Feminist Theory and International Relations

How Significant is the Contribution of Feminism to the Discipline of IR as a Whole?

Feminist Theory and International Relations

Feminist thought was applied to IR relatively late in comparison to other streams of the social sciences. Theorists began to examine how gender affected international relations theory and practice in the late 1980s, during the ‘third debate’ between positivists and post-positivists. Like post-positivist critiques of conventional approaches to IR, feminist theorist contend that paradigms like realism, neo-realism and liberal institutionalism, present a partial view rooted in unacknowledged political assumptions that do not tell the whole story of international politics. Conventional theories were censured for failing to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union, the sudden and peaceful end to the Cold War, and the diffuse security threats of the 1990s.

The feminist approach to IR is not a single unitary theory, but a distinct discourse made up of many competing theories. For example, liberal feminists focus on securing equal rights and access to education and the economy for women, while Marxist feminists seek to transform the oppressive socioeconomic structures of capitalist society (Steans, 1998, 16-19). Alternatively, standpoint feminists argue that women’s knowledge comes from a marginalised perspective that has the potential to provide fuller insights into world politics than those from the core (Brown, 1994, 231). Finally, post-modern feminists reject claims that a theory can tell “one true story” about the human experience (Steans, 1998, 25-26). Post-modern feminists argue that there is no authentic women’s experience or standpoint that can be used as a template for understanding the world, and chide liberal feminists for their adherence to the Enlightenment project, their Western middle class bias, and their essentialist views of women (Steans, 1998, 23-27).

Despite the fissiparous nature of feminism in the discipline, all feminist IR scholars are united by a concern with gender: an ideological and socially constructed difference between men and women, as opposed to the biological differences between the sexes (Tickner, 1997; Steans, 1998; Pettman, 2002; Sylvester 2002). Gender both constitutes and is constituted by inequalities in power relations and social structures, and has significant implications for the respective experiences of men and women (Steans, 1998, 10; Tickner, 2008, 265). In their different ways, feminists aim to explain the role of gender in the theory and practice of international relations by locating women in international politics, investigating how they are affected by structures and behaviour in the international system, and exploring ways of reconstructing IR theory in a gender neutral way (Tickner, 2008; Steans 1998; Sylvester, 2002).

Since mainstream IR theorists were not traditionally concerned with gender, the work of early IR feminists sought to unveil the crucial yet unaccounted role of women in conventional spaces of international politics, like the global economy, high politics and war. In her seminal work, Cynthia Enloe (1989) focused on the everyday experiences of women as individuals, demonstrating their importance to the continued running of the state system as plantation workers, consumers, wives of diplomats and of soldiers, and prostitutes surrounding military bases. She asserted that omitting women in theories left IR “with a political analysis that is incomplete, even naive” (Enloe, 1989, 2).

This is best seen via the example of women’s experiences of war: in general, war intensifies economic inequalities between men and women and often forces women into unpaid work, such as caring for the injured or sick when hospitals are over-crowded or destroyed (Chew, 2008, 76-77). Women are forced into the sex-trade for subsistence, sometimes being contracted informally by military leaders around bases in order to sustain the morale of soldiers (Enloe, 1989, 81-92; Chew, 2008, 76-77). Non-combatants, meaning women and children, make up 90% of deaths in contemporary wars, and systematic rape has been used as a weapon during wartime, as during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or currently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Chew, 2008, 75). Seeing war through the eyes of a woman can change the very nature of what constitutes the boundaries of IR, shifting the focus from the causes and costs of inter-state war to the drastic consequences individuals suffer due to militarisation and oppression (Tickner, 1997, 625; Steans, 1998, 102).