It is rather rare for international relations to be seen from a gender perspective. Just as the state is still often represented as gender-neutral, so too usually are relations between states and other aspects of IR.
I have faced a number of difficulties, as all researchers do, when designing, developing and implementing a project. How do I obtain my data, for example, or will I have significant findings?
How is it possible to know if the non-recognition of the value of domestic work undermines the possibilities for achieving gender justice?
Women have changed the face of the UK parliament in recent years and shown they are a real force to be reckoned with. However, despite progress, it is still nowhere near reflecting the percentage of women in the country.
Both at the outset and during the course of recent military operations, commercial polling companies and academic surveys have endeavoured to record public attitudes towards conflicts. The data reveals a significant ‘gender gap’ in public opinion.
I have tried recruiting my female friends and family into politics. I tell them we are looking for people like them: mums; business women; community workers; teachers. They all look at me with horror.
Madeleine Bunting wrote a fascinating piece regarding the inclusion of a feminist agenda in US foreign policy (USFP) in the Guardian on January 16, 2011. Fascinating, because it forces me to assess what I think about the success of inculcating a women’s agenda into USFP.
There a palpable sense of both exuberance and excitement in recent developments in gender and international politics. Though I use the word gender, this still tends to end up meaning women; I wonder why this is, especially as scholarly texts distinctly and convincingly explain that gender is not just about women. And though this is surely true, the idea doesn’t seem to stick, or at least stick where we want it to.
During the apparent peak of the so-called Global Financial Crisis in 2009, a flurry of descriptions of the crisis as a ‘mancession’ emerged. To ignore or trivialise gender in the global economy is to fail to appreciate the power of a basic and fundamental system of identification through which we understand the world; a system that organises how we respond to our environments, our abilities to survive, our goals in life, and how we approach our relationships.
Despite growth, women continue to constitute only 19% of all parliamentarians worldwide. Quotas are a diverse set of measures that can reach the political agenda for both feminist and non-feminist reasons, leading to diverse effects on the election and empowerment of women. Whilst necessary, more systematic research is needed in order to determine their impact on women as a group.
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