This is not to say that women and men will fight each other across armed barricades. The conflict will take a subtler form, and the main battlefield will be hearts and minds. But make no mistake: The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent.
Reihan Salam is a fellow at the New America Foundation. This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy.
A man looks at a list of employers at the 2009 CUNY Big Apple Job Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York city on March 20, 2009.
Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite during an interview in Vilnius on July 13, 2009. Debt-ridden Lithuania elected Grybauskaite, a black belt in karate, by a landslide in may of 2009 after a year of worsening financial conditions, rising unemployment, and violent ant-government protests.
Iceland’s Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir answers questions at a news conference with foreign news media in Reykjavik on April 25, 2009. When iceland’s economy imploded in 2008, voters threw out the all-male elite and elcted sigurdardottir, the world’s first openly lesbian leader.
