Compared to the other social sciences, feminist perspectives entered the discipline of international relations (IR) relatively late – at the end of the 1980s. Asking why IR remained immune to gender for so long, Margot Light and Fred Halliday have suggested that IR scholars have tended to view gender as an intranational problem, irrelevant to international relations; international relations have been seen as ‘gender neutral’, which means that they can no more be about women than they are about men (Light and Halliday, 1994: 45). With its focus on the ‘high’ politics of war, the discipline has privileged issues that grow out of men’s experiences; we are socialized into believing that war and power politics are spheres of activity with which men have a special affinity and special expertise and that their voices in describing and prescribing for this world are, therefore, likely to be more authentic (Tickner, 1992: 4–5).
Related Resources
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Foreign Aid and Soft Power: Great Power Competition in Africa in the Early Twenty-First Century
Blair, Robert A., Robert Marty, and Philip Roessler. “Foreign Aid and Soft Power: Great Power Competition in Africa in the Early Twenty-First Century.” British Journal of Political Science 52, no. 3 (July 2022): 1355–76.
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Geographical Blessing versus Geopolitical Curse: Great Power Security Agendas for the Black Sea Region and a Turkish Alternative
Aydın, Mustafa. “Geographical Blessing versus Geopolitical Curse: Great Power Security Agendas for the Black Sea Region and a Turkish Alternative.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 9, no. 3 (September 1, 2009): 271–85.
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