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A response to an article in the same journal issue, "Gender, the State, and War Redux: Feminist International Relations across the 'Levels of Analysis'," by Laura Sjoberg, which commented on the author's recent article, 'Women, the Staet, and War'.

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework "for interpreting recorded human history." The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

The secularization hypothesis has failed, and failed spectacularly. We must find a new paradigm to help us understand the complexities of the relationship between religion and democracy.

Does `gender' as a category of analysis or as a central feature of a logic of explanation alter in significant ways Kenneth Waltz's famous `levels of analysis' as developed in his classic, Man, the State, and War? One overriding claim of feminist international relations has been that `gender' alters all levels of analysis; thus, changing `man' to `woman' in the formulation `man, the state, and war' significantly transforms our understanding of international relations. I evaluate this claim critically by assessing the adequacy of feminist formulations on each of Waltz's levels of analysis and, further, by unpacking Waltz's own understanding of these levels. I conclude that Waltz remains enormously helpful in deconstructing reductionist accounts, especially on the `first level' of analysis, but that his own account is problematic insofar as it insists on a `structural analysis' sundered from his levels 1 and 2, namely, wars flow from human nature or, alternatively, from the domestic ordering of states. I point out that Waltz himself leaves some `wiggle room' in his book that permits one to `plug in' features of the first two levels of analysis that are critical to understanding the structural level. In other words, all three levels must be in play if one is to craft a compelling explanatory framework.

Elshtain argues that the realist—idealist divide serves no useful heuristic or even polemical purpose. Beginning with Tom Stoppard's acclaimed trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, Elshtain unpacks utopian arguments of recent vintage, showing their distinctive features. She goes on to display the utopistic/idealist `moments' in the work of self-described `realist' E. H. Carr as part of a critical re-examination of Carr's work. The article continues with an appreciative assessment of Martin Wight, concluding that his `idealism' is far more `realistic' than are the arguments of many `realists'. The article's concluding section makes the case for Augustinian realism.

The author examines and criticizes some of the key arguments from Security First, with a focus on issues related to Etzioni's discussion of "Illiberal Moderates." Etzioni's analysis of Christianity and Islam are found to be problematic. By looking at the just war traditions in both religions, the author finds very different models rather than the parallel ones suggested by Etzioni.