-à-vis power and gender, there will be a move towards more passive, less aggressive policy. Also, there is a move to make men more feminine and less aggressive, but the author believes that this will run into limits as biological drivers will be impossible to fully surmount. Also, while feminists believe that aggression and war stem from patriarchical societies, the author contends that their origin is fully biological.

The historic turn to explain social events has been constructivist. Things are determined by context, social roles and norms. This leads to relativism, in our author’s view. Alternative drivers are becoming more important, such as biology. Our author claims that this does not lead necessarily to biological determinism, as there is a great variety in the ways in which biological differences are actually filtered by culture and context. For example, for him, racial differences are not taken into consideration because race is a recent evolutionary phenomenon. Sex, however, is different and is the defining characteristic of a species.

“The core of the feminist agenda for international politics seems fundamentally correct: the violent and aggressive tendencies of men have to be controlled, not simply by redirecting them to external aggression, but by constraining those impulses through a web of norms, laws, agreements, contracts, and the like” (34).

“In anything but a totally feminized world, feminized policies could be a liability"