Feminist International Relations Scholarship Research Articles

Recentering the human in the continuums of in/mobility and in/security: Perceptions from two emblematic borders

This paper argues for a need to decenter the state and (re)center the human when exploring mobilities within international relations scholarship. To make this argument we bring together feminist and critical security studies, as well as multidisciplinary insights, to address the encounter between the person on the move and the enforcement of national sovereignty. This allows us to highlight the continuums of in/security and im/mobility entwined in this encounter. In so doing, we challenge the discipline’s understanding of security that is often conceptualized from the perspective of state security only, despite critiques of such understandings that emanate from and build on different critical approaches. Furthermore, feminist international relations scholarship and feminist security studies in particular have stressed the necessity to examine security and violence as continuums that traverse across sites ranging from the corporeal and intimate to the global and transnational, and which span over time. Combined with mobility studies that focus on migrant trajectories across countries, regions, and continents with periods of chosen or unwanted immobility in between, this body of scholarship helps us understand how border enforcement impacts diversely positioned persons’ lives. Such an exercise is also useful for making visible the intended and unintended consequences of policymaking that is based on state interests only, and one that refuses to acknowledge the human beings who are caught up in these consequences. Methodologically, the paper draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted at the Mexican side of the Mexico-US border and in Morocco. We have brought together insights from our respective research projects to address border externalization and its impact in two different parts of the world, enacted by two different states (the US) and supranational entities (the EU) on their neighbors to the South, likely to be economically and politically less powerful but supposedly similarly sovereign states. The paper is organized as follows: we begin the first section by discussing the key notion of state sovereignty which is enacted at the border and demonstrate how borders of certain states extend far beyond their demarcated territories. This process, conceptualized as externalization of migration management and border control, can be perceived as contradicting the sovereignty of those states subjected to these externalization practices. We then move on to the notion of security and ask the question of whose security is at stake. Here we demonstrate how the enforcement of state security jeopardizes the safety and security of those people on the move who are located in less privileged positions in the global hierarchies of mobility. In the second section, we discuss how the perspectives outlined in the previous section manifest in our two research sites. This section focuses on the continuums of mobility and immobility and those of security and insecurity, and proposes how we could begin addressing the diversely positioned human as a manifold yet full subject. We argue that International Relations scholarship usually ignores the human altogether or, at best, acknowledges the human in high-level politics drawing on the model based on the theory on rational actorness. Moreover, the analysis of insights gained at our research sites sheds light on the ways in which mobility is unevenly distributed, and how the enactment of mobility is gendered and racialized in complex ways. We conclude the paper by reflecting what these concerns might mean for international relations scholarship at the conjuncture of human im/mobility and security, and for contributing towards mobility justice.

Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the article explores some of the distinctive insights that are generated about global nuclear politics by a feminist approach that takes coloniality seriously. We show that such an approach reconceptualizes nuclear destruction as a lived reality for many, within a broader history of domination; exposes the racialized, gendered and colonial dimensions of nuclear discourses; and casts fresh light on the material colonial relationships at the heart of the global nuclear order. In the second part, we reverse our focus to critically think through how the content of feminism, and its relation to coloniality and struggles for self-determination, might be understood differently if we start from a concern with global nuclear politics. The third and final part surveys the articles in the special section, highlighting where they pick up on the themes we have explored and some future lines of enquiry.

Understanding girls’ everyday acts of resistance: evidence from a longitudinal study in nine countries

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars of girlhood studies have begun to focus on the long-overlooked topic of girls’ political agency and activism. This endeavor has increasing urgency since several prominent girl activists have come to the attention of politicians, the media, and international institutions. Girls’ political agency is more visible than ever, and yet, in media and in policy, it is still understood in narrow terms, concentrated almost entirely on the Global North. The focus on Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg and their books, tweets, marches, and speeches frames girls’ activism as the high-profile work of a few spectacular individuals, ignoring the many everyday ways in which girls do politics. In this article, we analyze data from a longitudinal study with girls across nine countries in the Global South to show one way in which they are resisting conservative discourses about girlhood: through their friendships with boys. While the girls may not themselves identify as political, or indeed as feminists, we argue that they are gradually and subtly negotiating more opportunities for themselves in their communities and challenging sexualized discourses about their bodies. The findings offer insights into how we might begin to theorize girls’ everyday acts of resistance in feminist international relations scholarship.

Returning to the root: Radical feminist thought and feminist theories of International Relations

AbstractFeminist International Relations (IR) theory is haunted by a radical feminist ghost. From Enloe's suggestion that the personal is both political and international, often seen as the foundation of feminist IR, feminist IR scholarship has been built on the intellectual contributions of a body of theory it has long left for dead. Though Enloe's sentiment directly references the Hanisch's radical feminist rallying call, there is little direct engagement with the radical feminist thinkers who popularised the sentiment in IR. Rather, since its inception, the field has been built on radical feminist thought it has left for dead. This has left feminist IR troubled by its radical feminist roots and the conceptual baggage that feminist IR has unreflectively carried from second-wave feminism into its contemporary scholarship. By returning to the roots of radical feminism we believe IR can gain valuable insights regarding the system of sex-class oppression, the central role of heterosexuality in maintaining this system, and the feminist case for revolutionary political action in order to dismantle it.

Governing “dependents”: The Canadian military family and gender, a policy analysis

Pioneering feminist International Relations scholarship suggests that in order to function, militaries rely on spouses, most often wives, to undertake the majority of domestic labour, suspend their...

Continuing the Conversation … Some Reflections

The diverse collection of short reflections included in this Critical Perspectives section looks to continue a conversation—a conversation that played out in the pages of this journal (Elias 2015) regarding the relationship between two strands of feminist international relations scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist international political economy (IPE). In this forum, the contributors return to some of the same ground, but in doing so, they bring in new concerns and agendas. New empirical sites of thinking through the nexus between security and political economy from a feminist perspective are explored: war, women's lives in postconflict societies, and international security governance institutions and practices.

Women, wars, and world affairs: Recovering feminist International Relations, 1915–39

AbstractThe academic study of International Relations (IR) emerged in the context of transnational networks of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and activists. Contrary to conventional wisdom, women belonged to these networks in various capacities and, crucially, contributed to the intellectual formation of the discipline. Whether as members of pressure groups, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), as independent authors or academics, they discussed all major issues of IR. Drawing on a range of international authors – including Anna B. Eckstein, Agnes Headlam-Morley, Lucy Mair, Margery Perham, Helena Swanwick, and Louise Weiss – this article recovers the intellectual substance of their work, arguing that it constitutes a genuinely feminist approach to IR. Early feminist IR authors emphasised the interests of women, children, and other marginalised groups, they demanded female representation in government and diplomacy, they condemned imperialism and racism, opposed military capitalism, employed religious, emotional, and universalist rhetoric, and advocated the role of education. Despite widespread male domination, women taught at universities, published in academic journals, spoke at conferences, and organised international summer schools. This article explores the origins of feminist IR scholarship and contextualises this body of thought within the revisionist history of IR.

Introduction: Feminist Security Studies and Feminist Political Economy: Crossing Divides and Rebuilding Bridges

The essays here reflect on the need to rebuild bridges between two key strands of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE). As many of the contributions to this section point out, feminist IR scholarship has long emphasized how gender relations and identities are constituted globally in relation to processes of militarization, securitization, globalization, and governance. In more recent years, however, feminist IR scholarship has come to be dominated by a concern with security (Prügl 2011). Of course, FPE scholarship has continued to provide critical accounts of the gendered nature of global production, work, and financial crises (among other issues). But it is notable that, in doing so, much FPE scholarship has tended to avoid questions of security and/or violence. This CP section, then, looks to the growing divide between FSS and FPE with all of the contributors seeking to analyse how these two traditions of feminist scholarship might be reintegrated and why this reintegration is important.

Gender, Constructed Masculinities, and Recruitment in the US Military

Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting Advertising During the All-Volunteer Force. By Melissa T. Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 229 pp., $74.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-19-984282-7). Melissa T. Brown's Enlisting Masculinity offers a welcome contribution to feminist international relations scholarship through her examination of the recruitment strategies of the four branches of the US military. Given that the United States relies on an all-volunteer force (AVF), how does the military recruit new members? Brown argues that the military continues its traditional focus on masculinity to attract new recruits, but at the same time, each branch also utilizes different “constructions of masculinity,” of which conventional warrior masculinity is one type (p. 5). In the Introduction (Chapter 1), Brown posits two research questions. First, “when the military appeals to potential recruits, does it present service in masculine terms, and if so, what form or forms does that masculinity take?” And second, “how do recruiting materials construct gender as they create ideas about soldiering?” (p. 10). She draws attention to three main issues related to her research questions. The first relates to the actual “nature of military occupations.” The military is faced with the challenge of masculinizing noncombat jobs (for example, nursing and technical occupations). It does so by making the connection with combat and what it means to be a warrior. The second issue revolves around “women's place in the military's gendering of service.” This relates to women's integration into the services, while avoiding “disrupting the association between military service and masculinity that might draw in men.” The third issue concerns the differences between the branches (histories, “institutional culture,” and “specific personnel needs”). Each service employs “different constructions of masculinity” or uses “gender in their recruiting materials in significantly different ways” (p. 11). To answer her research questions …

Feminist International Relations in Australia

I am convinced at every turn that the international is personal, and the personal is international too.1 Feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship has a small, but significant, presence in the Australian IR discipline. This presence, now over two decades old, has made important contributions to the re‐thinking of the agenda, methodology and ambitions of Australian IR. This article offers a guide to tracing the impact of feminist scholarship in the Australian IR discipline. It begins with an overview of feminist IR generally, and then moves to identify the work of Australian scholars in this field. It demonstrates the pioneering breadth and scope of this work and pays tribute to the scholars who broke down the traditional barriers of the discipline to reveal the identities, issues, and ways of thinking about world politics that had been previously unexplored. It doing so, it analyses feminist impact on the core of the discipline as well as its work on expanding the boundaries of IR. It will argue that, in Australia, feminist IR scholarship is often (though not exclusively) located within the pockets of scholarship committed to exploring critical approaches. However, this article also recognises that the discipline of International Relations in Australia has not always been welcoming of feminist insights and contributions. With this in mind, this article turns to the challenges and debates that face feminist IR both within the discipline and without, with a focus particularly on the dialogue between “critical feminism” and “mainstream International Relations”.