The engagement between the discipline of international relations (IR) and feminist theory has led to an explosion of concerns about the inherent gendered dimension of a supposedly gender-blind field, and has given rise to a rich and complex array of analyses that attempt to capture the varied aspects of women’s invisibility, marginalization, and objectification within the discipline. The first feminist engagements within IR have pointed not only to the manner in which women are rendered invisible within the field, but also to IR’s inherent masculinity, which masks itself as a neutral and universally valid mode of investigation of world politics. Thus, the initial feminist incursions into IR’s discourse took the form of a conscious attempt both to bridge the gap between IR and feminist theory and to bring gender into IR, or, in other words, to make the field aware that “women are relevant to policy.” In the 1990s, feminist literature undertook incisive analyses of women’s objectification and commodification within the global economy. By the end of the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, the focus turned to an accounting for the agency of diverse women as they are located within complex sociopolitical contexts. The core concern of this inquiry lay with the diversification of feminist methodologies, especially as it related to the experience of women in non-Western societies.
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Women as Objects and Commodities
Alina Sajed
Article
Peacekeeping Economies
Kathleen M. Jennings
“Peacekeeping economy” designates the political economy of a peacekeeping operation. It broadly encompasses economic activity that either would not occur, or would occur at a much lower scale and pay rate, without the international peacekeeping (or peacebuilding) presence. Peacekeeping economies are, to a significant degree, inextricable from peacekeeping missions: While they are not under the purview or direct control of the mission, the formal and informal economic activity that they include is important to peacekeeping missions’ ability to function in the host society. Of course, behind this simple formulation is a significantly more complex phenomenon. Moreover, the peacekeeping economy is not just an interesting empirical reality. It is also a useful analytical framework for examining and better understanding how peacekeeping is designed, regulated, and done; its socioeconomic, gendered, and racialized dimensions; and its (intended and unintended) consequences.
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Gender in the Classroom
Kathleen Staudt
Although the study of women and gender flourished at intersection of comparative politics (CP) and international relations (IR), mostly international political economy (IPE) and Development Studies, much of IR itself was resistant at its core. Explicitly feminist analysis challenged the core with several decades of research that instructors can incorporate into their classes. The incorporation/transformation challenge can be daunting, however, as publication outlets for research on women, gender, and feminism often remained separate from mainstream journals, with some promising exceptions. These separate tracks are now changing, but instructors still need to check multiple places to prepare for courses and identify good assignments. And although IR feminists seek interaction with the IR core, the core IR theorists are wedded to frameworks associated with realism, liberalism, Marxism, and others, or to positivist, quantitative methodologies that may rely on flawed and male-centric databases rather than grounded field research. A major challenge in the next 40 years involves growing the interactions among bordered subfields; analyzing the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nationality; and engaging with southern voices outside the US and Western-centric IR field. In this vein, the classroom is a major arena in which critical thinking, contestation, new research, and action agendas emerge.
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Women’s Participation in Violent Non-State Organizations
Meredith Loken and Hilary Matfess
Women are active participants in violent non-state actors/organizations (VNSAs). They engage in the front-line environment as armed fighters; participate off the front line as spies, recruiters, medics, and logisticians; and lead military units, hold political positions, and craft policy and outreach efforts. Women participate in VNSAs for a myriad of reasons and through a number of pathways: they join voluntarily as politicized recruits; are recruited through economic resources, potential for adventure, or other practical opportunities; may view VNSAs as a survival choice; or may be forcibly recruited. Women’s participation in VNSAs is significant both for the characteristics of political violence—as women often have unique discursive importance to organizational narratives and representations—and for conflict outcomes. VNSAs’ gender dynamics and the diverse experiences of women participants also shape post-conflict processes and durable peace efforts. The integration (or exclusion) of women from demobilization and reintegration programming, peace negotiations, and former-militant political parties affects the nature of the post-conflict political settlement.
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Teaching about Gender and Sexuality in the International Relations Classroom
Laura Sjoberg and Jon Whooley
Feminist pedagogy considers the scholarship on and practices of teaching gender and sexuality in global politics. Humans narrativize (tell stories about) their lives, creating stories about the world that they see in order to make sense of their complicated realities. As such, there are multiple story lines of the ways that a feminist curiosity can affect approaches to teaching, strategies for teaching feminist curiosity, the role that genders and sexualities play in constituting the international relations (IR) classroom, and approaches to teaching material related to genders and sexualities in global politics. There are six story lines that reveal the distinctive features of feminist pedagogy: foregrounding an explicitly feminist politics, treating knowledge as situated, reimagining the purpose and structure of the classroom, recognizing and combating alienation, broadening the view of texts available for teaching and learning, and including explicitly activist components in teaching strategies. Across these story lines, feminist teaching is an important part of feminist academic practice, where pedagogy with a feminist curiosity foregrounds the politics of feminisms and the politics of pedagogy.
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Militarization, Women, and Men: Gendered Militarizations
Erika Svedberg
Militarization is commonly thought of as a process that fundamentally changes society and all types of relations in it: the formal and institutional as well as the informal and the intimate. At its most extreme, militarization results in the disappearance of civil, civilianized space, leaving the civilians with no choice but to live in symbiosis with the military and its war-making. In a militarized society, women, men and children are typically affected differently.
Since the mid-1980s, there has been a steady flow of feminist literature specifically exploring questions on gender and militarization in various disciplines, including international relations (IR), as well as men and masculinity. To uncover the ways that militarization and gender are related, several different angles need to be employed. Indeed, contemporary feminist debates show that it is not ever clear what gender actually is, or how it should be best used in a consistent way in analyses of power relations. So how can gender be thought about? As a “freestanding” social construct or as embodied? Is the gender order of male dominance and female adjustment the actual machinery that drives militarization and war? When militarization is introduced, what happens to the gendered embodiments of men and women? How are men’s and women’s bodies marked in the processes of militarization? In other words, how does militarization work to organize and categorize the bodies differently? The process of gendered militarization is often discussed using the conceptual binary of protector–protected. In short, gender is the order that imprints the masculine as “Protector” and the feminine as “Protected,” which helps to make society more easily militarized.
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Gender and Governance
Annica Kronsell
Gender has been conceptualized in various ways in the mainstream governance literature and critical feminist work. The relationship between the concepts of gender and governance can be viewed as governance of gender and gender governance. The governance of gender is related to the way in which the values that permeate governance reflect traditional gender regimes. On the other hand, gender governance concerns governance in policy areas that, in the first instance, directly deal with women's issues. Gender governance is about the attempts to change gender regimes by inserting new policies, procedures, and values through global and multilevel governance, for example via the UN and the EU. In feminist studies that have focused on the state, the literature that is of particular interest to governance studies looks at the role of the state in gender relations. It studies, for example, the representation of women in electoral bodies and parties, theorizes representation in political bodies, and looks at the organization of welfare politics. In the field of international relations, feminist scholars are particularly interested in exploring the gender aspects of globalization and how the neoliberal order organizes women's lives. Governance has also been explored in relation to the EU and the term multilevel governance has become a standard concept in EU studies. The concept gender regime or gender order has been used by many researchers who study gender governance in the EU context.
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Genders, Spaces, Places
Lynne Phillips
The concepts of gender, space, and place have significant social and political implications for the kind of world that people inhabit and the kinds of lives we can lead. That there has been a transformation in thinking about these concepts is indicated in references today to pluralized (and polymorphic) spaces, to the waxing, and waning of distinctions between space and place, and to the idea that gender, space, and place are something produced rather than simply lived in, or ventured into. These subtle shifts hint at a complex history of ideas about what constitutes gender, space, and/or place and how we might understand the connections and disjunctures between and among them. The theoretical roots of space act as the starting point for discussion, since these have a longer historical record than work which also explicitly includes gender. Western conceptions of space have drawn primarily from early Greek philosophers and mathematicians, and these conceptions indicate an early distinction between a philosophy of space and a pre-scientific notion of space. From here, the development of feminist methods has become essential for revealing how spatial thinking informs ideas about gender. These methods include deconstructing canons, asking the profoundly spatial question of “Where are the women?” and “ungendering” space. These methodological strategies reveal the extent to which the central concerns of feminism today have spatial and place-based dimensions.
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Conflict Analysis and Resolution: Development of the Field
Joyce Neu and Louis Kriesberg
The field of conflict analysis and resolution (CAR) is primarily defined as ideas about and applications of ways in which conflicts can be addressed constructively. The boundaries of the field cannot be sharply drawn. There are scholars, practitioners, and outside analysts who sometimes apply conflict resolution ideas and methods but who do not self-identify as belonging to the field. They do, nevertheless, contribute to the field. The field also refers to people designated or self-identified as conflict analysis and resolution scholars and/or practitioners. This article focuses on the development of the CAR field as an interdisciplinary social science endeavor within the broad international relations domain. The major periods covered include (1) development of the field and its preliminary beginnings from 1914 to 1945; (2) emergence of CAR as a field between 1946 and 1969; (3) expansion and institutionalization from 1970–1989; (4) diffusion and differentiation from 1990–2008; and, (5) advances and challenges 2009 through 2017.
From 1914 to 1945, as a result of World War I, there was a rise in pacifism. The creation of the United Nations in 1945 following World War II was intended as a means to prevent war and maintain peace. CAR research focused on analyzing the causes of violent conflicts. Researchers drew on psychoanalytic tools to examine, for example, attributes of leaders and social movements.
From 1946 to 1969, as a result of the Cold War and national liberation struggles, the world experienced an increase in the number of conflicts. Governmental organizations worked to avert a possible nuclear war and to limit conflict escalation through the United Nations and by the creation of forerunners to the European Union. In the nongovernmental sector, high-level unofficial meetings began taking place to build peace and reduce tensions. CAR research grew and included the use of game theory and rational models.
The period of expansion and institutionalization (1970–1989) saw the growth of alternative dispute resolution that positively affected the creation of new CAR institutions. Nongovernmental CAR organizations grew in number and effectiveness offering dialogue and problem-solving workshops to disputing parties. Research focused on nonviolent means of resolving conflicts as well as how conflicts can be waged constructively.
From 1990 to 2008, the field witnessed a period of diffusion and differentiation. The end of the Cold War gave way to a period with fewer armed conflicts. Nongovernmental organizations and university programs in CAR increased. Intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and the African Union began to focus on professionalizing their mediation and peacemaking efforts.
The period from 2009 through 2017 saw the field continue to grow. New challenges included the quashing of nonviolent resistance movements in the Middle East and North Africa, the impacts of climate change, the rise in terrorism, and the widespread use of technology for both positive and negative impacts on peace. This period saw a dramatic increase in the application of CAR research and experience in governmental and intergovernmental organizations’ work.
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Women as Agents of Violence
Caron E. Gentry
The public/private divide assumes that men are the (public sphere) actors gendered toward the possibility of violent action, specifically as soldiers, combatants, guerrillas, or revolutionaries, whereas “proper” women within the private sphere are gendered to be non-violent or peaceful actors. Women who engage in the political sphere are condemned for deviating from the private, and more so when they are involved in violence. Indeed, women who operate as agents of political violence are accused of transgressing both gender norms and the normative conceptualization of a state’s monopoly on violence. Feminists have challenged the veracity of this public/private circumscription through their evaluation of women as agents of political violence. Earlier feminist work dehumanizes politically violent women, making their violence more damaging and mental health more damaged than men who commit the same violence. Feminists later moved away from this dehumanization and instead portrayed women as helpmates to the politically violent organization and its male members. Some or most mainstream approaches refer to women involved in sub-state political violence as “terrorists,” and women terrorists are socially constructed as doubly illegitimate actors. Instead of focusing on what must be wrong with the women who engage in political violence, research should identify the reasons behind their actions, such as perceived injustices against them, their community, and/or political and civil rights.
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Women, Gender, and Contemporary Armed Conflict
Megan MacKenzie
More than twenty years ago, feminist scholars began challenging conventional approaches to the study of war that they accused of being gender blind and excluding women’s involvement and experience of conflict. This feminist critique was articulated by Cynthia Enloe in her question “Where are the women?” in reference to the study of conflicts. Since then, numerous scholars have produced works that not only include women in existing accounts of war but also offer radical alternative approaches to the study of war. This body of feminist scholarship has sought to deconstruct and challenge three foundations of mainstream scholarship on armed conflict: equating gender with women or women’s issues; conflating women and children together as victims of war; and narrowly defining war as a masculine, public activity with a clear time frame. Feminist scholars such as Judith Butler theorized the concepts of gender and sex in order to complicate feminism beyond “women’s studies.” Despite these inroads into the way conflict is conceptualized and researched, mainstream approaches to the study of war in the past decade remain resistant to systematic and comprehensive considerations of gender. Recent scholarship presents a broader picture of women’s relationship to international conflicts. Feminist scholars demonstrate women’s multiple roles within, and impacts on, war; disrupt stereotypes and gendered norms associated with “women’s place” during war; and highlight some of the many different ways that women—as soldiers, rebels, and as perpetrators of violence—perform in, and influence war.
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Gender, Mobility, and Displacement: From the Shadows to Questioning Binaries
Deniz Sert and Fulya Felicity Turkmen
The evolution of the construction of gender in migration studies can be appraised under several distinct headings. In the beginning, women were simply “in the shadows” with no recognition of them as potential or actual migrants. Eventually, the field moved to an “add women, mix, and stir” approach, which saw women recognized in migration studies and statistics for the first time. Here, gender was no more than a demographic category to ensure women were counted alongside men in migration flows. However, deconstructing the feminization of migration required that gender be understood as integral to the experience of migration, thus demanding more refined theoretical and analytical tools. Subsequently, migration intersected with masculinity studies, which showed the reciprocal relation where masculinity can be decisive in migratory decision making, and in return, mobility can be an essential factor in how men think about masculinity. More recently, gender in migration studies has moved beyond binary gender roles. Research on the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) refugees and asylum seekers demonstrates the importance of the relationship between sexual orientation, gender identity, and identity construction in navigating migration journeys beyond the male-female binary. This raises the question of how salient this development is for international studies. While the disciplines of political science and international relations were rather late to the study of international migration, migrants and refugees have become issues of high politics in the early 21st century. Thus, there is a need to revisit and revise how different disciplines intersect in the interest of more effective policymaking based on better data.
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UN, Gender, and Women
Soumita Basu
After the end of World War II, women’s rights advocates at the United Nations vigorously campaigned for equality between the sexes. At the UN Charter Conference held in San Francisco in 1945, women delegates fought for the recognition of sex-based discrimination as a violation of human rights in Article 1 of the Charter. At the UN, issues relating to women were primarily placed under the purview of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), established in June 1946 with the mandate to “prepare recommendations and report to the Economic and Social Council on promoting women’s rights in political, economic, civil, social and educational fields.” Three main perspectives underpin feminist International Relations (IR) literature on the UN, gender and women: promoting women’s participation and inclusion of women’s issues at the UN; gender critique of the UN, geared towards institutional transformation; and challenging the universality of the UN. Despite some fundamental differences between these three strands of thinking, their political significance is widely acknowledged in the literature. The co-existence of these contentious viewpoints resonates with the vibrant feminist politics at the UN, and offers a fruitful avenue for envisioning a better intergovernmental organization. This is particularly relevant in light of feminist scholars’ engagement with activism and policymaking at the UN from the very beginning. Nevertheless, there are issues that deserve further consideration, such as the workings of the UN, as reflected in its unique diplomatic characteristics and bureaucratic practices.
Article
Democracy, Democratization, and Gender
Georgina Waylen
Democracies and the processes surrounding recent transitions to democracy are gendered in a variety of ways. Recently, feminist scholars have questioned the exclusionary ways in which democracy is both theorized and operationalized and how these have resulted in women and men being incorporated into democratic polities. They have demonstrated how processes of democratization, particularly the third wave of democratization that has taken place over the last three decades, are gendered. They have also shown that women’s movements were key actors in the broad opposition coalitions against many nondemocratic regimes. In order both to understand the differing role of organized women in the subsequent transitions to democracy and the ways in which transition paths affect gender outcomes, feminist scholars have begun to focus on the complex and sometimes contradictory interaction of four variables: the transition; women activists; political parties and politicians involved in the transition; and the institutional legacy of the nondemocratic regime. Two main areas that have been explored in relation to the political outcomes of transitions to democracy are women’s participation in competitive electoral politics and major changes in gender policy. In order to expand one important emerging area of research that is looking at how attempts to establish democracy in post-conflict settings are gendered, feminist scholars with expertise in third wave transitions to democracy need to analyze not only women’s roles in post-conflict institution building but also the ways that the outcomes have gendered implications more systematically.
Article
Gender, Women, and Representation in State Politics
Mona Lena Krook and Sarah Childs
The main contribution of research on women, gender, and state-level politics has been the introduction of the concept of gender and an expansion of traditional definitions of politics. These studies have continued to expand over the years, opening up some major areas of research as well as introducing challenges to feminist research on women, gender, and state-level politics. Social movements are among the key topics of recent studies. This is due to the fact that women have been largely excluded from other arenas of political participation. Work on political parties links to another major area of study. Although wide-ranging, it can be separated into research on electing versus being elected. Furthermore, women’s voting behavior and the election of female candidates are often treated as important questions in themselves. Another line of work, however, seeks to go beyond political priorities and presence to examine concrete policy outcomes. This research can be divided into three sets of questions: the behavior of female policy actors, the gendered nature of public policies, and the creation and evolution of gender equality policies. A fifth major literature points to the relationship between women, gender, and the state. The state is a central actor and topic in political science. Focusing on state-society interactions, feminists have been interested in understanding how states influence gender relations and, conversely, how gendered norms and practices shape state policies.
Article
Critical Scholarship on Terrorism
Priya Dixit
Understandings of “critical” in critical scholarship on terrorism range from a Frankfurt School–influenced definition to a broader definition that aims to interrogate commonsense understandings of terrorism and counterterrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism draws on multiple disciplines and methodological traditions to analyze terrorism and counterterrorism. Within these, there have been ongoing debates and discussions about whether the state should be included in research on terrorism and, if so, what the inclusion of the state would do for the understanding of terrorism. Critical scholarship has also outlined the need for further attention to research ethics, as well as urged researchers to acknowledge their standpoints when conducting and communicating research. Some, but not all, critical scholarship has a normative orientation with the goal of emancipation, though the meaning of emancipation remains debated. Methodologically, the majority of critical scholarship on terrorism utilizes an interpretive lens to analyze terrorism and related issues. A central goal of critical terrorism research is to rework power relations such that Global South subjectivities are centered on research. This means including research conducted by Global South scholars and also centering Global South peoples and concerns in analyses of terrorism and counterterrorism. The role of gender, analytically and in practice, in relation to terrorism is also a key part of critical scholarship. Critical scholars of terrorism have observed that race is absent from much of terrorism scholarship, and there needs to be ongoing work toward addressing this imbalance. Media and popular culture, and their depiction of terrorism and counterterrorism, form another key strand in critical scholarship on terrorism. Overall, critical scholarship on terrorism is about scrutinizing and dismantling power structures that sustain commonsense knowledge regarding terrorism.
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Genealogies of Intersectionality in International Relations
Celeste Montoya and Kimberly Killen
The term intersectionality was introduced in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a U.S. legal scholar critiquing single-axis approaches (i.e., race only or gender only) to oppression that often obscure those residing at the intersection of multiple marginalities and preclude them from justice. Since then, intersectionality has become a burgeoning field of study aimed at exploring and addressing the complexity of multiple and intersecting dimensions of power and oppression. While scholars across a range of disciplines have engaged intersectionality and incorporated intersectional analysis into their work, its explicit application and study in international relations (IR) has been somewhat limited. While intersectionality, named as such, may be less common in IR, postcolonial, Third World, transnational, Islamic, and queer feminist scholars and activists have long sought to complicate traditional understandings of power. Identifying and tracing the genealogical strands of their intersectional thinking and interventions help demonstrate the relevance and potential of intersectionality for the study of IR.
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Gender and Populism in International Studies
Paula Drumond and Paula Sandrin
The rise of populist leaders both in the Global North and in the Global South in the early 21st century has moved critical research on populism to the center of academic debates in international studies. More recently, the current mobilization of antigender rhetoric and the backlash against women’s and LGBTIQ+ rights observed in many countries across the globe made evident that gender is anything but subsidiary to push forward theorizations on populism. What was once a marginal and undernoticed subject is currently at the heart of contemporary populism research. Consequently, an expanding body of literature has arisen since the mid-2010s, delving into the intricate interplay between gender and populism, encompassing diverse analyses and theoretical perspectives. At first, the multifaceted nature of how gender unfolded within various instances of populist politics led researchers to conclude that gender held a secondary importance to the phenomenon. As result, early researchers treated gender mostly as a variable or an add-on analytical component, failing to pay attention to its constitutive and productive roles in populist dynamics. In contrast, a more recent body of research maintains that populism is always already gendered, at least in its current right-wing manifestation, in the Global North and Global South and conceptualizes gender as a pivotal and potent connector of seemingly disparate issues such as race, ethnicity, religion, class, and political economy. Recognizing this intricate connection allows a more holistic understanding of the phenomenon, embracing its complex facets across diverse contexts and illuminating the profound interplay among gender, power, and politics.
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Women and Academic Organizations in International Studies
Karen Erickson and Elisabeth Prügl
Academic organizations introduce gender, race, nationality, and other signifiers of power into the field of international studies. Research on the status of women in the international studies profession has typically focused on the distributions of women and men according to academic rank, salaries, and employment. A number of detailed case studies have explored practices in particular academic departments and universities in order to elucidate the mechanisms in place that help to reproduce gender inequality. We can gauge the progress that women have made with regard to their status and role in academic organizations over the years by looking at the International Studies Association (ISA). The ISA presents a mixed picture of international studies as a field of gendered power. While women have entered leadership positions in the association, they have done so mostly at lower levels, while men continue to dominate the positions at the top, the ISA president and executive director. Women have made some advances into editorial positions, but gatekeeping in the scholarly journals published under the auspices of the ISA remains largely a male preserve. Furthermore, women and men in the ISA reproduce gender difference and inequality by re-enacting gender divisions of labor while participating in an economy that circulates symbolic capital. An important consideration for future research is the assumption that international studies is a field of complex gendered power that cannot be easily explained by purely singular tools of analysis.
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Feminist Security Theorizing
Laura Sjoberg
Feminist Security Theorizing is in many ways what it sounds like—thinking about security in the global political arena through gender lenses. Since early work in feminist International Relations (IR), feminists have been exploring research questions about the ways that gender shapes and is shaped by war, conflict, and militarism. The field has developed to be labeled Feminist Security Studies (FSS). Debates about whether FSS is “feminist security” studies or feminist “security studies” have asked about the subfield’s focus—whether it is toward rethinking security in feminist ways or toward the mainstream field of security studies as such. With space in the field for both approaches, feminist security theorizing has looked at revealing the importance of gender in conceptualizing security, demonstrating that gender is key to understanding causes and predicting outcomes, and showing gender as a key part of solving security problems. FSS has several common theoretical commitments and concerns. These include a necessary commitment to intersectionality, a recognition of the importance of theorizing not only about gender but also about sexuality, a consciousness about framing, and an awareness of the politics of sociology of the academic disciplines in which it is situated. It is important to explore the past, present, and potential futures of feminist theorizing about security, concluding with an invitation to expand recognition of feminist work addressing security issues across an even wider variety of perspectives.
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