HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

The first few posts were mostly me ranting about feminist theories. Now I'm going to rant about feminist theories in international relations.

Surprisingly, I am not a gender studies major. My degree is in international relations, and I have emphases in gender and cultural issues and international political economy; I like studying women and I like studying money. Let's go back to IR 101 and go over some concepts of international relations and how this applies to feminism.

The discipline of international relations was created largely to understand the action of nation-states during war; thus the main international relations theories are realism, liberalism, Marxism, and conservativism. We also have neo-liberalism, neo-conservativism, and all that. In my option, international relations theories without feminism fail to recognize the contributions of women. As an international relations feminist, I am mainly concerned with the largely unseen work that women do.

Ann Tickner is an international relations feminist scholar who drew on Morgantheu's truths of mankind, widely used to describe the international relations realist perspective, and wrote the feminist realist perspective. Such a perspective challenges the realist assumptions that human nature has masculine characteristics, such as autonomy and desire for power. A feminist realist recognizes the many dimensions of dynamic nationalism, collective power, and moral political action.

Cynthia Enloe has written entire books about the work that women do to facilitate international affairs - as diplomat's wives, as sex workers, as laborers, ect. Her view of IR comes from reflectionist ideas, which are ideas that reposition the thinking of politics to understand them from different points of view

In studying international relations it is tempting to pay attention to only western politics, but IR provides a strong framework for understanding the complexities of other nation-states. Examining international women's rights helps us avoid the trap of becoming too focused on our view of the world as Western women. For instance, did you know that women make up more than half the members of parliament in Rwanda? Or that Tunisia just signed a new constitution that promotes women's rights? Or that Venezuela pays pensions to full-time mothers?


Women do 66% of the world's work and own 1% of the world's property. From a Western perspective, it can seem as though all women have the same goals, which exist in a capitalist society. Initiatives such as Lean In cater to this Western definition of success. But the world is a diverse place, with more cultural variation that could be easily understood by an outsider. Honoring those differences through international relations theory and feminist theory is crucial in making gains to enhance the power of women internationally.