Introduction To Security Studies: Feminist Contributions

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Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist Contributions

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Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist

Contributions
LAURA SJOBERG
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In 1988, Millennium published a special issue on “Women and Interna-

tional Relations” now widely recognized as the start of a research program
of feminist approaches to International Relations (IR). In a critique of Hans
Morgenthau’s political realism in that issue, Ann Tickner pointed out that “in-
ternational relations is a man’s world, a world of power and conflict in which
warfare is a privileged activity.”1 Based on this realization, Robert Keohane
characterized feminist International Relations as “likely to begin a produc-
tive debate involving international relations scholars, feminist thinkers, and
others concerned about security in the most inclusive sense.”2 Feminist
scholars aspired to “move the suspicion of officially ungendered IR texts
Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute

and State University. She is author of Gender, Justice and the Wars in Iraq (New York:
Lexington Books, 2006) and (with Caron Gentry) Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Vio-
lence in Global Politics (London: Zed Books, 2007).Her work has recently appeared in Inter-
national Studies Quarterly, International Relations, Politics and Gender, and International
Studies Review.
The Special Issue as a whole has benefited from funding for this project provided by
the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University, the International Studies Association, and the Department of Political Science at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Two anonymous reviewers were gracious
enough to read the entire project (twice), and tireless work has been put in to this project by
Susan Peterson, Michael Desch, and William Wohlforth at Security Studies. Others, including
Christine Sylvester, Carol Cohn, Annick Wibben, Lene Hansen, and Jacqueline Berman, have
read and commented on substantial parts of this work. Important insights about the structure
and content of this introduction came from all of the contributors to the special issue, as
well as Amy Eckert, Caron Gentry, Ilja Luciak, Janice Bially Mattern, Swati Parashar, Spike
Peterson, and Ann Tickner. Any mistakes remain my own.
1 J. Ann Tickner, “Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation,”
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 3 (December 1988): 429–40.

2 This is Robert Keohane’s endorsement on the back cover of Ann Tickner’s book, Gender in Inter-
national Relations: Feminist Approaches on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1992), back cover.
183
184 L. Sjoberg
to their subversion and to replace their theories,”3 and several IR schol-

ars predicted that their insights should “fundamentally change IR’s greatest
debates.”4
In the intervening decades, feminist scholars have critiqued and refor-
mulated many of the foundational theoretical assumptions of IR. Still, the
productivity of conversations between feminists and other IR scholars has
been more mixed than original predictions envisioned. In some areas of IR,
scholarship that uses gender as an analytical category has successfully en-
gaged in dialogue with more “mainstream”5 approaches. In other areas of
study, however, feminists have experienced “awkward silences and miscom-
munications” brought about by a lack of understanding between IR audiences
and feminist speakers.6
Security Studies is one area of IR where unsatisfactory encounters “illus-
trate a gendered estrangement that inhibits more sustained conversations”

between feminists and IR scholars.7 As Ann Tickner laments, “feminist theo-
rists have rarely achieved the serious engagement with other IR scholars for
which they have frequently called.”8 In many ways, the theory and practice
of international security remain a man’s world.9 The material result of this
3 Christine Sylvester, “Feminists and Realists on Autonomy and Obligation in International Relations,”
in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions on International Relations Theory, ed. V. Spike Peterson (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992).
4 Robert Keohane, “International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint,” Millen-
nium: Journal of International Studies 18, no. 2 (1989): 245–53.

5 I do not use this term with any essential content and am hesitant to use it at all for fear of
reifying/reproducing a dichotomy the existence of which is problematic for me and for the other authors in
this special issue. Still, as discussed below, there are problems with ignoring disciplinary power dynamics
and terminology as well. The “mainstream” for the purposes of this article refers to what Ole Waever
labels the “neo-neo synthesis” where “during the 1980s, realism became neo-realism and liberalism neo-
liberal institutionalism. Both underwent a self-limiting redefinition towards anti-metaphysical, theoretical
minimalism, and they became thereby increasingly compatible . . . no longer were realism and liberalism
‘incommensurable’—on the contrary they shared a ‘rationalist’ research programme.” See Ole Waever,
“The Rise and Fall of the Interparadigm Debate,” in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds.,
Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 149–85.
6 J. Ann Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand: Troubled Engagements Between Feminists and IR
Theorists” International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4 (December 1997): 611–32; and V. Spike Peterson,
“Transgressing Boundaries: Theories of Knowledge, Gender, and International Relations,” Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 21, no. 2 (June 1992): 183–206.
7 Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand,” 613; Cynthia Weber argues that “wherever the feminist body
of literature threatens to overflow the boundaries within which the discipline of International Relations
has sought to confine it . . . [the mainstream] works to reimpose these boundaries or invent new ones.”
See Cynthia Weber, “Good Girls, Little Girls, Bad Girls: Male Paranoia in Robert Keohane’s Critique of
Feminist International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23, no. 2 (June 1994):
337–49, 337.
8 Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand,” 628.
9 Women in privileged positions in international security policy making remain rare (and are often
identified primarily by their gender when they do reach those positions), and entire scholarly texts can
be found with no reference to women or gender at all.
Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist Contributions 185
dynamic is that less than forty out of more than five thousand articles in
the top five security journals over the last twenty years explicitly address
gender issues as a major substantive theme.10 No gender-based article has
appeared on the pages of Security Studies as of the time we are compiling this
issue.
This lack of communication between the field of Security Studies and
feminist scholars exists despite the growing influence of feminist thought
and practice in the policy world. The passage and implementation of United
States Security Council Resolution 1325 (which mainstreams gender in Se-
curity Council operations and obligates member-states to include women
in peace negotiations and post-conflict reconstruction), and similar initia-
tives throughout the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF, show
that gender is a salient concern in global governance.11 Furthermore, spe-
cific international phenomena all show not only women’s significance in

international security, but also the relevance of gender as a factor in un-
derstanding and addressing security matters—such as, the increase in fe-
male suicide bombers,12 growing evidence of the use of sexual violence
as a tool of war in conflicts from South Korea to the Democratic Repub-
lic of Congo,13 women’s participation as soldiers in armed conflicts around
the globe,14 and women’s activism and protests against conflicts (including
the war in Iraq).15 Practitioners interested in peacekeeping,16 the study and
10 This statistic counts International Security, Security Studies, International Security Review, Issues
in International Security, and Security Dialogue as of early 2006. The statistic makes it appear as if the
first four journals do a better job on this issue than they do and is unfair to Security Dialogue, which
published more than half of the security work which addressed issues of gender. These observations are
the result of a personal count and any counting error is mine alone.
11 Jacqui True, “Gender Mainstreaming in Global Public Policy,” International Feminist Journal of
Politics 5, no. 3 (2003): 368–96; and Jacqui True and Michael Mintrom, “Transnational Networks and
Policy Diffusion: The Case of Gender Mainstreaming,” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March
2001): 27–57.
12 Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics
(London: Zed Books, 2007).

13 Claudia Card, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” Hypatia 11, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 5–18.
14 Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You? The Militarisation of Women’s Lives (Boston: South End
Press, 1983); see also Megan MacKenzie and Sandra McEvoy’s articles in this special issue.
15 Concerning Iraq, see Judy El-Bushra, “Feminism, Gender, and Women’s Peace Activism,” Develop-
ment and Change 38, no. 1 (January 2007): 131–47; generally, see Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenham
Women Everywhere: Dreams, Ideas, and Actions from the Women’s Peace Movement (London: Pluto Press,
1983).
16 See Dyan Mazurana, “International Peacekeeping Operations: To Neglect Gender is to Risk Peace-
keeping Failure,” in The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, eds.,
Dubravka Zarkov and Cynthia Cockburn (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2002); and Dyan Mazurana,
Angela Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart, ed., Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping (Oxford: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005).
186 L. Sjoberg
management of refugees,17 and protecting noncombatants in times of war18

reveal the increasing importance of gender sensitivity to many of the actors
that we study in global politics. As Spike Peterson explains, “‘real world’
events are not adequately addressed by androcentric accounts that render
women and gender relations invisible.”19
This special issue was assembled with the goal of improving the quality
and quantity of conversations between feminist Security Studies and Security
Studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender
analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist
research program in Security Studies. The articles included in this special
issue not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that
gender is not a subsection of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or
briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, feminists argue that gender is con-
ceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international

security. As such, accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship cannot be pro-
duced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of
world politics.
In this introduction, I provide a brief discussion of what it means to
approach IR from a feminist perspective and a brief overview of questions
of epistemology and method in feminist theorizing. I then give a summary
of some of the accomplishments of and common themes in feminist Se-
curity Studies to this point and situate feminist work in the larger field of
Security Studies. Finally, I introduce the articles in this special issue as anal-
yses of traditional issues in Security Studies through feminist lenses, explo-
rations of the roles that women play in conflict and conflict resolution, and
the introduction of new or previously neglected Security Studies issues that
resulted from taking gender seriously.
FEMINIST APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
It has been argued that all scholars approach their particular subject matter
with lenses that “foreground some things, and background others.”20 In
17See Nira Yuval-Davis, and Pnina Werbner, ed., Women, Citizenship, and Difference (London: Zed
Books, 2006); and Doreen Indra, “Gender: A Key Dimension of the Refugee Experience,” Refugee 6, no.
3 (1987).
18 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Theory: Readings in Social and Political Theory (New York: New
York University Press, 1992); Judith Gardam and Hilary Charlesworth, “Protection of Women in Armed
Conflict,” Human Rights Quarterly 22, no. 1 (February 2000): 148–66; Laura Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and
the Wars in Iraq (New York: Lexington Books, 2006); and Laura Sjoberg, “The Gendered Realities of the
Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4
(December 2006): 889–910.
19 Peterson, “Transgressing Boundaries,” 197.
20 V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1999), 21.
other words, scholars’ investigations start with the variables that they find
meaningful in global politics. For the studies in this special issue, that lens
is gender.21 As Jill Steans explains, “to look at the world through gendered
lenses is to focus on gender as a particular kind of power relation, or to
trace out the ways in which gender is central to understanding international
processes.”22
In order to understand feminist work in IR, it is important to note that
gender is not the equivalent of membership in biological sex classes. Instead,
gender is a system of symbolic meaning that creates social hierarchies based
on perceived associations with masculine and feminine characteristics. As
Lauren Wilcox explains, “gender symbolism describes the way in which mas-
culine/feminine are assigned to various dichotomies that organize Western
thought” where “both men and women tend to place a higher value on
the term which is associated with masculinity.”23 Gendered social hierarchy,

then, is at once a social construction and a “structural feature of social and
political life” that “profoundly shapes our place in, and view of, the world.”24
This is not to say that all people, or even all women, experience gender
in the same ways. While genders are lived by people throughout the world,
“it would be unrepresentative to characterize a ‘gendered experience’ as
if there were something measurable that all men or all women shared in
life experience.”25 Each person lives gender in a different culture, body,
language, and identity. Therefore, there is not one gendered experience
of global politics, but many. By extension, there is not one gender-based
perspective on IR or international security, but many. Still, as a structural
feature of social and political life, gender is “a set of discourses that represent,
construct, change, and enforce social meaning.”26 Feminism, then, “is neither
just about women, nor the addition of women to male-stream constructions;
it is about transforming ways of being and knowing” as gendered discourses
are understood and transformed.27
Though feminist scholars approach IR through these “gendered lenses,”
it is important to note that there is not one feminist approach to international
relations theory.28 Instead, like other IR theorists, feminists can approach
21 Ibid., 2.
22 Jill Steans, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1998), 5.
23 Lauren Wilcox, “Gendering the ‘Cult of the Offensive,”’ in Gender and International Security:
Feminist Approaches, ed. Laura Sjoberg (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

24 Wilcox, “Gendering the ‘Cult of the Offensive.”’
25 Sjoberg and Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores, 16.
26 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); and J. K. Gibson-
Graham, “‘Stuffed if I Know!’ Reflections on Post-Modern Feminist Social Research,” Gender, Place, and
Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 1, no. 2 (September 1994): 205–44.
27 Peterson, “Transgressing Boundaries,” 205.
28 A detailed description of typologies of feminist theories can be found in Ann Tickner and Laura
Sjoberg, “Feminism,” in International Relations Theories, eds., Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith,
2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
188 L. Sjoberg
global politics from a number of different perspectives, including realist, lib-

eral, constructivist, critical, poststructural, postcolonial, and ecological. These
perspectives yield different, and sometimes contradictory, insights about and
predictions for global politics. Similar diversity, however, is a feature of all
of the major research programs in international relations.29
Feminist work from a realist perspective is interested in the role of gen-
der in strategy and power politics between states.30 Liberal feminist work calls
attention to the subordinate position of women in global politics and argues
that gender oppression can be remedied by including women in the existing
structures of global politics. 31 Critical feminism explores the ideational and
material manifestations of gendered identity and gendered power in world
politics.32 Feminist constructivism focuses on the ways that ideas about gen-
der shape and are shaped by global politics.33 Feminist poststructuralism
focuses on how gendered linguistic manifestations of meaning, particularly

strong/weak, rational/emotional, and public/private dichotomies, serve to
empower the masculine, marginalize the feminine, and constitute global
politics.34 Postcolonial feminists, while sharing many of the epistemological
assumptions of poststructural feminists, focus on the ways that colonial re-
lations of domination and subordination established under imperialism are
reflected in gender relations, and even relations between feminists, in global
politics and academic work.35 Ecological feminism, or “ecofeminism,” iden-
tifies connections between the treatment of women and minorities on one
29 See, for discussion, Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman, “Lessons from Lakatos,” in Progress
in International Relations Theory: Appraising the Field, eds., Colin Elman and Miriam Fendius Elman
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
30 Most typologies leave out a feminist/realist approach from their list of types of feminist theories.
Still, several feminists have suggested that the research programs have potentially fruitful commonalities—
for example, Sandra Whitworth, “Gender and the Interparadigm Debate,” Millennium: Journal of In-
ternational Studies 18, no. 2 (June 1989): 265–72; Laura Sjoberg, “Feminism and Realism, Strategy in
(Apparently) Gender-Emancipatory Policies,” paper presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Inter-
national Studies Association, Chicago, Illinois, 28 February-3 March 2007; and Jacqui True, “Feminism
and Realism,” paper presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, San
Francisco, CA, 26–29 March 2008.
31 For example, liberal feminists have tested the relationship between woman-inclusive policies at
the domestic level and a state’s violence internationally, arguing that states will be less violent if and
when women are integrated into their structures. See Mary Caprioli and Mark Boyer, “Gender, Violence,
and International Crisis,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 45, no. 4 (August 2001): 503–18.
32 Critical feminism builds on the work of Robert Cox, studying the interacting forces of material
conditions, ideas, and institutions, committed to understanding the world in order to change it. See
Sandra Whitworth, Feminism and International Relations (London: MacMillan, 1994); and Christine Chin,
In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
33 See Elisabeth Prugl, The Global Construction of Gender (New York: Columbia, 1999).
34 See Charlotte Hooper, Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics
(New York: Columbia, 2001).

35 See Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,
eds., Chandra Mohanty, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991),
51–80; and Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair, ed., Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations:
Reading Race, Gender, and Class (New York: Routledge, 2002).
hand and the nonhuman environment on the other.36 While each of the
articles in this special issue approach international security from a feminist
perspective, each of their feminist perspectives differ.
Still, feminists looking at global politics share a normative and empirical
concern that the international system is gender-hierarchical. Gender hierar-
chy is seen as a normative problem, which can be revealed and analyzed
through scholarly evaluation. This tenet of feminist approaches to IR (and
specifically international security) has been the source of debates between
feminists and those who argue that it is possible to study gender without
feminism (and therefore without an understanding of gender hierarchy as a
normative problem).
For example, Charli Carpenter has argued for the value of studying
gender in international relations from a nonfeminist standpoint. Carpenter’s

interest in such an endeavor grew out of her recognition that, while critical
feminist IR continued to grow as a subfield, “mainstream” IR remains largely
silent about gender.37 She argues that this disparity can be explained by a
discipline-wide perception that gender studies in IR is largely synonymous
with feminist IR.38 Carpenter contends that this is a misperception that de-
prives conventional IR of observations about gender that do not stem from
feminist insights.39 In the alternative, Carpenter argues that nonfeminists who
study gender would undertake insightful studies that feminists would miss
because they are critical of the positivist methodologies necessary to obtain
meaningful results.
Scholars who take an explicitly feminist approach to studying IR contend
that Carpenter has misidentified the problem: it is not (only) the methods
of “mainstream” scholarship that feminist IR scholarship problematizes; it is
the incompleteness of its substantive analysis. It is not the incorporation of
gender as a variable in “mainstream” IR that feminist work critiques; it is
that many “mainstream” scholars who use gender as a variable do so with
what feminists argue is an insufficient understanding of the meanings and
implications of gender in global politics. Too many scholars who use gender
as a variable use it as a proxy for women (or men), failing to take account of
the complexity of the levels and ways that gender operates in global politics.
Marysia Zalewski explains that “the driving force of feminism is its at-
tention to gender and not simply to women. To be sure, for many feminists
the concern about the injustices done to women because of their sex is
36 See Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993); and Karen Warren,
ed. Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997).
37 R. Charli Carpenter, “Gender Theories in World Politics: Contributions of a Nonfeminist Stand-
point?” International Studies Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 153–65, 153.

38 Ibid., 155.
39 Ibid.
190 L. Sjoberg
paramount, but the concept, nature and practice of gender are key.”40 Helen
Kinsella is concerned that scholars approaching gender from a nonfeminist
standpoint “necessarily presuppose that gender is not already constructed.”41
Scholars looking through gender lenses “ask what assumptions about gender
(and race, class, nationality, and sexuality) are necessary to make particular
statements, policies, and actions meaningful.”42 In other words, gender is
not a variable that can be measured as a “yes” or “no” (or “male” or “female”
question), but as a more complicated symbolic and cultural construction.43
The difference between “feminist IR” and “nonfeminist studies of gen-
der” can be seen in the example of the debate between feminist scholars
and Charli Carpenter on the nature and manifestations of the noncombatant
immunity principle.44 For example, Carpenter observes the (repeated and
almost exclusive) use of women and children to represent civilians in the

donor-seeking literature of transnational advocates for the civilian immunity
principle.45 Feminist scholars have not focused their criticisms on the ob-
servational content of those results or the method with which they were
collected. Instead, feminists have argued that analyzing those observations
without an understanding of gender subordination produces an incorrect
understanding of what is actually going on.46 Carpenter concludes that these
representations mean that transnational advocacy networks (and other pur-
veyors of aid to civilians) protect women while neglecting men.47 Feminists
challenge this conclusion, arguing that
40Marysia Zalewski, “Well, What is the Feminist Perspective on Bosnia?” International Affairs 71,
no. 2 (April 1995): 339–56.
41 Helen Kinsella, “For a Careful Reading: The Conservativism of Gender Constructivism,” Interna-
tional Studies Review 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 287–302.

42 Wilcox, “Gendering the Cult of the Offensive.”
43 Feminists have argued that Carpenter’s approach to studying “gender from a non-feminist per-
spective” relies on failing to interrogate the naturalness of sex, making it fundamentally at odds with
feminist approaches whose work is built on a critique of the assumed immutability of the male/female
dichotomy. Lauren Wilcox makes this argument most articulately in a yet-unpublished manuscript, “What
Difference Gender Makes: Ontologies of Gender and Dualism in IR.”
44 R. Charli Carpenter, “Women, Children, and Other Vulnerable Groups: Gender, Strategic Frames,
and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 2 (June
2005): 295–355; R. Charli Carpenter, Innocent Women and Children: Gender, Norms, and the Protection
of Civilians (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Laura Sjoberg, “The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Princi-
ple”; Helen Kinsella, “Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War,” in Power in Global
Governance, eds., Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
249–72; and Lauren Wilcox, “What Difference Gender Makes.”
45 Carpenter, “Women, Children, and Other Vulnerable Groups.”
46 Marysia Zalewski explains the problem as an issue of not paying attention to existing theorizing,
asserting that “to suggest that one might make scholarly inquiries about woman or man through gender
that do not engage the abundance of existing theoretical analyses runs the risk of saying nothing at all.”
Zalewski’s concern is that (when it is not about feminism) entirely ignoring a canon of literature decades
in the making is generally a losing method for theoretical development. See Marysia Zalewski, “‘Women’s
Troubles’ Again in IR,” International Studies Review 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 287–302.
47 Carpenter, “Women, Children, and Other Vulnerable Groups.”
a woman and child on the front of a Red Cross brochure means some-
thing about gender; it means more than that there is no man in the
picture. It means that women are seen as vulnerable, as less than, and
as a liability in war. It means that men will fight to protect women. It
means that women’s viewpoints and women’s suffering are incompletely
understood. Carpenter successfully recognizes the empirical phenomena
of gender essentialism. Without the tools of feminist analysis, however,
she is unable to explain either its causes or its effects.48
Where Carpenter sees “enabling and legitimizing the targeting of adult

civilian men and older boys,”49 feminists see enabling and legitimizing a so-
cial system and a war system based on gender hierarchy.50 This gender sub-
ordination renders the immunity principle ineffective for men, women, and
children. In the noncombatant immunity puzzle, feminism adds explanatory

power where nonfeminist theories lack deep enough insight, and it provides
a moral basis for theoretical reformulations that answer the puzzle’s most
perplexing questions. As Helen Kinsella explains, “the [non-feminist] schol-
arship that does engage in analysis of gender and the laws of war focuses
primarily on the protection of women within the law rather than the produc-
tion of women in the law, and, more importantly, the production of the laws
of war themselves.”51 It is for these reasons that Terrell Carver characterizes
nonfeminist gender studies as “virtually an oxymoron.”52
In other words, while gender hierarchy is a normative problem, the
failure to recognize it presents an empirical problem for IR scholarship. Fail-
ing to recognize gender hierarchy makes IR scholarship less descriptively
accurate and predictively powerful for its omission of this major force in
global politics. In the study of IR, “feminist theories begin with a different
perspective and lead to further rethinking. They distinguish ‘reality’ from the
world as men know it.”53 Scholars looking through gender lenses “ask what
assumptions about gender (and race, class, nationality, and sexuality) are
necessary to make particular statements, policies, and actions meaningful.”54
Even though gender representations differ, the patterns of valorizing mas-
culinities over femininities that are reflected and reproduced in genderings
in global politics demonstrate the importance of feminist analysis.
48 Sjoberg, “The Gendered Reality of the Immunity Principle,” 900.

49 Carpenter, “Women, Children, and Other Vulnerable Groups,” 296.
50 Sjoberg, “The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle,” 902.
51 Kinsella, “Securing the Civilian,” 289.
52 Terrell Carver, “Gender/Feminism/IR,” International Studies Review 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 287–302.
53 V. Spike Peterson and Jacqui True, “New Times and New Conversations,” in The Man Question
in International Relations, eds., M. Zalewski and J. Parpart (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). Many
feminists critique the implicit naturalness of the categories of male and female that are often used to
label both sex and gender. See, for example, V. Spike Peterson, “Sexing Political Identities/Nationalism
as Heterosexism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 1 (November 1999): 34–65, 38.
54 Wilcox, “Gendering the Cult of the Offensive.”
192 L. Sjoberg
EPISTEMOLOGY AND METHOD FOR FEMINIST APPROACHES

TO SECURITY
Feminist scholars have argued that “gender matters in what we study, why
we study, and how we study global politics.”55 Epistemologically, feminists
have long recognized that “whatever knowledge may ostensibly be about,
it is always in part about the relationships between the knower and the
known.”56 In other words, feminist scholars often see knowing not in terms
of the dichotomy between objective knowledge (fact) and subjective knowl-
edge (opinion), but instead relationally—knowledge is necessarily contex-
tual, contingent, and interested.57 Instead, objective knowledge is only the
subjective knowledge of privileged voices disguised as neutral by culturally
assumed objectivity, “where the privileged are licensed to think for everyone,
so long as they do so ‘objectively.”’58 This understanding of the relationship

between the knower and the known in feminist thought means that some
feminists “are asking questions that could probably not be asked within the
epistemological boundaries of positivist social scientific approaches to the
discipline.”59
The feminist recognition of a relationship between the knower and the
known means that many if not most feminist scholars see (all) knowledge-
building as a political enterprise.60 Feminist scholars have argued that all
IR scholarship has political commitments, even though most of the disci-
pline hides its politics behind claimed objectivity.61 Feminist scholars, how-
ever, emphasize that all knowledge is interested, and express a political
55 Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, ed., Feminist Methodologies for International Rela-
tions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5.

56 Naomi Scheman, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (New York
and London: Routledge, 1993); Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms,
and Epistemologies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Mary Hawkesworth, “Knowers,
Knowing, Known: Feminist Theory and Claims of Truth,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
14, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 533–57.
57 Mary Maynard and June Purvis, ed., Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1994); Anne Marie Goetz, “Feminism and the Claim to Know: Contradictions
in Feminist Approaches to Women in Development,” in Gender and International Relations, eds., Rebecca
Grant and Kathleen Newland (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991); and Evelyn
Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). The idea
that knowledge is “interested” comes from Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1972).
58 Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq, 39.
59 J. Ann Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations: Some Methodological Issues,” in Feminist
Methodologies for International Relations, 41.

60 Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 275; and J. Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001).
61 Jill Steans, Gender in International Relations (London: Routledge, 1998), 29.
commitment to understanding the world from the points of view of marginal-

ized peoples and actors.62
These epistemological understandings have methodological implica-
tions for feminist work in IR generally and Security Studies specifically. Femi-
nists in IR are looking not only to understand the international arena but also
to highlight its injustices, and to change those injustices. For this reason, fem-
inists have led the way in introducing and applying “hermeneutic, historically
contingent, sociological, or ethnically based” and “ethnographic, narrative,
or cross-cultural methodologies.”63 The frequent appropriateness of multiple
methods to answer feminist questions makes feminist method not an event
or a performance but a journey—a journey of critique, revealing, reformula-
tion, and reflexivity.64 It is substance, not methodological commitments, that
dictate the contents of that journey.
Different feminists hold different perspectives on the degree to which

feminism is necessarily a methodological and epistemological critique of
“mainstream” IR. For example, Mary Caprioli argues that it is possible to
“build a bridge among feminist and traditional worldviews” by providing
a rationale for the incorporation of feminism into conventional IR using a
quantitative approach.65 On the other hand, others argue that “reason itself
is more deeply implicated in our oppression; [therefore] the problem is not
one that can be solved by a shift in emphasis . . . the core idea is that a
rational stance is itself a stance of oppression or domination, and accepted
ideals of reason both reflect and reinforce power relations that advantage
white privileged men.”66 Ontological and epistemological concerns influence
62 J. Ann Tickner, Gender and International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
see also Sarah Brown, “Feminism, International Theory, and International Relations of Gender Inequality,”
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 3 (December 1988): 461–75. This commitment is
inherent in feminisms for two main reasons. First, feminists are critical of the personal/political divide
that obscures the suffering of many marginalized people in global politics. See Jean Elshtain, “Reflections
on War and Political Discourse: Realism, Just War, and Feminism in a Nuclear Age,” Political Theory 13,
no. 1 (February 1985): 39–57. Instead, Cynthia Enloe explains that the personal is international and the
international is personal. See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). Second, feminists observe the
oppression of women, and thus have a concept of the material and ideational properties of subjugation
which, if not universal in quantity/quality, can and should inspire empathy. See Fiona Robinson, Global-
izing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 31;
and Marianne H. Marchand and Anne Sisson Runyan, ed., Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings,
Sites, and Resistances (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
63 J. Ann Tickner, “Continuing the Conversation,” International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Septem-
ber 1998): 205–10; and Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations.”

64 Steans, Gender and International Relations; Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq; and
J. Ann Tickner, “What is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations
Methodological Questions,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (March 2005): 1–27.
65 Mary Hawkesworth, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” In-
ternational Studies Review 6, no. 2 (June 2004): 253–69.

66 Sally Haslanger, “On Being Objective and Objectified,” in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Articles
in Reason and Objectivity, eds., Louis M. Anthony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002).
194 L. Sjoberg
different feminist theorists (and different feminist projects) in different ways.

What feminist projects share is a self-reflexivity about ideas and methods
based on observations of gender inequalities not only in the real world of
global politics, but also in the communities that study that world and the
methods they use to do so.
Though some scholars view feminist IR as methodologically limited,
Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True argue that “what makes schol-
arship . . . feminist is the research question and the theoretical methodology
and not the tool or particular method used.”67 Feminist research finds tools
“for moving beyond the knowledge frameworks that construct international
relations without attention to gender.”68 These tools are means to “making
the invisible visible, bringing women’s lives to the center, rendering the
trivial important, putting the spotlight on women as competent actors, and
understanding women as subjects rather than the objects of men.”69 In this

way, including gender as a central area of analysis “transforms knowledge
in ways that go beyond adding women” to critiquing, complicating, and
improving Security Studies.70
Including gender as a central category of analysis means characterizing it
as both constitutive of and a causal factor in international politics. It is useful
to look to the work of Alexander Wendt for a review of this distinction.71
Wendt explains that “causal theories answer questions of the form ‘why?’
. . . ‘why did the Protestant Reformation occur?’ ‘Why did Gorbachev move
to end the Cold War?”’72 In response to these questions, “in saying that ‘X
causes Y,’ we assume three things: 1) that X and Y exist independent of
each other, 2) that X precedes Y in time, and 3) that but for X, Y would not
have occurred.”73 On the other hand, “constitutive theories have a different
objective, which is to account for the properties of things by reference to the
structures in virtue of which they exist . . . . Their goal is to show how the
properties of the system are constituted.”74 As such, constitutive questions
usually take the form of “how-possible?” or “what?” . . . . “what we seek
in asking these questions is insight into what it is that instantiates some
phenomenon, not why that phenomenon comes about.”75
67 Ackerly, Stern, and True, Feminist Methodologies, 5.

68 Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand,” 621.
69 Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
248.
70
Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand,” 621.
71
Alexander Wendt, “On Constitution and Causation in International Relations,” Review of Interna-
tional Studies 24, no. 1 (January 1998), 101–22.
72 Ibid., 104.
73 Ibid., 105.
74 Ibid., 105. As such, Wendt argues, “the answers to constitutive questions must support a coun-
terfactual claim of necessity, namely that in the absence of the structures to which we are appealing
the properties in question would not exist.” Ibid., 105–106. Still, the counterfactual proof for constitutive
claims is different than that for causal claims, it is “conceptual or logical, not causal or natural.” Ibid., 106.
75 Ibid., 105.
In this issue, Megan MacKenzie’s “Securitization and Desecuritization:

Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra
Leone” demonstrates a causal relationship between the desecuritization of
former female combatants and the inefficacy of the disarmament, demobi-
lization, and reintegration (DDR) process in Sierra Leone. Sandra McEvoy’s
article, “Loyalist Women Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland: Beginning a
Feminist Conversation about Conflict Resolution,” shows that including Loy-
alist combatant women in the negotiation of various agreements (or, as
her interviewees characterize them, “disagreements”) could have had seri-
ous implications not only for the content of those agreements but also for
the success of negotiated cease-fires between belligerent groups. In “Peace-
building Through a Gender Lens and the Challenges of Implementation in
Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire,” Heidi Hudson contends that an African feminist
consciousness in including women in peacebuilding could make those pro-

cesses more efficient. Despite their being about gender, many of the claims
in this special issue are the sort of claims (causal) backed up by the sort of
evidence (case studies and interviews) that frequent the pages of this and
other security journals.
On the other hand, Brigit Locher and Elisabeth Prugl hold up Cynthia
Enloe’s work on gender and militarism as an example of constitutive femi-
nist argumentation.76 Enloe “claims that relationships between governments
depend on the construction and reconstruction of gender and that such re-
lations produce certain notions of femininity and masculinity. Gender in her
work emerges as constitutive of international relations and vice versa.”77
In the debate about the noncombatant immunity principle, feminists argue
that gender constitutes the noncombatant immunity principle, as opposed to
Charli Carpenter’s characterization of gender as an intervening causal vari-
able. Jennifer Lobasz’s article in this special issue, “Beyond Border Security:
Feminist Approaches to Human Trafficking,” shows that gender constitutes
the concept of “human trafficking” because prevalent understandings of hu-
man trafficking “(1) discount women’s agency, (2) establish a [gendered]
standard for victimization that most trafficked persons cannot meet, and
(3) unjustly prioritize the sexual traffic of white women over the traffic of
women and men of all races who are trafficked for purposes including, but
not exclusive to, the sex trade.” Lauren Wilcox’s “Gendering the Cult of the
Offensive” also makes a constitutive claim, arguing that gender constitutes
potential belligerents’ perceptions of the offense-defense balance, which are
shaped not by quantitative or qualitative military advantage, but instead by
gendered perceptions of technology, gendered nationalism, and the “protec-
tion racket.”
76 Birgit Locher and Elisabeth Prugl, “Feminism and Constructivism: Worlds Apart or Sharing the
Middle Ground?” International Studies Quarterly 45, no. 1: (March 2001): 111–29.
77 Ibid., 116.
196 L. Sjoberg
While some of the articles in this volume focus on causal claims and
others on constitutive claims, together they demonstrate that constitution and
causation are not distinct and separable categories. The constitutive claims in
this and other feminist theorizing have causal implications: determining the
nature of the perceived offense balance, or the publically consumed content
of human trafficking, or the noncombatant immunity principle, has impli-
cations for how those phenomena influence and are influenced by global
politics. Likewise, many of the causal claims in this and other feminist the-
orizing have constitutive implications or rely on constitutive arguments. For
example, Sandra McEvoy’s assertion in this issue that the peace processes
in Northern Ireland would be substantively improved by the inclusion of
women combatants is a cause and effect argument, but it is reliant on evi-
dence about the constitution of what a combatant is and what a woman is
in the context of that conflict and more generally.
SEEING GENDER IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
Though, as noted above, conversations between feminists who study secu-

rity and the field of Security Studies have been limited, feminist scholars
have developed important and sophisticated analyses of many key issues in
international security. Based on this literature, and looking ahead to fem-
inist conversations with the “mainstream,” this section discusses some of
the contributions of feminist Security Studies and then lays out four of the
foundational arguments of feminist theories of international security.
Feminists have analyzed traditional concepts and theories in Security
Studies. In doing so, they have demonstrated the gender bias in security’s
core concepts, such as the state, violence, war, peace, and even security
itself, urging redefinition in light of that bias.78 For example, Jacqui True has
pointed out that the state is constructed on the dual gendered dichotomies
of inside/outside and public/private.79 Women’s lives and gender subordi-
nation are trapped in the inside, private dimension of that dichotomy, where
abuse is invisible.80 From a feminist perspective, the state can be seen as a
misleading construction that purports to protect its citizens but often perpetu-
ates the subordination of women.81 A gender-based analysis, then, questions
the unitary nature of state security by arguing that secure states often only
achieve security by sacrificing the security of some of their citizens, namely,
78Tickner, Gendering World Politics; and Peterson, Gendered States; and J. J. Pettman, Worlding
Women: A Feminist International Politics (London: Routledge, 1996).
79 Jacqui True, “Feminism,” in Theories of International Relations, eds., Scott Burchill and Andrew
Linklater (London: Macmillian, 1996), 229–30.

80 See also Susan B. Boyd, ed. Challenging the Public/Private Divide (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1997).
81 True, “Feminism.” See also John Hoffman, Gender and Sovereignty: Feminism, the State, and
International Relations (London: MacMillan, 2001).

women.82 In place of the focus on state security, feminists have suggested

an approach to security that begins its analysis at the margins of social and
political life.83
Feminist scholars have also gained empirical and theoretical insights
from analyzing the various roles of women and gender in conflict and conflict
resolution. Feminists have found gender-based language and assumptions
at the foundation of debates about nuclear strategy, 84 the noncombatant
immunity principle,85 peacekeeping,86 and various aspects of militarization
and soldiering.87 For example, Galia Golan’s work on the gendered nature
of Israeli militarization demonstrates the crucial role that gender plays in
security politics and policy.88 Golan notes that, given the “prolonged armed
conflict and chronic absence of peace” in Israel, “the military as an institution
plays a central role” in society.89 She notes that, despite the impression
that Israeli society is more egalitarian because both women and men are
subject to compulsory services, “this central and socializing institution . . . is
the quintessence of a patriarchal institution, reinforcing and perpetuating the
stereotypical role of women as subordinate.”90 Golan points out that, in the
Israeli military, women are barred from combat positions.91 Given that “status
in the army is determined by one’s relationship to combat,” and status in the
army is linked to status in Israeli society more generally, women’s inequality
in the military both entrenches inequality in society more generally and
results in the devaluation of peaceful policies in Israeli politics.92 Golan
demonstrates not only that Israeli militarization is gendered, but also that the
gendering of Israeli militarization affects choices of security policies.
82 Tickner, Gendering World Politics, 51; and Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage,
1997).
83 Ackerly, Stern, and True, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations; Christine Sylvester,
Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); and Tickner, Gender in International Relations.
84 Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the World of Rational Defense Intellectuals,” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 687–718.

85 Sjoberg, Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq.
86 Sandra Whitworth, Men, Militarism, and Peacekeeping (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers,
2004).
87 For example Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

88 Galia Golan, “Militarization and Gender: The Israeli Experience,” Women’s Studies International
Forum 20, no. 5/6 (September-December 1997): 581–86. For in-depth coverage of the gendered dimen-
sions of the Israel/Palestine conflict, see Simona Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The
Politics of Women’s Resistance (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
89 Golan, “Militarization and Gender,” 581.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid., 582. Additionally, it is easier for women to get an exemption from service, women serve
far less time, women complete a shorter basic training, and women do virtually no reserve duty (while
men are obligated to the reserves for thirty years). The result is that even this military, which conscripts
women, is male-dominated, both in absolute numbers and in terms of positions of power. Ibid., 583.
92 Ibid., 585–86.
198 L. Sjoberg
In addition to critiquing concepts traditionally employed in the study

of security, gender-based perspectives have also uncovered new empirical
knowledge about sexual violence in war and gendered participation in armed
conflict.93 For example, feminist scholars have pointed out that rape is more
prevalent in times of war than in times of peace.94 In addition to pointing out
the serious threat to women’s security posed by wartime rape,95 feminists
have demonstrated that rape is institutionalized in war, as recreational and
as a weapon.96 For these reasons, feminist scholars have pushed wartime
rape onto the agenda of Security Studies, arguing that “wartime rape is . . . a
collective security problem. Rape happens, not as a question of thought-
lessness, provocative or unfortunate behavior, but as a question of national
warfare.”97
Feminist theorists have contributed to the field of Security Studies
through analyses and reformulations of the traditional contents of Security

Studies, explorations of the roles that women and gender play in combat
and combat resolution, and bringing attention to new or neglected subjects
revealed by taking gender seriously. This special issue aims to consolidate
and build on these gains. In order to begin that process, I will lay out some
of the common tenets of work in feminist Security Studies.
The first common tenet is a broad understanding of what counts as
a security issue, and to whom the concept of security should be applied.
Feminist approaches to security define security broadly in multidimensional
or multilevel terms. In this view, security threats include not only war and
international violence, but also domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender sub-
ordination, and ecological destruction.98 Feminist scholars not only broaden
what is meant by security but also who merits security. Fueled by the recog-
nition that secure states often contain insecure women, feminists analyze the
security of individuals and communities as well as of states and international
organizations. Feminist studies of international security have demonstrated
how the security of individuals is related to national and international poli-
tics, as well as how international politics impacts the security of individuals
at the local level. Feminists have argued that “the personal is international
93 See for example, Card, “Rape as a Weapon of War,” 5; Anne Barstow, ed. War’s Dirty Secret:
Rape, Prostitution, and Other Crimes Against Women (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2000); Caroline O.
N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, ed.,Victims, Perpetrators, or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political
Violence (New York: Zed Books, 2001); and Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End
of the Cold War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
94 Enloe, The Morning After; and Steans,Gender and International Relations.
95 Lene Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape: Bosnia and the Construction of Security,” International
Feminist Journal of Politics 3, no. 1 (April 2001): 55–75; and Gardam and Charlesworth, “Protection of
Women in Armed Conflict.”
96 Peterson and Runyan, Global Gender Issues, 127.
97 Hansen, “Gender, Rape, and Nation,” 59.
98 Tickner, Gender in International Relations.
[and] the international is personal.”99 A good example of this argument

is Katherine Moon’s work on military prostitution in the United States-
South Korea security relationship. 100 Moon argues that United States-South
Korea negotiations for the maintenance of the United States military pres-
ence in South Korea have several times turned on the United States’ demands
that the South Korean government regulate prostitution in camp towns near
United States military installations; specifically, that the South Korean govern-
ment decrease levels of venereal disease among prostitutes in the 1970s.101
Moon demonstrates that individual women’s bodies and behaviors impacted
the relationship between the United States and South Korea. Further, Moon
demonstrates that the presence of bases created a demand for a prostitution
industry servicing (almost exclusively) soldiers, and that the “clean-up” rules
negotiated by the United States and implemented by the South Koreans cre-
ated classes of prostitutes within those camp-towns and left many women
even more vulnerable to the demands of pimps and customers.102 In this
way, Moon demonstrates that, not only is the personal international, but the
international is personal.
The second common theme in feminist Security Studies is an under-
standing of the gendered nature of the values prized in the realm of interna-
tional security. If “masculinism is the ideology that justifies and naturalizes
gender hierarchy by not questioning the elevation of ways of being and
knowing associated with men and masculinity over those associated with
women and femininity,”103 then the values socially associated with feminin-
ity and masculinity are awarded unequal weight in a competitive social order,
perpetuating inequality in perceived gender difference. Social processes se-
lect for values and behaviors that can be associated with an idealized, or
hegemonic, masculinity.104 This selection occurs because traits associated
with hegemonic masculinities dominate social relations while other values
are subordinated. This cycle is self-sustaining—so long as masculinity ap-
pears as a unitary concept, dichotomous thinking about gender continues
to pervade social life.105 This dichotomous thinking about gender influences
how scholars and policy makers frame and interpret issues of international
security.
A third common theme for feminist Security Studies is the broad and
diverse role that feminist scholars see gender playing in the theory and
99 Enloe, Maneuvers.
100 Katherine Moon, Sex Among Allies: Militarized Prostitution in US-South Korea Relations (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
101 Ibid., 113.
102 Ibid., 190.
103 Charlotte Hooper, “Masculinist Practices and Gender Politics: The Operation of Multiple Mas-
culinities in International Relations,” in The ‘Man’ Question, 31.

104 Hooper, Manly States; and Connell, Masculinities.
105 Hooper, Manly States, 48.
200 L. Sjoberg
practice of international security. In each of these articles, gender matters in

the theory and practice of international security in three main ways: it is nec-
essary, conceptually, for understanding international security, it is important
in analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and it is essential to thinking
about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm. First,
gender can be a constitutive category which defines (and is defined by) in-
ternational actors’ understandings of their security as well as those left out of
security analyses. For example, Cynthia Enloe makes the point that many of
the things that we take for granted—among them security—could not exist in
their current form without gender hierarchy. For example, the international
political economy is reliant on taking women’s unpaid labor for granted
(and thus entrenching gender subordination).106 Similarly, international se-
curity practice often relies on the invisibility of women (both as labor and
as a casus belli) specifically and gender generally.107 Second, gender can be

a causal variable, which causes (or is caused by) states’ security-seeking be-
havior. For example, feminist scholars have argued that states’ foreign policy
choices are guided by their identities, which are based on association with
characteristics attached to masculinity, manliness, and heterosexism. 108 Fi-
nally, feminists’ interest in remedying gender subordination could be episte-
mologically constitutive for the theory and practice of security. For example,
if we were to re-envision security as starting from the perspective of indi-
vidual women’s lives, it would change not only what security is, but how it
is conceptualized, operationalized, and acted on. The articles in this special
issue argue that gender adds something to Security Studies, but that it is also
a transformative force in the constitution of security generally and security
scholarship specifically.
These observations lead to a final common theme for feminist Security
Studies: that the omission of gender from work on international security
does not make that work gender-neutral or unproblematic. Instead, feminist
work on issues of international security has served to “question the supposed
nonexistence of and irrelevance of women in international security politics,”
interrogate “the extent to which women are secured by state ‘protection’ in
times of war and peace,” contest “discourses where women are linked un-
reflectively with peace,” and critique “the assumption that gendered security
practices address only women.”109
106 See V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy (New York: Routledge,
2003); and Catherine Hoskyns and Shirin Rai, “Recasting the Global Political Economy: Counting Women’s
Unpaid Work,” New Political Economy 12, no. 3 (September 2007): 297–317.
107 Enloe, Maneuvers.
108 See Peterson, “Sexing Political Identities”; and Hooper, Manly States.
109 Eric Blanchard, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security The-
ory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 1,289–1,313, 1,290.
SITUATING FEMINIST APPROACHES IN SECURITY STUDIES
Feminist scholars’ claims that research that omits gender is not gender-neutral
but gender-biased have often received a strong reaction from IR scholars.
Scholars have often responded to feminist critiques of IR generally and in-
ternational security specifically by arguing that feminist critiques of the gen-
dered logic and/or structure of their theories are the equivalent of shooting
the messenger, because “mainstream” analyses reflect the gendered world
rather than creating the gendered assumptions themselves. These scholars
make the valid point that their work reflects the real world which is “primarily
engaged by men, and governed by norms of masculinity” while appearing
gender-neutral.110 A feminist perspective, however, does not argue that IR
scholars are wrong to observe a world of gender hierarchy; instead, femi-
nist theorists argue that they are wrong to observe such a world as if those
gender hierarchies did not exist.
This debate shapes the relationship between feminist IR and the “main-
stream” in IR generally and in Security Studies specifically. The relationship
between feminist scholarship and realist/liberal approaches seems at first
glance easy enough to understand. Feminist scholarship is explicitly nor-
mative, while the “neo-neo” synthesis maintains that objective or apolitical
research is still possible.111 Rationalism sees the purpose of theory as bringing
order and meaning to global politics and increasing knowledge through the
logical development of empirical hypotheses;112 feminist scholarship finds
this view problematic and continues to challenge the core assumptions, con-
cepts, and ontological presuppositions of the field.113 Many “mainstream”
scholars have come to see women as important variables within existing the-
ories; feminists argue that efforts to integrate women into existing theories
and consider them equally with men can only lead to a theoretical cul-de-sac
that reinforces gender hierarchy. Feminists do their research by combining
bottom-up and top-down explanations in multilevel analysis; realism and lib-
eralism remain (with some exceptions) systemic-level theoretical discussions.
Feminists argue that people are worth studying as people in global politics
(that all life merits recording);114 “mainstream” security scholars focus their
attention on those powerful actors capable of directly influencing the causal
chain of interstate conflict (if they focus on actors at all). Feminists study
110 Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick, “A Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,”
in Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction, eds., Steven Lee and Sohail Hashmi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2002), 3.
111 See for example, Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry:
Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

112 Robert Keohane, in his 1988 International Studies Association Presidential Address, “International
Institutions: Two Approaches,” described a divide between “rationalists” and “reflectivists.”

113 Tickner, “Continuing the Conversation.”
114 Cynthia Enloe, “Margins, Silences, and Bottom Rungs,” in International Relations Theory.
202 L. Sjoberg
structural as well as direct violence; “mainstream” scholars tend to neglect

structural violence.
As a result of these differences, Ann Tickner has pointed out that “the
effect [of feminist IR] on the mainstream discipline, particularly in the United
States, continues to be marginal.”115 As Spike Peterson explains:
The scale and complexity of what is at stake may invite disbelief (‘the
challenge is unintelligible or overstated’), disdain (‘this is irrelevant to
the ‘real’ work of international relations’), and/or distrust (‘surrendering
empirical/evaluative ground is too dangerous’). As long as marginal ter-
rain is seen as incoherent, it is easier to remain—if that is where you
begin—at the centre.116
Jill Steans echoes this concern, noting that “at best, mainstream scholars have
engaged selectively with feminist IR, ignoring or even disparaging the work
of scholars who work with unsettled notions of gender subjectivities.”117
Peterson explains that, in “mainstream” IR, “critiques of reason, objectivity,
and foundational ontologies are frequently understood as entailing their op-
posites: irrationality, subjectivity or relativism, and nihilism.”118 Though the
feminist project is transformative, the alternatives that it offers are productive
rather than destructive for the knowledge-building enterprise.
Still, “mainstream” Security Studies has been reluctant to accept and in-
clude gender issues. Stephen Walt has argued that a broader field of Security
Studies might not be able to maintain its integrity.119 Though Walt acknowl-
edged that “nonmilitary phenomena can also threaten states,” he argued
that the study of security is mostly if not entirely about interstate wars.120
Other scholars have accepted parts, but not all, of feminist theorizing. For
example, in his debate in International Studies Quarterly with Ann Tickner,
Robert Keohane argued that feminism would be accepted into IR when and
only when feminist scholarship came to take on the epistemological and
methodological identities of the “mainstream” of the discipline.121 Jill Steans,
on the other hand, worries that “ultimately, the legitimacy of feminist work
will only be recognized as a part of ‘the discipline’ when it is rethought
in ways that disturb the existing boundaries of both what we claim to be
115Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand,” 611.

116Peterson, “Transgressing Boundaries,” 187.
117 Jill Steans, “Engaging from the Margins: Feminist Encounters with the Mainstream of International
Relations,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5, no. 3 (August 2003): 428–54.
118 Peterson, “Transgressing Boundaries,”187.
119 Stephen Walt, “The Renaissance of Security Studies,” International Studies Quarterly 35, no. 2
(June 1991): 213.

120 Ibid.
121 Keohane, “International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint”; and Robert
Keohane, “Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between International Relations and Feminist Theory,”
International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 1998): 193–98.
relevant in international politics and what we assume to be legitimate ways

of constructing knowledge.”122 While critical security theorists Keith Krause
and Michael Williams urge openness, arguing that there is “a need for all
scholars to consider seriously the issues central to approaches other than
their own,”123 others are content to marginalize feminist approaches to the
pages of gender-based journals and the panels of feminist organizations. The
question of whether feminist approaches will be accepted into the IR cannon
remains unanswered as feminist IR enters its third decade of research and
teaching.
To be sure, feminist IR differs from “mainstream” IR in important ways,
ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically. The question of how
to define the relationship between the two, given the tendency of the “main-
stream” not to engage with feminist concerns, has caused substantial con-
troversy among IR feminists. Some feminists have argued that the project of
reconciling with “mainstream” IR is insidious and poses danger to the integrity
of feminist theory and feminist theorists.124 As Sarah Brown explains:
The danger in attempts to reconcile international relations and feminism

is twofold. Most immediately, the danger lies in the uncritical acceptance
by feminists of objects, methods, and concepts which presuppose the
subordination of women. More abstrusely, it lies in the uncritical accep-
tance of the very possibility of ‘gender equality.’125
Many IR feminists today heed Brown’s warning, but see it as a caution instead
of as a barrier prohibiting conversations between feminist and rationalist
approaches to IR.
A second approach feminist scholars have used is to ignore that an IR
orthodoxy exists and proceed with their own work as they please. As Judith
Squires and Jutta Weldes propose, “scholars are now actively reconstructing
IR without reference to what the mainstream asserts rightly belongs inside the
discipline. In so doing they show that it is more effective to refuse to engage
in disciplinary navel-gazing inspired by positivist epistemological angst.”126
Still, many feminist scholars problematize this approach (which has come
to be known in the UK as G/IR (Gender/IR)) for ignoring the disciplinary
power-relationships that feminist scholars have revealed over the last two
decades to its own detriment. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that
122 Steans, “Engaging from the Margins,” 445.

123 Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, “Broadening the Agenda of Security Studies: Politics and
Methods,” Mershon International Studies Review 40, no. 2 (October 1996): 247.
124 Brown, “Feminism, International Theory.”
125 Ibid., 470.
126 Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes. “Beyond Being Marginal: Gender and International Relations in
Britain,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 2 (May 2007): 185–203, 185.
204 L. Sjoberg
it functions “to endorse/reproduce conventional heteronormative gendered

arrangements in the discipline of IR.”127
A third way to deal with the distance between feminist IR and IR’s “main-
stream” is a strategy I will call “constructive engagement.” A constructive en-
gagement strategy proposes that feminists, while remaining cognizant of the
intellectual risks of engagement and the power relationships in the discipline,
talk to (and, when possible, with) “mainstream” IR.128 An example of the use
of this strategy can be seen in the work of Ann Tickner.129 Tickner, while
maintaining that feminist insights should fundamentally transform the onto-
logical, epistemological, and methodological foundations of IR, consistently
engages “mainstream” scholars’ ideas about the factors that make global pol-
itics. In her work, Tickner painstakingly demonstrates how IR scholars would
benefit from incorporating a feminist perspective in their research and teach-
ing, in terms of issues of import to them, including increased explanatory

leverage and more nuanced conceptual operationalization.130 Variants of this
constructive engagement strategy have brought the writers in this special is-
sue to their articles which talk to (and hopefully spark discussion with) the
(“mainstream”) field of Security Studies.
If there is an uncertain relationship between IR feminism and the “main-
stream” of the discipline, there is more complexity and confusion about how
IR feminism relates to other critical approaches in the discipline. Many early
readers of this collection of articles have struggled with what is the “value
added” of feminist critiques as compared to other critiques of the IR ortho-
doxy. In other words, in a field that has come to accept some of the insights
of critical theorists, why are feminist approaches also necessary?
These questions can be contextualized given feminist theories’ entry
into the discipline of IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, associated with
the more general “third debate.”131 This debate in IR coincided with the
end of the Cold War, as the discipline looked to make sense of the end
of the Cold War. In the third debate, “certain scholars began to question
127 Marysia Zalewski, “Do We Understand Each Other Yet? Troubling Feminist Encounters With(in)
International Relations,” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 9, no. 2 (May 2007): 302–12.
128 Tickner, “Continuing the Conversation,” 207. Tickner notes these difficulties, explaining, “in the
U.S. at least, where to locate oneself epistemologically or methodologically depends not only on the
condition of world politics, the state of knowledge, and the nature of the problem to be investigated, as
Keohane claims, but also on deeper issues of disciplinary legitimacy and career risks to which I referred
earlier.”
129 For example, Tickner, Gender in International Relations; and Tickner, Gendering World Politics.
130 For example, in Gender in International Relations, Tickner uses a wealth of examples in chapters
on security, political economy, and the environment. This “constructive engagement” strategy (my words,
not theirs) was common in early work in feminist IR, including (but not limited to) the work of Spike
Peterson, Anne Runyan, Sandra Whitworth, Cynthia Enloe, and Francine D’Amico.
131 Tickner, “You Just Don’t Understand.” For extensive discussion of whether or not feminist IR
belongs in the “third debate,” see Sandra Whitworth, “Gender in the Inter-Paradigm Debate”; and Marianne
H. Marchand, “Different Communities/Different Realities/Different Encounters: A Reply to J. Ann Tickner,”
International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 1 (March 1998): 199–204.
both the epistemological and ontological foundations of a field which, in the

United States especially, had been dominated by positivist, rationalist, and
materialist theories.”132 Many feminists “share the postpositivist commitment
to examining the relationship between knowledge and power.”133 As such,
feminist approaches have substantially more in common with a number of
postpositivist approaches than they do with the “IR orthodoxy” as such.134
While it is important to note these commonalities, it is equally important
to recognize that feminisms still have differences with other approaches that
arose during the third debate, and that feminist theory makes an independent
and unique contribution to IR and Security Studies.
The major difference between feminist approaches and other critical
theoretical approaches is that feminists see gender subordination as consti-
tutive of the global political world. As Ann Tickner and I have noted, “IR
postpositivists have been as slow as positivists to introduce gender into their

research.”135 For example, as Christine Sylvester points out, the “Critical Ap-
proaches to Security in Europe” (CASE) Manifesto published in Security Dia-
logue lists feminist approaches (along with other “hard-core postmodernists”)
as relevant to critical security, but only in a footnote. In other words, the
authors of the Manifesto judged feminist ideas as not worthy of discussion
in an article detailing the key tenets of critical approaches to international
security.136 Still, critical theories’ failure to embrace feminism does not in
itself answer the question of what the intellectual and practical differences
are between those approaches and feminist approaches. I will discuss these
differences in some detail as corresponds to two theoretical approaches that
feminist security work has been compared to: human security approach and
Copenhagen School approach.
Feminist theories in IR have often been compared to or understood as
part of human security approaches. Human security is a scholarly and policy
framework that has its intellectual foundations in the capabilities approach
developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen.137 In the 1994 United Na-
tions Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report, which
launched human security on the international stage, it was defined as “free-
dom from fear and freedom from want” encompassing seven categories of
security: economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community, and
132 Tickner and Sjoberg, “Feminism,” 5.

133 Ibid., 6.
134 See Peterson, “Transgressing Boundaries”; and Steans, “Engaging from the Margins.”
135 Tickner and Sjoberg, “Feminism,” 6.
136 C.A.S.E. Collective, “Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto,” Security
Dialogue 37, no. 4 (December 2006): 443–87; and Christine Sylvester, “Anatomy of a Footnote,” Security
Dialogue 38, no. 4 (December 2007): 547–58.
137 Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, ed., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
206 L. Sjoberg
political.138 This approach has substantial commonalities with feminist ap-

proaches that pay attention to the safety of people at the margins of global
politics. As Ann Tickner notes, these approaches share that “‘bottom-up’
modes of analysis are crucial for understanding security issues and that
emancipatory visions of security must get beyond statist frameworks.”139
This commonality, along with other common theoretical and political goals,
makes the two approaches look similar and leads IR scholars familiar with
the human security approach to suspect that it subsumes and obliterates the
need for feminist theorizing. Still, “feminist approaches differ in that they
adopt gender as a central category of analysis for understanding how un-
equal social structures, particularly gender hierarchies, negatively impact the
security of individuals and groups.”140 In other words, feminists critique the
human security approach’s failure to recognize the humans as gendered.
Feminist work also complicates the referent in a broadened notion of

security. Human security theorists advocate focusing on the security needs
of individuals. Those who have taken account of gender in a human security
framework have focused on the security needs of individuals as they iden-
tify themselves with particular groups. Feminist scholars have argued for “a
feminist standpoint which takes as its point of departure the conception of
security as the human experience in everyday life mediated by a variety of
social structures.”141 In other words, a feminist approach to security recog-
nizes human security not as individual security but as social security, based
on feminist understandings of human interdependence and relational auton-
omy.142 Feminist work “highlights the need to link a normative approach to
human security (the human being as the key referent to the human security
policy framework) with an interpretive approach (i.e., which human beings
are we talking about, in what context, where and to what effect) that recog-
nizes the complexity of the operation of power within and across categories
of gender, ethnicity, and generation.”143
Instead of being subsumed by human security approaches, feminist
work in security offers a paradigmatic alternative to human security that re-
tains most of its benefits and avoids many of its pitfalls. The human security
138 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1994: New Di-
mensions of Human Security, accessed at http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr1994/, 19 October

2008.
139 Tickner, Gendering World Politics, 48.
140 Ibid.
141 Thanh-Dam Truong, Saskia Wieringa, and Amrita Chhachhi, ed., Engendering Human Security
(London: Zed Books, 2006), xii.

142 Tickner, “Hans Morgenthau’s Principles”; Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations in
a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

143 Truong, Wieringa, and Chhacchi, Engendering Human Security, xxi; Gunhild Hoogensen and
Svein Rottem, Gender Identity and the Subject of Security, Security Dialogue 35, no. 2 (June 2004): 155–71;
and Gunhild Hoogensen and Kirsti Stuvoy, “Gender, Resistance, and Human Security,” Security Dialogue
37, no. 2 (June 2006): 207–28.
approach has been criticized for being atheoretical,144 indeterminate,145 and

risking a return to a top-down approach as it tries to identify thresholds
for which humans’ security receives priority.146 Feminist theory, on the other
hand, provides a theoretical basis for broadening Security Studies inspired by
a concern for gender subordination and political marginality. Feminist theory
also suggests a counter-hierarchical foundation for developing policy prior-
ities within a broadened notion of security. For example, Jennifer Lobasz’s
article in this volume, which details feminist approaches to human traffick-
ing, demonstrates that feminist theorizing provides a more complicated and
justifiable way to look at trafficking as an issue of individual security, and
that it is important, if not crucial, to understand trafficked persons not only
as individuals but also as gendered individuals in order to fully grasp both
their ordeals and the complexities of trafficking as a phenomenon.

Another critical approach with which feminist approaches have been
associated is the Copenhagen School.147 The Copenhagen School has been
identified by its emphasis on the social dimensions of international security.
Copenhagen School scholars have criticized traditional understandings of se-
curity as “underdeveloped” and “simple-minded,”148 and argued that scholars
who write about security are often not sufficiently aware of its internal contra-
dictions or the degree of interdependence required to understand security.149
In contrast to traditional security approaches, Copenhagen School scholars
argue that security is affected by five sectors: military, political, economic,
societal, and environmental,150 and several levels of analysis including the
individual, substate actors, state actors, the international subsystem, and the
international system.151 The claim to fame for the Copenhagen School, how-
ever, is the concept of “securitization,” which has been characterized as “one
of the most innovative, productive, and yet controversial avenues of research
in contemporary Security Studies.”152
144 Roland Paris, “Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?” International Security 26, no. 2 (Fall
2001): 87–102.
145 Barry Buzan, “What is Human Security? A Reductionist, Idealistic Notion that Adds Little Analytical
Value,” Security Dialogue 35, no. 3 (September 2004): 369–70.

146 Truong, Wieringa, and Chhacchi, Engendering Human Security, xxv.
147 This term was coined in Bill McSweeney, “Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen
School,” Review of International Studies 22, no. 1 (January 1996): 86–93.

148 Barry Buzan, People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 1, 2. This book has been republished (edited,
with different subtitles) several times since its original publication. I use this version to chronicle the
development of the Copenhagen School.
149 Ibid., 2.
150 Ibid., 19.
151 Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder
Colorado: Lynne Rienner Press, 1998), 5.

152 Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,” Inter-
national Studies Quarterly 47, no. 4 (December 2003): 511–31.

208 L. Sjoberg
According to the Copenhagen School, security is not a fixed concept

and cannot be defined in a static manner. Instead, it is argued that security is
constructed by securitizing actors153 through the “speech act” of naming an
issue a security concern. Once a matter has been securitized, it is prioritized
above “normal politics,” and “extraordinary means” are necessary to address
the problem.154 As a result of this prioritization, securitization “has clear
political implications.”155 Recognizing particular events or issues as security
concerns heightens their profile and increases the amount of attention given
to the issue in terms of policy making, funding, and media attention.
Feminist scholars have embraced the Copenhagen School’s interest in
broadening what counts as security and whose security matters. Also, like
the Copenhagen School, feminists pay attention to the production of security
rather than assuming that current security dynamics are somehow natural.156
Nonetheless, feminists have been critical of the Copenhagen School for its
omission of gender as a consideration.157 Feminists have also critiqued the
Copenhagen School for its failure to analyze the power dynamics inherent
in the concept of securitization. Lene Hansen expresses concern that the
Copenhagen School’s epistemological reliance on speech act theory “pre-
supposes the existence of a situation where speech is indeed possible” and
neglects those who “are constrained in their ability to speak security and are
therefore prevented from being subjects worthy of consideration and pro-
tection.”158 Hansen is also concerned that the Copenhagen School pays in-
sufficient attention to the emotional dimensions of security/securitization.159
Hansen argues
two elements prevent possible gendered security problems from register-

ing within a Copenhagen School analysis: the focus on speech produces
problems in situations where the possibilities of speaking security are
constrained, and the conditions for becoming a referent object are such
that gender security is almost excluded from qualifying. Hansen suggest
153 Securitizing actors are defined by Buzan et al. as someone, or a group, who performs the speech
act. This could be governments, individuals, military groups, etc.

154 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security
(London: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

155 Rita Abrahamson, “Blair’s Africa: the Politics of Securitization and Fear,” Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political 30, no. 1 (January-March 2005): 55–80

156 See for example, Anna M. Agathangelou and L. H. M. Ling, “The House of IR: From Family Power
Politics to the Poisies of Worldism,” International Studies Review 6, no. 4 (December 2004): 21–50.
157 See Lene Hansen, “The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of Gender in
the Copenhagen School,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2000): 285–306;
and Hansen, “Gender, Nation, Rape”; and Hoogensen and Rottem, “Gender, Identity, and Security.”
158 Hansen, “The Little Mermaid,” 285.
159 Ibid., 286. Here, Hansen is interested in how securitization is consumed—arguing that emotion
is necessary to understand how people come to believe something is a security issue.

broadening the Copenhagen school’s approach to account for not only

speech but performativity.160
The crucial differences between feminist approaches to security and the

Copenhagen School can be found in a broader reading of Hansen’s critique.
The Copenhagen School should be credited for developing an analysis of
security as an endogenous process in global politics. The concept of se-
curitization demonstrates security as authored rather than objective and as
constructed rather than omnipresent. Still, the Copenhagen School fails to
ask the critical questions that inspired feminist IR’s critique of the discipline
more generally. If securitization is a process, who does the securitizing?
Who is securitized, and who is marginalized? What are the power relations
in the process of securitization? Megan MacKenzie’s article in this volume is
a crucial example of the value added when feminist approaches revise and
reconstruct the Copenhagen School’s concept of security. MacKenzie shows
that a gender-neutral concept of securitization does not show that securiti-
zation (and thus prioritization) is a privileged position in local and global
politics, often distributed on the basis of gender. Feminist work can use and
expand on the Copenhagen School’s concept of securitization, but cannot
be limited to it or subsumed within it.
SECURITY STUDIES: FEMINIST CONTRIBUTIONS
Much like the traditions of scholarship that have been developing in feminist
Security Studies, the articles in this special issue contribute to the field of
Security Studies by exploring topics traditionally featured in “mainstream” IR
from a feminist perspective, by foregrounding the role of women and gender
in conflict and conflict resolution, and by demonstrating the importance of
new or previously marginalized topics to Security Studies by taking gender
seriously.
The special issue opens with Lauren Wilcox’s article, “Gendering the
Cult of the Offensive,” which explores a topic that has long been of inter-
est to traditional scholars in Security Studies, the offense-defense balance.
Wilcox focuses on the claim in offense-defense theory that misperceived of-
fensive dominance has been the cause of numerous international conflicts,
including, but not limited to, the First World War. Her essay starts with a
question offense-defense theory has not definitively answered: why do states
misperceive the dominance of the offense? Wilcox suggests that the roots of
these misperceptions can be found in a combination of states’ “gendered per-
ceptions of technology, gendered nationalism, and definitions of citizenship
160 Ibid., 291.

210 L. Sjoberg
and honor based on the gendered concept of protection.”161 In other words,

Wilcox explains that “gender may provide the missing link in explaining
the cult of the offensive.”162 Through the analysis of offense-defense theory,
Wilcox demonstrates that gender is constitutive of perceptions of military
strength. This article shows that a feminist analysis of offense-defense theory
is one instance in which gender can add explanatory leverage to “main-
stream” security theories and suggest a transformative agenda for the theory
and practice of international politics.
The next three articles, by Megan MacKenzie, Sandra McEvoy, and Heidi
Hudson, foreground the role of women in conflict and conflict resolution
to gain theoretical and empirical insights that address some concerns of
“mainstream” security theorists while demonstrating the relevance of new
subject matter to the discipline. Megan MacKenzie’s article, “Securitization

and Desecuritization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in
Post-Conflict Sierra Leone,” is based on fifty interviews with female former
combatants in Sierra Leone. Her analysis focuses on the gendered construc-
tion of “soldier” and “victim” in the DDR process in Sierra Leone, based on her
interviews and her observation that reintegration agencies are reluctant to
acknowledge women who participated in the war as soldiers. Instead, in the
language of the Copenhagen School, MacKenzie recognizes that men and
masculinity are securitized post-conflict, while women former soldiers are
desecuritized. The result is that services focus on the reintegration of men
into society as essential for the transition to peace, and women’s reintegra-
tion, when considered at all, is treated as a social issue. MacKenzie argues
that the gendered perceptions of former combatants in Sierra Leone not only
cause the DDR process to be less effective for women, but to be less effective
more generally. Using this information, MacKenzie critiques the concept of
securitization through gendered lenses, arguing that gendered power dic-
tated who was securitized and who was desecuritized (that is, ignored) in
the post-conflict reconstruction process in Sierra Leone.
Sandra McEvoy’s article, “Loyalist Women Paramilitaries in Northern Ire-
land: Beginning a Feminist Conversation about Conflict Resolution,” chal-
lenges traditional conceptions about conflict resolution by foregrounding
the experiences and opinions of women combatants. McEvoy argues that
the conflict in Northern Ireland remained intractable in part because the
peace negotiators’ perceptions of the conflict were flawed by their exclu-
sion of the perspectives of Loyalist women combatants. The article reveals
the unique perceptions of Loyalist women paramilitaries on the four cross-
border agreements between 1974 and 2007, arguing that the inclusion of
combatant women in their negotiation and execution would have made
161 Wilcox, “Gendering the ‘Cult of the Offensive”’, PG. NO.

162 Ibid., PG. NO.
these agreements more likely to succeed. McEvoy’s analysis demonstrates

to conventional accounts of conflict resolution that women should not be
left out of the process. This article also points out to feminists that they
should not only be asking whether women are involved in peace processes,
but also asking which women are invited to the table when women are
included. Like the women that MacKenzie interviewed in Sierra Leone, the
women that McEvoy interviewed in Northern Ireland commit the double
transgression of being involved in conflict and doing so against inherited
expectations of women’s behavior. Reading these women’s experiences,
McEvoy argues for a theoretical and practical reformulation of both gender
role expectations and conflict resolution processes, in Northern Ireland and
beyond.
Heidi Hudson’s article, “Peacebuilding Through a Gender Lens and
the Challenges of Implementation in Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire,” looks at

peacebuilding processes from a different perspective, through the lens of
African feminisms with special attention to the cases of Côte d’Ivoire and
Rwanda. Building on previous work proposing that “gender mainstream-
ing” be adopted in peacebuilding processes, 163 Hudson contends that main-
streaming strategies, while important to peacebuilding, needs to take ac-
count not only of including women in peace processes, but also of the
cultural context in which a conflict occurs. Using examples from several
African conflicts, Hudson contends that the success of peacebuilding gen-
erally depends on the inclusion of women, and that the success of the
inclusion of women depends on the cultural sensitivity of the mainstream-
ing process, the strength and commitment of local women’s movements,
and the translation of international legal frameworks to local contexts. Hud-
son demonstrates that neither peacebuilding nor gender emancipation are
cookie-cutter processes, and that both gender and cultural sensitivity could
“have substantial payoffs in terms of gender rights . . . [and] could serve as
the missing link to lend coherence to peacebuilding processes.”164 Hudson’s
feminist analysis also shows that post-conflict security requires the interac-
tion of a number of actors, including states, social movements, and individ-
uals (women) who “make various and important contributions to modeling
and implementing African peacebuilding processes.”165 Like the other two
essays that focus on women’s roles in conflict and conflict resolution, Hud-
son’s essay provides both new empirical information and new theoretical
insights which both speak to issues that traditional security theorists are in-
terested in (conflict resolution) and introduce new topics to Security Studies
163 See True, “Gender Mainstreaming in Global Public Policy.”

164 Hudson, “Peacebuilding Through a Gender Lens and the Challenges of Implementation in
Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire,” PG. NO.
165 Ibid., PG. NO.
212 L. Sjoberg
by taking gender seriously (such as women’s movements and indigenous

processes).
The last two articles in this special issue focus on the introduction and
framing of issues traditionally excluded from the canon of Security Studies
literature. Jennifer Lobasz’s article, “Beyond Border Security: Feminist Ap-
proaches to Human Trafficking,” addresses an issue rarely considered by
“mainstream” scholars in international security: human trafficking. Lobasz
points out that when addressing human trafficking, traditional security ap-
proaches “emphasize border security, migration controls, and international
law enforcement cooperation.”166 She contends that feminist perspectives
reject both the marginalization of human trafficking in traditional security
approaches and those approaches’ policy priorities in dealing with traffick-
ing. Instead, Lobasz uses feminist theory to argue that trafficking should be
a high-priority security issue and that key issues concerning trafficking to

be addressed include the security of trafficked persons, the security threats
posed by both traffickers and states, and the sexist and racist stereotypes that
are used to categorize trafficking victims in the policy world. Lobasz’s article
demonstrates that trafficking deserves attention in Security Studies and that
“mainstream” approaches to trafficking as a security issue can be improved
and transformed by the addition of feminist analysis.
This special issue concludes with Nicole Detraz’s “Environmental Se-
curity and Gender: Necessary Shifts in an Evolving Debate.” Detraz argues
that gender analysis can shed helpful light on the question of the links be-
tween the environment and security. For years scholars in Security Studies
have asked if the environment is a security issue, but as Detraz points out,
gender has not been incorporated into these debates in a meaningful way.
Combining theoretical analysis with two case studies, Detraz uses feminist
lenses to demonstrate that not only is the environment a security issue, it
is a gendered security issue. In other words, Detraz argues that the framing
that security theorists use to deal with the environment (when they deal with
the environment) is problematic. This article reformulates the environmental
security approach from a feminist perspective, presenting a combination of
feminist and environmental security that provides more theoretical leverage
than either approach does separately. It demonstrates the relevance of an
issue traditionally considered outside the “mainstream” security realm and
(much like Lobasz’s essay does for human trafficking) proposes a different—
and uniquely feminist—way of viewing this new issue of environmental
security.
Separately, these essays reformulate “mainstream” approaches to tradi-
tional security issues, foreground the role of women in conflict and conflict
166 Lobasz, “Beyond Border Security,” PG. NO.

resolution, and introduce new issues that demonstrate that taking gender
seriously is relevant to international security. Together, they show that, con-
ceptually, gender analysis is necessary for understanding international secu-
rity, important for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential
to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security
realm.

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Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist Contributions

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Introduction to Security Studies: Feminist

In 1988, Millennium published a special issue on “Women and Interna-

Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute

Millennium: Journal of International Studies 17, no. 3 (December 1988): 429–40.

to their subversion and to replace their theories,”3 and several IR schol-

trate a gendered estrangement that inhibits more sustained conversations”

nium: Journal of International Studies 18, no. 2 (1989): 245–53.

cific international phenomena all show not only women’s significance in

(London: Zed Books, 2007).

management of refugees,17 and protecting noncombatants in times of war18

ceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international

FEMINIST APPROACHES TO INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

the term which is associated with masculinity.”23 Gendered social hierarchy,

Feminist Approaches, ed. Laura Sjoberg (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

global politics from a number of different perspectives, including realist, lib-

focuses on how gendered linguistic manifestations of meaning, particularly

(New York: Columbia, 2001).

gender in international relations from a nonfeminist standpoint. Carpenter’s

point?” International Studies Review 4, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 153–65, 153.

almost exclusive) use of women and children to represent civilians in the

tional Studies Review 5, no. 2 (June 2003): 287–302.

Where Carpenter sees “enabling and legitimizing the targeting of adult

children. In the noncombatant immunity puzzle, feminism adds explanatory

48 Sjoberg, “The Gendered Reality of the Immunity Principle,” 900.

EPISTEMOLOGY AND METHOD FOR FEMINIST APPROACHES

so long as they do so ‘objectively.”’58 This understanding of the relationship

tions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5.

Methodologies for International Relations, 41.

commitment to understanding the world from the points of view of marginal-

Different feminists hold different perspectives on the degree to which

ber 1998): 205–10; and Tickner, “Feminism Meets International Relations.”

ternational Studies Review 6, no. 2 (June 2004): 253–69.

different feminist theorists (and different feminist projects) in different ways.

understanding women as subjects rather than the objects of men.”69 In this

67 Ackerly, Stern, and True, Feminist Methodologies, 5.

In this issue, Megan MacKenzie’s “Securitization and Desecuritization:

consciousness in including women in peacebuilding could make those pro-

in the context of that conflict and more generally.

SEEING GENDER IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

Though, as noted above, conversations between feminists who study secu-

Linklater (London: Macmillian, 1996), 229–30.

International Relations (London: MacMillan, 2001).

women.82 In place of the focus on state security, feminists have suggested

Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 4 (Summer 1987): 687–718.

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

In addition to critiquing concepts traditionally employed in the study

through analyses and reformulations of the traditional contents of Security

[and] the international is personal.”99 A good example of this argument

culinities in International Relations,” in The ‘Man’ Question, 31.