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 Reference Prügl2011). 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.

This section draws together scholars working within and across FSS and FPE from a variety of theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. And yet, in spite of this scholarly diversity, a certain degree of consensus is reached in terms of the need to return to a more integrated feminist IR. We open with Laura Sjoberg's reflection on the emergence of FSS and how attention to political economy can serve an important role in developing understandings of militarized gendered lives and sexualities and, in particular, of male military prostitution. In this sense, Sjoberg suggests that reintegration is necessary in order to bolster the explanatory value of feminist IR analyses. Heidi Hudson's commentary argues for a reconnection between FSS and FPE in understanding sexual and gender-based violence. Hudson makes the point that FPE serves as an important source for FSS scholars seeking to reincorporate materialist concerns into their work. Indeed, for Hudson, such a commitment is necessary in order to better understand not just practices of violence, but in order to maintain a commitment to radical, emancipatory understandings of human security. Jacqui True further underlines the need for bringing FPE into discussions of sexual and gender-based violence. For True, FPE provides insights that are easily overlooked and/or forgotten. This includes recognizing the gendered political economic relations that underpin the formation of the modern state system. States may well have started to better acknowledge women, peace, and security agendas as a result of sustained civil society pressure, but the endurance of the highly masculinized and militarized authoritarian “security state” is complemented by neoliberal political economic state transformations. Elias and Rai's contribution moves the conversation away from more obvious discussions of gender and security (e.g., sexual and gender-based violence, militaries) and instead looks to how a discussion of everyday gendered forms of violence can also play a role in bridging the gap between FSS and FPE. Finally, Katherine Allison reflects on this topic with a warning, suggesting that we need to look closely at how we tell “feminist stories,” for example, of a schism between FSS and FPE in ways that may well serve to ignore earlier manifestations of these debates. The question of reintegration entails asking some difficult questions about the nature of feminist theorizing and feminist practice. In particular, Allison notes the divisions within feminist peace movements and scholarship in the early twentieth century over the role and position of socialist thinking. Moreover, Allison reminds us of the need to recognize the existence of multiple ways of doing and knowing feminism and that the search for a single “best” way of doing feminism should not be the goal of efforts by FPE and FSS scholars to better understand one another. Thus, the contributors to this CP section look to bridge the current divide between feminist security studies and feminist IPE by returning to the spirit of early feminist IR. In this sense, it is not a particular methodological approach or theoretical framework that serves to “best” integrate a feminist understanding of security and political economy—rather, it is to suggest that a “feminist curiosity” (Enloe Reference Enloe2004) should lead us to look beyond the confines of security studies and IPE. It is appropriate then that this Critical Perspectives section is rounded off with a closing reflection by Cynthia Enloe.