Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security

Jul 8, 2026

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Gender in International Relations presents feminist perspectives on how global security is shaped by gendered assumptions within the discipline. The preface asks why women remain scarce in international relations and why course readings exclude women’s scholarship and lived experiences. It argues that masculinist foundations structure what counts as “important” issues such as war and national security, and that incorporating women’s everyday realities can reveal how gender hierarchies influence knowledge and reshape the field’s boundaries.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages21

Reading Time32 min

Preface

Engendered Insecurities

Man, the State, and War: Gendered Perspectives on National Security

Three Models of Man: Gendered Perspectives on Global Economic Security

Man over Nature: Gendered Perspectives on Ecological Security

Toward a Nongendered Perspective on Global Security

Bibliography

Gender in International Relations Gender in International Relations Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security J. Ann Tickner New York Columbia University Press 1992 Bibliographic Data To Joan, Heather, and Wendy --feminists for the future Preface 1. Engendered Insecurities 2. Man, the State, and War: Gendered Perspectives on National Security 3. Three Models of Man: Gendered Perspectives on Global Economic Security 4. Man over Nature: Gendered Perspectives on Ecological Security 5. Toward a Nongendered Perspective on Global Security Bibliography [an error occurred while processing this directive] [http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/index.html](http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/index.html) (1 of 2) [8/11/2002 5:12:37 PM] Gender in International Relations Pagination [http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/index.html](http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/index.html) (2 of 2) [8/11/2002 5:12:37 PM] Preface As a scholar and teacher of international relations, I have frequently asked myself the following questions: Why are there so few women in my discipline? If I teach the field as it is conventionally defined, why are there so few readings by women to assign to my students? Why is the subject matter of my discipline so distant from women's lived experiences? Why have women been conspicuous only by their absence in the worlds of diplomacy and military and foreign policy-making? I began to think about writing this book as an attempt to answer these questions. Having spent my childhood in London during World War II and my adolescence in New York as part of a United Nations'family, international affairs were an important part of my early life. But, as one of only three female graduate students in my year in Yale University's International Relations Program in the early 1960s, I began to notice that the academic discipline that I had chosen, in part because of these formative experiences, was not one that attracted many women. Admittedly, when I returned to graduate studies in the 1970s, the number of women entering the field had grown: while I felt less isolated, I observed that women scholars and teachers of international relations were clustered in areas such as international political economy, development studies, and international political theory. I still wondered why so few women chose national and international security studies, the privileged core of the field. My own research has been in areas such as Third World development, North-South relations, and peace studies--areas that were far from the mainstream of international politics in the early 1980s when I began my academic career . Like many women in international relations, I did not choose to specialize insecurity-linked war and peace studies, usually associated with great power relations and power politics, areas central to the subject matter of the classical discipline. As a teacher of international relations, however, I have, of necessity, familiarized myself with what some in my field would call the "important" issues of war and peace, generally defined as national security studies. But, as only one of three women out of a total of about sixty students who participated in a course on nuclear strategy at M.I.T. in the early 1980s, my contention that this is an area of international relations not heavily populated by women was strongly reinforced. Trying to familiarize myself with the arcane and esoteric language of nuclear strategy, I remembered with some sympathy how, as an undergraduate history major, I had avoided details of war-fighting strategies and weapons development. Since I began teaching these issues myself, often using the same language that I found so alienating in my own education, I have found that, while many of my male students seem quite comfortable with the discourse of war and weaponry in my introductory course on international relations, a semester has never passed without some of my f

FAQs

What approach does the author propose to answer the book’s questions?

Instead of focusing only on bringing more women into the field as traditionally defined, the author aims to expose the field’s masculinist foundations and reconsider what international relations looks like when women’s day-to-day realities are included.

Jul 8, 2026

Upload by Skyler