order for aggressors to feel superior and righteous in their actions. At the same time, both offenders and defenders need to justify their actions by waging war in the name of those who cannot fight and thus are in need of and worthy of protection(typically, a nation's or group's"own women and children"). Such rationales for war are disturbed by the realities that"women and children" are now rarely protected from direct violence in most contemporary wars and that the structural violence of hom ness, hunger, disease, and so on visited by war, particularly in the global South, and war spending affects especially civilian populations the world over These inconvenient truths also redirect attention to the most historically frequent reasons for war and conquest-namely, the colonizing practices of the extraction of wealth and resources through the brutalization of populations in order to destroy communities and thus the will to resist such extraction. But the power of gender covers up this inconvenient