Feminist international relations is situated uneasily within a subfield of political science, on the one hand, and within an interdisciplinary literature on globalization, on the other. Emerging in the 1990s from a critique of the realist and rationalist IR canon, feminist IR research has diversified considerably, including different lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry and drawing on a range of methods. Different emphases emerge in three fields – feminist security studies, feminist international political economy, and feminist work on international governance.
In a striking reversal, feminist security studies have emerged as the most visible research field in feminist IR during the past decade.Footnote 1 Addressed to the traditional core of IR scholarship, this literature is both theoretical and empirical. It continues the critique of core concepts that spawned feminist IR as a field in the early 1990s and broadens this critique to concepts such as offense/defense, just war, and power transition theory (Sjoberg Reference Sjoberg2006, Reference Sjoberg and Sjoberg2010; Wilcox Reference Wilcox2009). Moreover, it introduces into research on war and conflict considerations of the body, drawing on the theoretical work of Judith Butler (Wadley Reference Wadley and Sjoberg2010; Wilcox Reference Wilcox2010). This is an exciting new push to reformulate foundational concepts and themes that have been at the core of international relations as a masculinist knowledge enterprise.
A burst of empirical research has accompanied these theoretical developments. It describes patterns of sexual violence during war, seeks to make sense of women committing violence, and explores the reproduction of gender in postwar peacebuilding efforts (Leiby Reference Leiby2009; MacKenzie Reference MacKenzie2009; Sjoberg and Gentry Reference Sjoberg and Gentry2007). The adoption in the United Nations Security Council of a string of resolutions focusing on women, peace, and security has, in addition, generated research on gender constructions in these resolutions, and on successes and problems of implementation (Cohn Reference Cohn, Rai and Waylen2008; Hudson Reference Hudson2009; Tryggestad Reference Tryggestad2009). Finally, during the past decade, a rich literature has emerged that uses quantitative methods to link women's treatment within states to the likelihood of these states to resolve conflicts in violent ways (Caprioli Reference Caprioli2005; Caprioli and Boyer Reference Caprioli and Boyer2001; Melander Reference Melander2005). Together, these studies and analyses make gender issues visible in security practices to an unprecedented degree. And in doing so, they largely sever the association of women with peace or with victimhood, employ sophisticated understandings of gender as productive of security practices, link these practices to patriarchal conduct outside war, and interpret security politics as a politics of gender.
If feminist security studies speak to the core of international relations as a subfield of political science, then feminist international political economy (IPE) is situated within a more interdisciplinary realm that includes scholars from a range of the social sciences. Here as well, a critique of concepts continues to inspire research as IR scholars join feminist economists to emphasize the need to consider the reproductive economy. In addition, they theorize a “virtual economy” that captures the flow of symbols and information made possible with new information technologies (Peterson Reference Peterson2003; Youngs Reference Youngs2007). They also share with feminist economists an understanding of markets not as natural forces but, rather, as socially and politically instituted. Governments and the institutions of global governance make the rules for international economic exchange and thereby infuse gender into economic conduct (Rai and Waylen Reference Rai and Waylen2008; Waylen Reference Waylen2004). Rules emanating from the World Trade Organization, the European Union, and the World Bank, in addition, have constitutive force, empowering market actors along the lines of gender and restructuring intimate practices in situated contexts (Bedford Reference Bedford2009; Prügl Reference Prügl, Rai and Waylen2008). Local gender regimes importantly direct these types of impacts (Caraway Reference Caraway2005). Drawing on Foucaultian methods, scholars also explore the way in which gendered economic knowledge produces boundaries and exclusions and the way in which gender mainstreaming is co-opted into neoliberal strategies (Çaglar Reference Çaglar2009; Wöhl Reference Wöhl, Rai and Waylen2008). In making visible a complex terrain of governance that links international, regional, and local scales, this literature puts to rest any conception of markets as gender neutral. It also defines an expansive research agenda that approaches economic governance as a governance of gender.
Globalization and the feminization of international migration have opened up another research area for feminist IPE scholars. Researchers explore new international divisions of labor and transnational constructions of gender in global care chains, the international sex trade, and the globalization of domestic work (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2006; Marchand and Runyan Reference Marchand and Runyan2010). They draw on insights from postcolonial studies, refusing the opposition between local and global, here and there, to map a new field of transnational gender politics (Chowdhry and Nair Reference Chowdhry and Nair2002; Ling Reference Ling2002). They probe the work of migrant organizations, the political and economic impacts of remittances, and hegemonic constructions of femininity and masculinity in global business media (Hooper Reference Hooper2001; Kunz Reference Kunz, Marchand and Runyan2010; Schwenken Reference Schwenken, Prügl and Thiel2010). This literature charts new loci of transnational politics and with them new sites of gender construction. Considerable scholarly creativity continues to go into making these spaces visible, together with new conceptualizations of how to think about them.
Two distinctive themes emerge in feminist literature on international governance. The first concerns gender mainstreaming, or more broadly, the relationship between feminist strategizing and international organizations. Research on gender mainstreaming has found vast problems of implementation and co-optation (Daly Reference Daly2005; Moser and Moser Reference Moser, Moser, Porter and Sweetman2005), and increasingly assesses the power effects that are generated as feminism moves into the mainstream (Prügl Reference Prügl2009; Zalewski Reference Zalewski2010). While the theoretical argument has been made, there remains considerable room for systematic comparative research that documents variations in the effects of gender mainstreaming. The creation of UN Women, the new UN entity tasked with advancing gender equality and the empowerment of women, invites renewed reflection on the relationship between gender mainstreaming and international organizations.
The second theme of feminist research in international governance focuses on women's human rights and the way in which these rights travel. Feminists have taken the lead in criticizing the static treatment of norms in IR scholarship. They have shown that women's rights are constantly negotiated in international contexts, such as in the committee overseeing the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. They have also drawn on literatures in legal anthropology to argue that international norms undergo processes of translation as activists, lawyers, or parliamentarians invoke them in diverse situations (Merry Engle Reference Merry Engle2006; Zwingel Reference Zwingel2010, n.d.). These considerations refocus the discussions over whether human rights are Western, and whether women's rights are incompatible with religious prescriptions or traditions. They also question understandings of human rights as a purely legal construct to be implemented by states, approaching them instead as one package of international norms among many, negotiated and subject to various forms of power politics.
In sum, diverse and vibrant research programs continue to thrive in contemporary feminist international relations. They problematize foundational concepts in security and political economy, provide new insights into the link between war and gender, reconceptualize the global economy and show how it is governed, analyze feminist strategies in international organizations, and explore the way in which international gender norms travel. Some of this scholarship has been published in Politics & Gender, but not nearly enough. As an associate editor, I look forward to seeing an avalanche of submissions on these issues, making Politics & Gender a must-read for scholars in the subfield of feminist international relations.
