Feminist International Relations Scholars Research Articles

The Forgotten Lives: Connecting Gender, Security, and Everyday Livelihoods in Ukraine's Conflict

Recent debates within Women, Peace and Security (WPS) scholarship (e.g., Bergeron, Cohn, and Duncanson 2017; Elias 2015; True 2015) have underlined the need to position the WPS agenda in the context of broader feminist security analysis as defined by early feminist international relations scholars (e.g., Tickner 1992). More precisely, this requires integrating feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist political economy (FPE). At the center of these largely theoretical reflections is a concern that gender-responsive peace-building efforts have too often been undermined by postwar neoliberal economic processes. This essay provides an empirical contribution to this debate, taking the case study of Ukraine as an atypical example of how WPS has been adopted and implemented for the first time during an active conflict. The integration of FPE and FSS proves especially relevant for a country in conflict, where economic austerity policies come along with increased military expenditure. The essay illustrates that the bridging of security and economy is entirely absent in Ukraine's WPS agenda, which has largely prioritized military security while failing to connect it to the austerity policies and the gendered structural inequalities deepened by the ongoing conflict.

Grappling with Dr. Strangelove’s “Wargasm” Fantasy

AbstractDr. Strangelove continues to be viewed as one of the most acclaimed films of all-time. Likewise, international relations (IR) experts commonly list the film among the most essential IR-themed movies. The IR scholars who discuss Dr. Strangelove as a text or recommend it for courses generally claim that it can be used to explain nuclear deterrence, the security dilemma, mutually assured destruction, Cold War competition, and various other traditional serious concerns of the field. They also recognize that the satirical film is critical of nuclear strategy. This article considers Dr. Strangelove’s sexual subtext, involving important metaphors and symbols that IR scholars characteristically ignore. Yet, for decades, film critics and scholars from other disciplines have identified and emphasized the importance of the film's comedic “sexual framework” and concluding “wargasm.” Director Stanley Kubrick even acknowledged these key elements in private correspondence. The film suggests that the national security establishment's masculine view of the utility of nuclear weapons and deterrence are comparable to absurd male sexual fantasies. Feminist IR scholars frequently note that mainstream scholars largely ignore their critique of masculine views of the discipline and nuclear strategy. The article concludes that scholars in the field should both prioritize Dr. Strangelove’s sexual subtext and rely upon feminist contributions to help understand those elements.

Feminist Experiences of ‘Studying Up’: Encounters with International Institutions

This article makes the case for feminist IR to build knowledge of international institutions. It emerges from a roundtable titled ‘Challenges and Opportunities for Feminist IR: Researching Gendered Institutions’ which took place at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in Baltimore in 2017. Here, we engage in self-reflexivity, drawing on our conversation to consider what it means for feminist scholars to ‘study up’. We argue that feminist IR conceptions of narratives and the everyday make a valuable contribution to feminist institutionalist understandings of the formal and informal. We also draw attention to the value of postcolonial approaches and multi-site analyses of international institutions for creating a counter-narrative to hegemonic accounts emerging from both the institutions themselves, and scholars studying them without a critical feminist perspective. In so doing, we draw attention to the salience of considering not just what we study as feminist International Relations scholars but how we study it.

“There are no women here”. Gender Discourses in United Nations’ Peace Operations

International Relations (IR) discipline is no longer only a man’s world. For decades, feminist IR scholars have managed to challenge the gender-blind and male-dominated discourses of security, power and conflict. However, and outside this academic bubble, in international politics more broadly, and with the United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security specifically, “gender” in relation to peace and security is often interpreted in narrow perspectives. The article discuss some of the feminist IR contribution to the Women, peace and security agenda and offers an empirical take on gender discourses that exists within a peace operation context based on multiple fieldwork studies on peacekeepers and national staff working for the UN operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, MONUSCO. The author finds that gender is interpreted as a separate, women-only topic and outside the core mandated activity of state restoration and militarized protection and security. The interpretation of gender as women leads to the distorted assumption that it is irrelevant to men as “there are no women here”, as one peacekeeper put it. This gender essentialism is also reinforced by gender experts themselves in order to gain political leverage. I argue that framing women on the one hand in need for protection (victimhood) and as potential peacemakers is a sellable narrative to a masculinized Security Council as well as ‘robust’ UN peace operations.

An Introduction to Feminist Security Studies

International Security and Gender. By Nicole Detraz. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. 255 pp., $22.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-745-65117-0). Nicole Detraz provides an impressive and accessible introduction to the vibrant and wide-ranging body of International Relations (IR) research now commonly referred to as “feminist security studies” (Sjoberg 2010; Wibben 2011). Addressing itself primarily to advanced undergraduates and graduate students, International Security and Gender adroitly guides the reader through feminist analyses of militarization and militarism, peacekeeping and peacebuilding, terrorism, human security, and environmental security. Surveying foundational texts, recent contributions, and emerging research areas, Detraz presents a strong case for the adoption of “gender lenses” to facilitate much-needed reevaluations of the assumptions that undergird security scholarship. Although issues related to the subordination of women are central to this work, Detraz specifies that her subject is not “women and security,” much less “women in need of security,” but rather “gendered understandings of security” (p. 12). This distinction—pithily captured in the title of Terrell Carver's 1996 book Gender Is Not a Synonym for Women— reflects the work's explicitly feminist theoretical orientation. That is, by defining gender as “a set of socially constructed expectations about what men and women ought to be” (p. 5), Detraz distinguishes her project from nonfeminist security-studies research that treats gender as an unproblematic and dichotomous variable—the “add gender and stir” approach previously criticized by feminist IR scholars (Peterson 1992; Carver 2003; Sjoberg 2006). She rejects, in other words, efforts that merely “bring women into an analysis, which can isolate …

Gendering Universalisms in International History

Gendered critiques by historians and feminist international relations scholars have been animating international history for a good thirty years by complicating the supposedly binary relationships between states and societies, private and public, and local and international that traditionally structured the discipline. In this essay we would like to ask what a sensitivity to gender might add to international histories that are shifting their focus away from intergovernmental relations towards a reassessment of internationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through studies of transnational social movements, international organizations and norms, or practices of global governance. We are especially interested in how gender might contribute to a major emerging theme of international history today: the history of internationalism and international organizations as a struggle between competing or converging universalisms – ‘imperial and anticolonial, “Eastern” and “Western”, old and new’ – that sought to speak in the name of all humanity, rather than as the triumph of an international order imposed by the “West” on the rest.

Gendered War and Gendered Peace: Truth Commissions and Postconflict Gender Violence: Lessons From South Africa

That war is profoundly gendered has long been recognized by feminist international relations scholars. What is less recognized is that the postwar period is equally gendered. Currently undertheorized is how truth-seeking exercises in the aftermath of conflict should respond to this fact. What happens to women victims of war violence? The difficulties of foregrounding gendered wartime violence in truth telling are illustrated by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The article explores some consequences of the failure to uncover gendered truth, including its impact on the government's reparations policy, and continued "peacetime" violence perpetrated against women in South Africa.