International relations theory is the study of international relations (IR) from a theoretical perspective. It seeks to explain behaviors and outcomes in international politics. The four most prominent schools of thought are realism, liberalism, constructivism, and rational choice. Whereas realism and liberalism make broad and specific predictions about international relations, constructivism and rational choice are methodological approaches that focus on certain types of social explanation for phenomena.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Jean W. Sacks, Head of the Journals Division, with Catharine R. Stimpson as its first editor in Chief, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization.
Critical international relations theory is a diverse set of schools of thought in international relations (IR) that have criticized the theoretical, meta-theoretical and/or political status quo, both in IR theory and in international politics more broadly – from positivist as well as postpositivist positions. Positivist critiques include Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches and certain ("conventional") strands of social constructivism. Postpositivist critiques include poststructuralist, postcolonial, "critical" constructivist, critical theory, neo-Gramscian, most feminist, and some English School approaches, as well as non-Weberian historical sociology, "international political sociology", "critical geopolitics", and the so-called "new materialism". All of these latter approaches differ from both realism and liberalism in their epistemological and ontological premises.
Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.
Judith Ann Tickner is an Anglo-American feminist international relations (IR) theorist. Tickner is a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC.
Feminism is a broad term given to works of those scholars who have sought to bring gender concerns into the academic study of international politics and who have used feminist theory and sometimes queer theory to better understand global politics and international relations as a whole.
Evelyn Seiko Nakano Glenn is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, she served as founding director of the university's Center for Race and Gender (CRG), a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008, Glenn was elected president of the 15,000-member American Sociological Association. She served as president-elect during the 2008–2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as president of the association during the 2009–2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing council as past-president until August 2011. Her presidential address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance", and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.
Feminist political theory is an area of philosophy that focuses on understanding and critiquing the way political philosophy is usually construed and on articulating how political theory might be reconstructed in a way that advances feminist concerns. Feminist political theory combines aspects of both feminist theory and political theory in order to take a feminist approach to traditional questions within political philosophy.
Feminist security studies is a subdiscipline of security studies that draws attention to gendered dimensions of security.
Judith Lorber is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She is a foundational theorist of social construction of gender difference and has played a vital role in the formation and transformation of gender studies. She has more recently called for a de-gendering of the social world.
Carol Cohn is the founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights and a Lecturer of Women's Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Cohn is recognised for addressing issues of gender in global politics, particularly conflict and security issues. She has published in academic and policy contexts with major research interests lying in the realm of gender and armed conflict, the gendered discourses of US national security elites and gender mainstreaming in international security institutions. In addition to her research, Cohn facilitates training and workshops for United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and has been active in the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security since 2001. Taken wholly, Cohn's career includes a stance described as feminist anti-militarism. In 2013, Cohn edited a well-received collection of essays on the topic of women and war in which it is argued that the topic of war cannot be understood without understanding gender dynamics.
Embedded feminism is the attempt of state authorities to legitimize an intervention in a conflict by co-opting feminist discourses and instrumentalizing feminist activists and groups for their own agenda. This term was introduced in the analysis of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, but can also be applied to several historical examples where women's rights were used as justification and legitimization of Western interventionism.
Cynthia Cockburn was a British academic, feminist, and peace activist.
Scholarship on nationalism and gender explores the processes by which gender affects and is impacted by the development of nationalism. Sometimes referred to as "gendered nationalism," gender and nationalism describes the phenomena whereby conceptions of the state or nation, including notions of citizenship, sovereignty, or national identity contribute to or arise in relation to gender roles.
The Victoria Schuck Award is an annual prize granted by the American Political Science Association to the author of the best book published in the previous year on the topic of women and politics. The award is named in honor of the political scientist Victoria Schuck. Although a number of area-specific sections of the American Political Science Association have dedicated book awards, the Schuck Award is one of only a few awards given directly by the Association rather than by a subsection of it.
Verta Ann Taylor is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with focuses on gender, sexuality, social movements, and women's health.
Judith Hicks Stiehm is an American political scientist. She is a professor of political science at Florida International University. She studies civil-military relations in the United States, processes of social change, and the status of women. She has published books on the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance, the results of mandated orders to admit women to the United States Air Force Academy, and the functioning of the U.S. Army War College. She was the first woman to be a university provost in State University System of Florida.
Feminist peace research uses a feminist framework to expand on conventional peace research practices, examining the roles of gender and other power structures to conceptualize and actively build peace with justice. Feminist peace research understands peace and violence to be interwoven and ongoing processes that occur at many scales, and points to how these scales are interconnected. While gender is the dominant lens through which processes of peace and violence are analyzed, this research seeks to address the ways in which other intersecting systems of power, such as race, class, sexuality, and disability, among many others, further complicate these dynamics.
Pandora Press is a UK feminist publishing imprint that was founded in 1983 by Philippa Brewster at Routledge and Kegan Paul, with Dale Spender as editor-at-large. It was the first imprint to produce a list devoted primarily to feminist non-fiction. Among early Pandora Press titles were Spender's There's Always Been a Women's Movement This Century (1983) and Time and Tide Wait for No Man (1984), and other authors published by the imprint included Marge Piercy and Jeanette Winterson. Brewster took on a book written by the women of Greenham Common, about which she has said: "That seemed to fulfill what we really wanted to do. ...We were all part of the women's movement. We represented it, but we also informed it." Also a commissioning editor for Pandora Press was Candida Lacey, who went on to become publisher of Myriad Editions for 15 years.
