J. Ann Tickner

You just don't understand: troubled engagements between feminists and IR theorists

This article reconstructs some conversational encounters between feminists and IR theorists and offers some hypotheses as to why misunderstandings so frequently result from these encounters. It claims that contemporary feminist perspectives on international relations are based on ontologies and epistemologies that are quite different from those that inform the conventional discipline. Therefore, they do not fit comfortably within conventional state-centric and structural approaches to IR theorizing, nor with the methodologies usually employed by IR scholars. As an illustration of how these differences can cause misunderstandings, the article offers some feminist perspectives on security, a concept central to the discipline. It also suggests how feminist approaches can offer some new ways to understand contemporary security problems. In conclusion, it suggests how feminist/IR engagements might be pursued more constructively.

Hans Morgenthau's Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation:

International politics is a man’s world, a world of power and conflict in which warfare is a privileged activity. Traditionally, diplomacy, military service, and the science of international politics have been largely male domains. In the past, women have rarely been included in the ranks of professional diplomats or the military: of the relatively few women who specialize in the academic discipline of international relations, few are security specialists. Women political scientists who do international relations tend to focus on areas such as international political economy, North-South relations and matters of distributive justice.

Feminist responses to international security studies

In his book, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, sociologist Anthony Giddens asks what we should make of the fact that “propagation of military violence has always been a resolutely male affair.” While acknowledging that there is a relation between war, military power, and masculinity, Giddens claims that war is not a manifestation of male aggression; rather, it is associated with the rise of the state. In a rather different book, War and Gender, international relations scholar Joshua Goldstein asks why we have not been more curious about the fact that, while virtually all societies throughout history have engaged in war, overwhelmingly they have been fought by men. Although Goldstein reaches a conclusion somewhat similar to Giddens, that war is not due to males’ inherent aggression, he devotes his entire book to examining evidence about the association of war with men and masculinity. In this essay, I will first discuss the gendering of war, the state, and citizenship in the context of the discipline of international relations (IR). Then I will say something about gender studies and its silences with respect to war and international security. I will suggest some reasons why these two disciplines, or transdisciplines—IR and gender studies—have a hard time communicating with each other. I will then describe some of the recent feminist scholarship in IR that has begun to bridge this divide and some contributions IR feminists have made to our understanding of war, peace, and international security. Most IR feminists are closer to what in IR is called “critical security studies” than they are to more conventional IR security scholarship. In the end, I want to offer some thoughts on possible convergences between IR feminist scholarship and critical security studies.

Dealing with Difference: Problems and Possibilities for Dialogue in International Relations

This address suggests some avenues through which IR scholars from a variety of methodological approaches and different geographical locations might better dialogue with each other in mutually respectful ways. It begins by briefly revisiting IR’s great debates since they represent the way the discipline has traditionally defined itself. It claims that these debates have centred on challenging the predominance of a US-centred discipline and its commitment to neo-positivist methodologies. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist literatures, it then offers some suggestions as to how might envisage an IR that is built on more global foundations and on a more pluralist understanding of what we define as scientific knowledge. It concludes with some thoughts on possible paths towards placing different scientific traditions on a more equal and mutually respectful footing.

Susan Moller Okin

The entry in W. H. Audens Commonplace Book for “Justice” cautions: “Whoever suffers from the malady of being unable to endure any injustice, must never look out of the window, but stay in his room with the door shut. He would also do well, perhaps, to throw away his mirror.” Susan Moller Okin suffered this malady but rejected the poets advice. She opened the window and looked in the mirror; her writings reflect sensitivity to injustice and acute awareness that her position of privilege and her good fortune made the work she did a moral imperative. The temper of her work was set by her political sensibility to the consequences of strength and weakness and by unflagging attention to the events of our world.

Feminist Security Studies: Celebrating an Emerging Field

As feminist international relations enters its third decade as a subdiscipline within IR, it is particularly fitting that we recognize and celebrate the stimulating and important new research that is being done in Feminist Security Studies. In the early days of feminist IR, feminists tended to stay away from security studies, at least as it is conventionally defined, a tendency that, fortunately, is no longer the case. The rich and varied research being done by contributors to this volume is evidence that the field has taken off and that its research agendas are flourishing.

Retelling IR's foundational stories: some feminist and postcolonial perspectives

In the conclusion to my presidential address to the International Studies Association in 2006, I suggested that all of us International Relations (IR) scholars bear the responsibility for being cri...In the conclusion to my presidential address to the International Studies Association in 2006, I suggested that all of us International Relations (IR) scholars bear the responsibility for being critically reflective about how the knowledge we teach our students has been constructed historically and how the research traditions to which we subscribe are formulated. These reflections have lead me to embark on a new project – one which will endeavor to retell some of the foundational stories of our discipline from the perspective of those whose voices and lives have rarely been included in what we define as International Relations. I do this with no pretense to being a historian – rather to demonstrate that the way any discipline frames its foundational myths has important consequences for the questions it asks and the knowledge it deems necessary for answering them. For the most part, conventional IR inside the United States, where I am located, has been remarkably unreflective about its history. This may be less true in the Oceanic region where, according to Jason Sharmon and Jacqui True, the influence of British IR is greater and the commitment to positivist social science is weaker. Yet, as Ole Waever and Arlene Tickner claim in the introduction to their edited volume International Relations Scholarship Around the World, the IR scholarly community has very little knowledge about how it is itself shaped by global relationships of power, knowledge and resources. Certain critical theorists, broadly defined, who identify with more sociologically and historically grounded research traditions, many of whom work outside the United States, have been more open to examining the foundations of the discipline. It is, therefore, a particular privilege and pleasure for me to embark on this new project by giving this address here at the Oceanic Conference on International Studies. I owe a special debt to scholars in this region whose work has been an inspiration as I start to frame this endeavor. Our conventional disciplinary history credits the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the symbolic starting point in the history of modern interstate relations. Spatial relations began to be defined by territorial boundaries within which states claimed exclusive sovereignty and the right to prohibit other states from interfering in their internal affairs. Westphalia ended wars fought over religion; henceforward, European wars would be fought over (secular) sovereign spaces and securing territorial boundaries against external threats.

You May Never Understand: Prospects for Feminist Futures in International Relations

While my focus in this article is on International Relations (IR) because it is the discipline I know best, I am struck by how much feminist IR scholarship overlaps with feminist International Law in terms of subject matter, citations, and collaborations. Since feminist IRs is so recent, it has frequently been documented so I will sketch my own personal journey, connecting it with that of other feminist scholars in different parts of the world and in different disciplines. While this special issue celebrates the innovative and exciting research in both these fields, we must also acknowledge the intellectual challenges and controversies that lie ahead for both disciplines. I will address both the problems and the potential for feminists in IR. No academic discipline would be complete without its origins stories. Since feminist IR’s is so recent, it has frequently been documented so I will sketch my own personal journey, connecting with many others in different parts of the world and in different disciplines embarking on the same journey. In the 1980s, before I started writing and teaching about feminism, I became aware of how many of my women students were quite uncomfortable with, or unmotivated by, my IR survey course. Trying to figure out why extremely capable students felt so alienated from the material, with its emphasis on national security and conflict, motivated me to start thinking about IR as gendered masculine. The end of the 1980s was a hopeful time for new thinking in the discipline — the Cold War was ending and, not coincidentally, IR was opening up to critical perspectives. There was an optimistic sense that feminism was one of a number of new and exciting critical approaches that would enrich and expand a field that had been so caught up with explaining the national security behaviour of the great powers. It began with conferences and collaboration — a feminist way of doing things — at the London School of Economics in 1988, the University of Southern California in 1989 and the Wellesley Center for Research on Women in 1990. Katrina Lee-Koo puts the founding of Australian feminist IR somewhat later, with the publication of Jindy Pettman’s book Worlding Women, in 1996.1 Yet Pettman’s earlier 1993 article, ‘Gendering International Relations’ in theThe innovative and exciting research in the field of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship and feminist International Law is discussed. The challenges and difficulties that lie ahead for both disciplines as well as the potential for feminists in IR are highlighted.

Local Self-Reliance versus Power Politics: Conflicting Priorities of National Development:

Self-reliance, as an expression of the desire of both individuals and states for autonomy and self-determination, has captured the imagination of political writers over the centuries; its appeal has been manifest in many very different political traditions. This paper will examine an important contemporary manifestation of the desire for self-reliance evident in contemporary Third World development debates. In this context self-reliance has multiple goals, such as devising poverty-reducing development strategies, decreasing dependence with respect to the world economy, and pressuring more advanced states into a redistribution of global resources. Third World calls for self-reliance are often expressions of frustration with liberal capitalist models of development which have assumed that linkage to the international system accelerates economic growth and promotes the welfare of all. Failure to narrow the gap between rich and poor, both within and between states, has led to calls for reorientation of development planning, away from industrially-led associationist development models, toward a more direct focus on agriculture and the indigenous production of basic needs, and a temporary detachment from the international system in order to achieve self-reliance both for the individual and the nation-state.’ Self-reliance has become a popular rhetorical force within which to organize collective Third World responses to failed development strategies and the lack of success of New International Economic Order demands. More importantly, recent problems in the world economy, such as global recession, debt crises, and the intransigence of the North to Southern demands, suggest that self-reliance deserves to be considered as a serious development strategy for the future. However, self-reliance is a concept that is rarely defined

The gendered frontiers of globalization

Women are rarely to be found in the elite international corporate structure of the globalizing economy. They are, however, an important component of the new mobile global labor force. This article examines the pros and cons of economic globalization for women; in particular, why so many women are disproportionately disadvantaged by the globalizing forces associated with the neoliberal international economy. It also outlines some ways in which womens organizing at the grassroots, national and international levels is working toward efforts to diminish gender hierarchies which have the effect of disempowering women and contributing to economic inequalities more generally.Women are rarely to be found in the elite international corporate structure of the globalizing economy. They are, however, an important component of the new mobile global labor force. This article examines the pros and cons of economic globalization for women; in particular, why so many women are disproportionately disadvantaged by the globalizing forces associated with the neoliberal international economy. It also outlines some ways in which womens organizing at the grassroots, national and international levels is working toward efforts to diminish gender hierarchies which have the effect of disempowering women and contributing to economic inequalities more generally.