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Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory
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@MISC{_gender,international,
author = {},
title = {Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory},
year = {}
}
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Abstract
N ational security discourses are typically part of the elite world ofmasculine high politics. Statesmen, diplomats, and the military con-duct the business of states, and too often war, imbuing the relations and processes of the society of nation-states with an atmosphere seemingly devoid of women and an interest in issues of concern to women. The academic discipline charged with theorizing this world, international re-lations (IR), has only recently made a place for feminist analysis, and then only grudgingly. Academic feminism and IR are contemporaries, each developing through the war-torn twentieth century and motivated by some of the same international events, although work in IR often over-looks women’s contributions, such as the 1919 International Congress of Women, which ran parallel to Versailles (Grant 1992, 86). While in some respects estranged from the mainstream of IR, feminist and gender schol-ars have launched an important critique of the core issues of the discipline: war, peace, and the quest to secure the boundaries of the nation-state. In a rapidly changing, post-9/11 world, feminist voices must be heard if the international system is to achieve a more comprehensive security in the face of terror networks, technowar, and mounting civilian casualties. The term security itself has been wrought with ambiguity and has re-cently taken on the status of an essentially contested concept in the dis-cipline. Within international relations, discussions of international security traditionally revolve around issues of war and peace in an international system of sovereign and self-interested nation-states, with a particular fo-cus on issues of military strategy. In this view, the provision of security is entrusted to the state, with the assumption that states protect and secure the members of the political community from threats emanating from the dangerous, foreign realm outside state boundaries. However, feminists and other critical scholars have started to inquire into the meaning of this
Keyphrases
international relation feminist security theory international system comprehensive security particular fo-cus international security feminist analysis important critique international event civilian casualty ational security discourse feminist voice war-torn twentieth century state boundary political community military con-duct term security military strategy academic discipline elite world ofmasculine high politics international re-lations self-interested nation-states foreign realm critical scholar terror network core issue over-looks woman contribution academic feminism international congress
