Do we need a feminist contribution to International Relations?

Résumé du document

The open debates in International Relations (IR) in the late 1980s paved the way for feminist contributions to the discipline where it had previously received scant attention. The ten years that followed have seen a substantial amount of literature on gender and the discipline of international relations, causing quite some discussion on the results and usefulness of feminist writings. The purpose of this essay is to explore the value of feminist contributions to IR, discussing whether or not there is a need for this perspective within the discipline, with reference to criticisms from different perspectives, and a look at the results of feminist research

Extraits

[...] Whitworth (1989) also suggests problems within the pluralist paradigm for including a feminist contribution to IR. It might seem on the surface that pluralism offers room for feminist though, with a wider agenda from realism on what is considered relevant, including multinational corporations and bodies such as the United Nations and European Union. The state is not seen as a unitary actor (as with realism) but as something that has competing demands and interests both within the state itself and from non-state actors. [...]

[...] Tickner (1995), on the same topic, puts forward that the promotion of women's rights led the world to be alerted to the strategy of rape in the Bosnian wars, though the atrocity has always existed but usually gone unreported. The representation of women in international politics has been the other main concern of feminist writers, and in a modern society of equal rights (at least in the western world), such issues will continue to be important. This is not least because of the current domination of the field by males. In international organisations, women are often less than five per cent represented in policy-making jobs, while the combat forces largely remains an all-male arena. [...]

[...] I would suggest, though, that with continued work in other social sciences, our understanding of women's issues will continue to expand without the need for a separate theoretical standpoint in International Relations, but the insights it brings will remain highly valuable. Bibliography Baylis & Smith (2001) The Globalization of World Politics Second Edition. Oxford University Press Enloe, C (1990) Bananas, Beaches and Bases Peterson, V (1999) Feminisms and International Relations, in Sinha et al Feminisms and Internationalism. Blackwell Steans & Pettiford (2001) International Relations: Perspectives and Themes. Pearson Education Tickner, A (1995) Re-visioning Security, in Booth & Smith (eds) International Relations Theory Today. Polity Press Whitworth, S (1989) Gender in the Inter-Paradigm Debate. [...]

[...] There has been a huge contribution to IR in highlighting female values and interests that have seemingly gone unnoticed or unreported. Referring to issues of identity, Zalewski & Enloe (1995) suggest that IR theorists who had previously imagined they didn't have to be curious about identity were intellectually naïve. This stops IR observers from looking deep into the “nation-state” and seeing who is getting to speak and who is marginalized, as opposed to just taking a country as one cohesive actor. [...]

[...] The steams of thought under this post-positivist umbrella (including feminist thought but also critical theorists, postmodernists and post-structuralists) argue that mainstream IR theorists are theoretically and epistemologically constrained by their commitment to seeing a particular picture of the international (Peterson, 1999). The main source of complaint coming from feminist theorists about existing IR theory is the inadequacy of Realism in the post-Cold War era. Understanding security in a contemporary, highly interdependent world facing multiple security threats requires more than the state-centric analysis of purely political and military dimensions (Tickner, 1995). [...]