This collection of articles basically originates in Durban, South Africa. In late July 2006, the International Sociological Association (ISA) held its World Congress of Sociology in the beautiful landscape of Southern Africa. As usual on these occasions, the ISA's Research Committee: Armed Forces& Conflict Resolution (RC 01) organized several sessions dealing with issues of military sociology, the sociology of war and conflict resolution. One of these sessions looked at Women in the Military: National and International Per­ spectives and was chaired by Helena Carreiras from Portugal and Leena Parmar from India. As this session turned out to be very interesting and substantial, we, the editors deemed it worthwhile to make these papers available to a larger audi­ ence and thus contribute to the ongoing debate about war, the armed forces and the role of women in both war, violent conflict and the military. This an­ thology, then, contains the revised and updated versions of the papers that have been presented in Durban plus one or the other article that has been written specifically for the purposes of this book.

Dr. Gerhard Kümmel is Senior Researcher at the Bundeswehr Institute of Social Research (SOWI).
Dr. Helena Carreiras is Assistant Professor at ISCTE of Lisbon University.

Women in Combat: Reconsidering the Case Against the Deployment of Women in Combat-Support and Combat Units.- Off Limits: The Cults of the Body and Social Homogeneity as Discoursive Weapons Targeting Gender Integration in the Military.- Unsung Heroes: Womens Contributions in the Military and Why Their Song Goes Unsung.- About Intervening in Vulnerable Societies: Gender in Military Peacekeeping of the Bundeswehr.- Women in the Netherlands Armed Forces.- Defying the Prohibited Arena: Women in the UAE Military.- From Loyalty to Dissent: How Military Women Respond to Integration Dilemmas.- Chivalry in the Military.- The Militarization of Gender and Sexuality in the Iraq War.- Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones.