During the peak of the Cold War in the 1980s, International Relations (IR) was a particularly inhospitable place for feminist scholarship. It was not only devoid of women, but people more generally as actors in world politics, who were rendered invisible by IR's obsession with the behaviors of nation-states and the formal structure of the interstate system (Sylvester Reference Sylvester1994, 4). Aptly caricaturing IR as “white men in ties discussing missile size” (Cohn Reference Cohn1987, 692), “first generation” feminist IR scholars sought to push the boundaries of the discipline. For Ann Tickner, this boundary-pushing project, to which she has devoted the majority of her academic career, meant pluralizing IR epistemologies, methodologies, and ontologies to enable more cross-fertilizing and thus fruitful dialogues between feminist and nonfeminist IR scholars to make IR more “international” (less Western- and elite male-centric), more about horizontal and equitable “relations” (as opposed to vertical systems of command and control), and more faithful to its founding ideal of seeking to end war.

In A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Tickner, who became the first feminist scholar to lead the International Studies Association (ISA) in the late 2000s, provides her own retrospective on her 25 years as an “IR feminist,” a term signaling that IR remains her “home” discipline but is one she has sought to open up to feminist inhabitants. Her intellectual journey is represented by a compilation of eleven of her signature articles published between 1988 and 2011. These are divided up chronologically into three phases of her scholarship: making women and gender visible in IR, calling for postpositivist conversations and methods in IR inspired by feminist perspectives, and taking IR genealogies to task for their unacknowledged imperialist, racist, and secular foundations through feminist and postcolonial lenses. They are bookended by an introductory personal account of her life and career and a concluding chapter that reflects on questions of feminist marginalization in IR, IR feminist quantitative methods, and the future of IR feminist or feminist IR scholarship within and outside the discipline.

The substantial barriers to making IR more open to feminist perspectives are crystallized in her classic essay, “You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR Theorists” (1997). Although she strategically characterizes IR resistance to gender analysis as a cross-cultural misunderstanding, denigrating comments made to her by male IR theorists about the absurdity of gender having anything to do with interstate power struggles and the nonserious nature of feminist analysis suggest a deeper and more structural hostility. Nevertheless, she maintains a continued attachment to IR, which she roots in her personal experience of surviving the World War II bombings of London as a child and the promise she felt with the postwar rise of the United Nations and Gandhi's nonviolent path to decolonization. Unfortunately, power politics won out as a practice in the ensuing Cold War and as the dominant approach, dubbed realism, in the heavily US-based study of IR. Well into Tickner's first tenure-track position, there was almost no alternative to realist orthodoxy. There were also very few female IR scholars at the time and no focus on women or gender in IR texts.

As Tickner recounts, it was the rising community of feminists applying feminist perspectives to questions of war, peace, and economic development, some just entering the field on both sides of the Anglophone Atlantic, that gave her the inspiration and courage to first challenge the heart of realist orthodoxy with her still widely read, “Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation” (1988), the first entry in this compilation. Revealing initially that classical realism is far from gender-neutral in its masculinist emphases on autonomy, rationality, objectivity, amorality, national interests, and power as control, Tickner then counters these uni-dimensional realist norms with a set of socially embedded principles that recognize relationality, affect, subjectivities, political moralities, multiple interests, and enabling power.

These feminist principles not only informed her subsequent articles on gendering peace and security studies, international political economy, and globalization that appear in this compilation, but also her contributions to articulating feminist IR methodologies. “What is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to IR's Methodological Questions” (2005) identifies four guiding principles for feminist IR research: starting from the perspective of women's lives in order to make the invisible visible, making research useful to women as well as men, engaging in reflexivity on the part of the researcher to acknowledge subjectivities and situated knowledges, and contributing to emancipatory knowledge-building. She has extended these principles, most notably in “Retelling IR's Foundational Stories: Some Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives” (2011), to include decentering Western knowledges and IR origin stories that cover up the (neo)colonial legacies of the contemporary world order and marginalize feminist postcolonial voices in IR. In addition to producing critical feminist IR scholarship, Tickner has cultivated emancipatory community building by organizing key gatherings of IR feminists over time, which led to the formation and expansion of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section of ISA and its journal, the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

A (re)reading of Tickner's canonical works as an ensemble attests to both her keen intellect and the radical nature of her own rereading of IR over time. She effectively turns its masculinist, statist, positivist, and Eurocentric foundational stories on their heads and consistently reveals how feminist approaches not only expose these stories as violently exclusionary, but also point the way to creating different ones for developing “a more inclusionary, more open-minded, and more reflexive international relations that transcends the structures of domination” (172). The “House of IR” (Agathangelou and Ling Reference Agathangelou and Ling2004) may still banish feminists and postcolonialists within and outside its walls, but for Ann Tickner, there is hope that her home of IR can be and is being remade.