Feminist Security Studies

In studying what happens in international relations, Cynthia Enloe asked: “Where are the women?” This question essentially underlies feminist international relations (IR). Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, feminist scholars critiqued mainstream IR theories (i.e., realism, liberalism), arguing that there is a masculinist bias in the field and that IR’s omission of gender in their analysis is problematic. Feminist research challenges the binaries of public/private, male/female, masculine/feminine, protector/protected, and perpetrator/victim that are inherent in IR. In 1988, the journal Millennium—Journal of International Studies published a special issue titled, “Women and International Relations,” the first time a major IR journal focused on the topic of women and IR. The issue marks the starting point for scholarship on women and international relations. As the scholarship continued to evolve and develop, so too did different feminist approaches to security (including liberal, critical, constructivist, post-colonial, and post-structural approaches). Feminist research also uses different methodologies, including quantitative methods, case studies, interviews, and narratives. All feminist IR research utilizes a gender analysis that looks at women and men, masculinities and femininities, gender hierarchies/order, intersectionality (race, ethnicity, gender, class, etc.), positionality, and power relations. Moreover, feminist scholarship includes a normative aspect: in studying gender, power and women, feminist scholars seek to achieve gender equality and to increase women’s economic, political, cultural, and social status and rights around the world. As feminist IR scholarship developed in the 1990s, the field moved from “add women and stir” approaches to making gender a central category of analysis. In 1998, Millennium—Journal of International Studies published another special issue, “Gendering ‘the International,’” which reflected the evolution of feminist IR and the focus on gender as a social construction in the context of international relations. In utilizing a gender analysis, feminist scholars increasingly focused on security broadly defined, leading to the emergence of feminist security studies (FSS). A broader conception of security encompasses elements such as human security, domestic violence, economic security, social security, and environmental security as well as the security of the state. Feminist scholars also recognize that the security of the state can lead to insecurity of women and other marginalized groups. Since the early feminist IR works, feminist security studies scholarship has flourished, addressing issues such as the state and gendered nationalism, gender and conflict, militarism and militarized masculinity, sexual- and gender-based violence in wartime, women’s roles in conflict (peace activists, victims, and perpetrators), the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, post-conflict reconstruction and transformation, and the connection with feminist international/global political economy.