Feminist International Relations: Old Debates And New Directions

Feminist International Relations: Old Debates and New Directions

Feminist International Relations: Old Debates and New Directions

ANNICK T.R. WIBBEN Rockefeller Humanities Fellow Human Security

NCRW and CUNY Graduate Center

Many individuals and groups have a great deal to lose by the advancement of this radical project, and a great deal to gain by transforming the feminist impulse into just one more element of the nonthreatening pluralistic universe of theoretical discourse, where power relationships remain fundamentally unchallenged.1

IN MARCH OF 2002, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting on “Feminist Perspec- tives in U.S. and EU Foreign Policy” at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Two papers had been distributed in advance and would be examined with the help of discussants. The papers provided many possible topics for discussion; yet, instead of engaging in a detailed debate, the discussion began to revolve around whether femi- nists had a significant contribution to make to IR. It went so far as to obfuscate the impact feminists had already made, e.g. in human rights. When a participant claimed that human rights discourse spontaneously began devoting attention to gender-spe- cific violations, in particular sexual violence, feminists who had fought for the recogni- tion of these issues as human rights violations were baffled by the uninformed audacity of this claim. The event was instructive, since to this point I had heard about such non- engagements mostly second-hand from feminist colleagues or via journal articles.2 A return to some of the old debates and a clarification of the issues at stake might be useful, if not for those that continue to deny the relevance of feminist interventions, at least for students of International Relations (IR).3

This article revisits some of the debates between feminist and mainstream schol- ars in IR during the last 15 years. On the one hand, in the spirit of Dale Spender’s work, the aim is to recover feminist knowledges to provide a source of strength and inspiration.4 On the other hand, the goal is to explore the limits of themes covered by

ANNICK T.R. WIBBEN is a Rockefeller Humanities Fellow for Human Security with the National Council for Research on Women and the Center for the Study of Women and Society at CUNY Graduate Center. She is also a Watson Fellow at Brown University.

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these debates to push the conversation in new directions. Feminist IR is a burgeoning field, which contributes to and revisits areas of international relations beyond those covered by the mainstream discussion. There are many indicators that feminist IR is becoming an established subfield, including panels at major academic conferences, sections in professional organizations, single-authored and edited books as well as jour- nal articles (many in the new Feminist Journal of International Politics). The develop- ment is also displayed in the greater confidence of feminist IR scholarship overall. While the field initially exhibited a need to justify feminist approaches, scholars are now pursuing their work alongside or despite mainstream IR—they are getting on with it, often redefining IR in the process.5

The article begins with an overview of the history of feminist interventions in IR, beginning with several conferences in the late 1980s and early 1990s.6 Thereafter it outlines several contentious issues by discussing certain engagements between feminist and mainstream IR in more detail. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of what counts as knowledge in IR. Finally, by reference to debates about whether the field should choose to identify itself as ‘doing’ women in IR, gender and IR, or feminist IR, the examination concludes by arguing for a mature feminist IR. Conceiving the field as such also entails an acceptance of the (feminist) political project at its base.

HISTORY LESSON

International Relations has been one of the last fields to open up to feminisms, which offer unique contributions to any field of research. Indeed, compared with other disci- plines, the arrival feminist perspectives in IR occurred relatively late. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that several conferences and the published books created momentum for a feminist study of IR. Among the early books, now classics of the field, are Jean Bethke Elshtain’s Women and War (1987) and Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989).7 In addition, J. Ann Tickner’s Gender in International Rela- tions: Feminist perspectives on achieving global security (1992), V. Spike Peterson and Anne Runyan’s Global Gender Issues (1993), and Christine Sylvester’s Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (1994) made their mark in the early 1990s. While they are all different in their approach, they are united by seeking to rethink IR’s basic parameters.

Three conferences completed the launch of feminist thought onto the IR scene: the 1988 Millennium: Journal of International Studies conference at the London School of Economics, the 1989 conference at the University of Southern California, and the 1990 conference at Wellesley.8 Millennium published the proceedings from its confer- ence in a special issue titled “Women and International Relations,” and consequently

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Feminist International Relations: Old Debates and New Directions

also published as Gender and International Relations by Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland.9 Peterson, who had organized the conference in California, agreed to edit a collection of the papers presented at Wellesley, which culminated in the 1992 volume Gendered States.10

It should also be noted that feminists in peace research had already mounted a challenge to bias in their field at the 1975 International Peace Research Association conference, where they highlighted gender as a variable in structural violence.11 They worked to bring feminist perspectives to bear on issues of peace, conflict, and war as early as the 1960s. By the late 1960s women peace researchers were analyzing power, “developing feminist conceptions of power as power to, or empowerment, rather than power over.”12 In the 1970s they moved on to “reconceptualizing security as security with an adversary, or common security, rather than security against the

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