Feminist approaches to international relations Premium

Understanding the various feminist approaches to international relations

After the Second World War, the global order was undergoing various shifts which could not be explained by traditional theories of inter-state war and conflict. The rise of violent trans-state actors and groups, ethnic conflict and tension, and the relatively peaceful ending of the Cold War were markers of a changing global arena where the state was not just the only player. This called for different and varied approaches to look at international relations (IR) not just as an order of states and relations among them but where multiple actors and institutions factor in. The feminist approach to IR is one such perspective which sees the international arena through primarily a gendered lens.

The feminist perspective to IR emerged out of what is popularly known as ‘the third debate’ between positivists and post-positivist scholars in the 1980s. Here the positivist assumptions within IR, that the field is a value-neutral arena where definitions and structures such as anarchy and nation state are set in stone and self-explanatory, were challenged. Post-positivists questioned the very foundations of the discipline, its basic knowledge structure and ideals and said that IR needs to be analysed more critically. They called for pluralism and more diversity in IR which up to that point was dominated by realist and liberal perspectives.

The first generation of feminist perspectives in IR were not so much as a fresh approach to understanding global politics as trying to deconstruct the fundamental foundations laid down by realist and liberal IR scholars and how they fail to properly represent all actors in conflict and foreign policy. Realists believe the international arena is in a state of anarchy (there is no overarching sovereign power to govern nation states and tell them what to do). Therefore, states are constantly involved in ‘power politics’, trying to safeguard their own interests and security. While some countries use power only when their security is threatened, some other (larger) countries actively seek and use power to gain a relative advantage over other nation states. Power and the need for security is the ultimate driving force as far as realists are concerned. Liberal scholars, on the other hand, prioritise cooperation. While they agree on the premise of the global order being anarchic, they contend that instead of power, nation states actively seek alliances in order to safeguard their interests. When states have something to gain, it is more in their self-interest to cooperate than seek power or use aggression.

The realist idea that nation states are selfish and will always seek power first is derived from a Hobbsian understanding of ‘human nature’, which is also characterised by self-interest. It is this — supposedly objective — knowledge that is challenged by feminist theoreticians, as a masculine assumption rather than an understanding of human nature as a whole. They say that elements of social reproduction and development also feature into ‘human nature’, not just domination and aggression. The global order for feminists is not a state of anarchy but a constructed social hierarchical order which contributes to and thrives on gender subordination. The experience of women in war, conflict and diplomacy has either been given no focus as it is subsumed under the ‘universal’ experience (read men) or has not been acknowledged or recognised. As Mary J. Tickner argues, IR is gendered to “marginalise women’s voices,” and “that women have knowledge, perspectives and experiences that should be brought to bear on the study of international relations.”

In international conflict, women are mostly spoken of in terms of needing protection as they are a vulnerable group. This imagery, of the need to protect women from foreign invaders, is often invoked while asking young men to conscript. However this has also led them to be invisible from featuring in talks and processes of war.

For example, Cynthia Enloe, in Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War looks at the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 through a gendered lens. She analyses the war through American housewives and Iraqi women and how their lives are increasingly militarised. She shows how their role as women, specifically women as a category, ensured the smooth functioning of the war-machine. How women took on roles from as diverse as being care-givers to wounded soldiers to becoming prostitutes near military bases to support their war-torn families. Additionally, in Beaches, Bananas and Bases, she talks about how conflict ridden situations facilitated opaque marital contracts paving the way for sex trafficking and money laundering. However, rarely is any of this acknowledged when one talks about the Iraq war or any war for that matter. There is a masculinisation of the sphere of war and conflict, where women are made completely invisible. Even within the discourse of protection, the exclusive targeting of women through rape and sexual violence is seen as an effect of war and not as a key military strategy used by nations for ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Thus, the second generation of IR feminist theoreticians started to expand on the idea of what exactly a feminist perspective on global politics would look like and how gender should become an empirical category of analysis when it comes to foreign policy, security, global politics etc.