Upcoming Event: The First Political Order: Sex, Governance, and National Security

Valerie M. Hudson is Professor and George H. W. Bush Chair in the Department of International Affairs at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where she directs the department’s Program on Women, Peace, and Security. Her research has been funded by the Minerva Initiative of the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, among others, and she has been named a distinguished scholar of foreign policy analysis by the International Studies Association. Hudson is a founder of The WomanStats Project, which hosts the largest database on the status of women in the world today. Her books include Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Sex and World Peace, and The Hillary Doctrine (both Columbia University Press).

In this annual lecture Professor Hudson will present a lecture on  “The First Political Order: Sex, Governance, and National Security”. The first political order is the sexual political order. How the character of male-female relations develops within a society has profound effects on nation-state level phenomena, including food security, health, economic prosperity, demography, governance, and intra- and inter-state conflict. Mixed-methods research, including large-N statistical analysis, shows a deep divide in behavior and outcomes between societies encoding an inequitable sexual order versus societies encoding a more equitable order. The clash of civilizations is not best understood in Huntington’s terms, but rather in terms of a clash between two divergent sexual political orders.