Gender Matters in World Politics

This course is concerned with gender ‘in’ International Relations. It is comprehensive introduction to a way of analyzing and researching global politics and international relations that takes gender seriously as a category of analysis. More specifically, it is concerned with how ideas of war, peace, sovereignty, violence, foreign policy, governance and political economy are sustained by specific masculinities and femininities, and how these particular gender constructions impact on the lives of particular groups of men and women. Set against this, the aim of the course is mainly threefold: firstly, to (re)introduce how the discipline has traditionally thought about war and peace; secondly, to reveal the gendered constructions and inequalities that mark the traditional scholarship; and thirdly, to evaluate the specific contribution that feminist critiques have made as part of the so-called ‘Critical Turn’ in IR. Gender is understood here not as a synonym for ‘woman’ but as a hierarchical coding of masculinity and femininity that pervades social relations and institutional practices, with systemic (though not deterministic) effects on inequalities. Gender meanings and practices permeate our lives, and a closer look at these processes is more illuminating than many anticipate, with relevance and implications for who we are, how we think, and how we act – as individuals, groups, communities and nation-states.