ABSTRACT
When feminist scholars began to make their mark on the field of International Relations (IR) in the 1980s, matters of security were at the top of their agenda. IR feminists were able to draw on a long history of writing about issues of peace, war and violence (Gioseffi 2003), largely in the form of historical or cross-cultural case studies, often involving ethnographic research (Ardener et al. 1987; Florence et al. 1987; Isaksson 1988; Nordstrom 1997). This writing (and the feminist activism it emerges from) provides the impetus and background material for the development of Feminist Security Studies (FSS) today. The Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom (WILPF), created in 1915,
has been actively and publicly involved in debates about security, though not necessarily as an equal partner of policymakers.1 What is more, in the 1960s, women (and WILPF) were involved in the creation of the International Peace Research Association. Despite their efforts, peace research became a male-dominated field, and gender remained noticeably absent even from debates about structural violence where gender should be a central category (cf. Batscheider 1993). Still, feminist peace researchers were, by the late 1960s, analysing power and emphasizing empowerment over coercion; by the 1970s, they had moved on to developing notions of security with an adversary and broadening security to include ‘security against want, security of human rights, the security of an empowered civil society’.2 In the 1980s, they focused on the linkages between war and patriarchy (Boulding 1992: 56f.). In the early 1990s, feminists (in IR) began to phrase their insights on peace, war and
violence in terms of security, thus engaging debates in Security Studies more directly. Most often, the advent of FSS is traced to Tickner’s Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, published in 1992 (cf. Blanchard 2003; Broadhead 2000). Almost at the same time, feminist peace researcher Reardon wrote Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security (1993). Both books, besides being notable in their emphasis on global security (rather than national security), draw on the
long tradition of feminist engagements with issues of peace, war and violence – now framing them explicitly as security issues. In addition, many feminist insights, e.g. on alternative conceptions of power, cooperative security arrangements and non-state-centric perspectives (Brock-Utne 1989; Ruddick 1989; Stiehm 1972), have made their way into Security Studies via other alternative approaches, such as Critical Security Studies (Booth 1997; cf. Tickner 2001). Since the turn of the century, there has been a veritable explosion of feminist work in
Security Studies, to the point where one can now confidently refer to FSS as a sub-field at the intersections of Security Studies and feminist IR. FSS are interdisciplinary – with scholars trained in peace research and Security Studies, but also in anthropology, history, literary theory, philosophy or sociology. What unites these scholars are their feminist (methodological) commitments: they (1) ask feminist research questions; (2) base their research on women’s experiences; (3) adopt a (self)-reflexive stance; and (4) have an emancipatory agenda (Tickner 2006: 22-29). Whereas IR, like many traditional sciences, assumes gender neutrality, feminists make gender (the socially constructed femininity/masculinity distinction) a central category of analysis. For feminists, gender neutrality is impossible, because ‘gender is a socially imposed and internalized lens through which individuals perceive and respond to the world’ (Peterson 1992b: 194). As a consequence, they argue that concepts and ideas as well as practices and institutions are shaped by gender and that gender analysis produces interesting new insights that are otherwise overlooked. Adopting a bottom-up approach to security, feminist scholars pay close attention to
the impact of security policies, including war, on the everyday lives of people. As such, FSS departs from a large part of traditional Security Studies research. FSS scholars challenge the notion that wars are fought to protect vulnerable populations (such as children and women) and show that civilians are often explicitly targeted (especially in ethnonationalist wars) (Enloe 1998; Hansen 2000, 2001). Rather than offering security for all their citizens, states often threaten their own populations, whether through direct violence or through the structural violence that is reflected in its war-fighting priorities and embedded in its institutions (Enloe 1993, 2000; Peterson 1992a; Reardon 1985; Tickner 1992; Tobias 1985; Young 2003). Feminists also point out that the increasing technologization of war, from nuclear strategy to the current revolution in military affairs, depersonalizes killing, offers the illusion of clean warfare, and obscures accountability (Blanchard 2003; Cohn 1989a, 1989b; Masters 2005; Molloy 1995). Clearly, feminist contributions to Security Studies are varied. It is not currently possible
to make out a dominant position in FSS whose progressive history could be traced. Rather, different contributions exist side-by-side, often mirroring debates in feminist thought at large.3 The next section highlights some of the contributions FSS scholars have made to date. Thereafter, attention turns in more detail to the epistemological and political commitments of feminist scholars and how they shape feminist research in Security Studies. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of the impact of FSS in IR.
