TRENDS IN EUROPEAN IR THEORY *SERIES EDITORS*: KNUD ERIK JØRGENSEN · AUDREY ALEJANDRO ALEXANDER REICHWEIN · FELIX RÖSCH · HELEN TURTON

# **Feminist IR in Europe**

Knowledge Production in Academic Institutions

*Edited by* Maria Stern · Ann E. Towns

# Trends in European IR Theory

Series Editors

Knud Erik Jørgensen, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark Audrey Alejandro, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Alexander Reichwein, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany Felix Rösch, Coventry University, Coventry, UK Helen Turton, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

A series of 9 select Palgrave Pivots that together will provide concise accounts of IR theoretical traditions in Europe and the historical and theoretical roots that European IR currently is missing. The series will provide a theoretical backbone for the IR discipline and define and strengthen the identity of European IR theory. Each Pivot in the series will constitute and reconstruct IR theoretical traditions in Europe (Liberalism, Realism, English School, International Political Economy, International Political Theory, Feminism, and the post-positivist tradition including constructivism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and critical theory), and a concluding volume will look back and summarise the advances (and missed opportunities) of the discipline in the 20th century, all following an initial framework volume setting the scene and providing the rationale. As a theoretical tradition is nothing without theorists to produce, reproduce and transform it, the individual volumes will necessarily focus on the contributions of individual theorists, a feature that will provide the series with a unique edge, and covering the main characteristics of each tradition that is sorely missing. But more than just providing roots, the series will have a critical integrative function. In order to achieve this aim, the projects will take a transnational perspective, going beyond the sociology of knowledge studies that so far has been predominantly national in its orientation. Each Pivot will be kept as close as possible to a common length and shared structure; the volumes will be developed individually yet with a very clear common thread and thus appear as an exclusive collection. Individual volumes will have a largely identical structure which the editorial committee will define and enforce.

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15636 Maria Stern · Ann E. Towns Editors

# Feminist IR in Europe

Knowledge Production in Academic Institutions

*Editors* Maria Stern School of Global Studies University of Gothenburg Göteborg, Sweden

Ann E. Towns Department of Political Science University of Gothenburg Göteborg, Sweden

#### Trends in European IR Theory ISBN 978-3-030-91998-6 ISBN 978-3-030-91999-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022. This book is an open access publication.

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# Contents


#### vi CONTENTS


#### **Index** 171

# List of Contributors

**Özlem Altan-Olcay** Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

**Saskia Bonjour** Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

**Gülay Ça˘glar** Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

**Laura Cleton** Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

**Harriet Gray** International Relations/Politics, University of York, York, UK

**Toni Haastrup** International Politics, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

**Tonka Kostadinova** University of Burgas, Burgas, Bulgaria

**Kateˇrina Krulišová** International Relations, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

**Míla O'Sullivan** Centre for Global Political Ec, Institute of International Relatio (IIR), Prague, Czechia

**Maria Stern** School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

**Jennifer Thomson** Comparative Politics, University of Bath, Bath, UK **Ann E. Towns** Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

# List of Figures


# Introduction

# *Maria Stern and Ann E. Towns*

**Abstract** This editorial introduction sets the stage for the subsequent chapters in the volume. The chapter begins with a discussion of the contradictory situation that feminist international relations scholarship is facing, a situation characterized both by great gains and by growing resistance. It then notes the transnational and global character of feminist knowledges and unpacks why a focus on Europe—as one location among many—is nonetheless warranted in this volume. The chapter subsequently turns to a discussion of the shared premises and questions that inform each contribution.

**Keywords** Feminist IR scholarship · Europe · Politics of location · Political economy of knowledge production

M. Stern (B)

A. E. Towns

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden e-mail: maria.stern@globalstudies.gu.se

Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden e-mail: ann.towns@gu.se

Feminist international relations (IR) scholarship has grown dramatically in the past three decades. Having emerged as a set of interventions from the disciplinary margins, the field of feminist IR is now thriving even in core venues, with a flagship journal devoted to feminist international relations (*International Feminist Journal of Politics*), a section at the International Studies Association (*Feminist Theory and Gender Studies*), a large presence in the form of panels and papers at all political science and international studies conferences, an increasing number of publications in top-ranked and even mainstream IR journals, as well as dedicated chapters in IR textbooks on gender or feminist approaches to IR. Today, there are very few questions in international relations that have not been examined from one feminist perspective or another. As a result, IR is a more diverse and inclusive discipline, providing a better understanding of just how pervasive gender is in international affairs. More than ever, it is now clear that research agendas that systematically ignore feminist insights at best provide partial answers and at worst distort how international relations operate.

That said, while feminist perspectives have indeed become established within IR, gender scholarship is facing new and intensifying challenges from currents critical of such work. These currents charge that feminist scholarship lacks scientific legitimacy, that gender analyses are so ideologically driven that they fail to pose questions open to empirical scrutiny, and that gender studies amount to little more than the pursuit of political and ideological ends under the guise of academic knowledge production. As an allegedly ideological and activist endeavor, the study of gender has no legitimate place at universities and is a waste of public resources, these critics contend. In many cases, such attacks come from actors outside of academia, ranging from critical editorials in major media outlets to (more unusual) government interventions, such as when the Hungarian government withdrew accreditation from gender studies programs in 2018. However, there is also a seemingly growing number of 'anti-gender' critics within academia.

The aim of this volume is to take stock of and critically engage feminist IR scholarship, but also to celebrate and defend this work. The volume does so because of the contradictory situation that feminist IR is facing, a situation characterized both by great gains and by growing resistance. The contributors to this volume are furthermore quite conscious of the global character of feminist scholarship. Feminist thought has a history of moving across national and other borders, of being translated from one language to another, of being reinterpreted and reimagined, and of returning in new forms to places of presumable origin. Academic mobility and transnational collaborations have been integral to the development and vitality of feminist work, feminist IR included.

The focus of the volume is feminist IR scholarship produced in Europe. Much of that work was initially inspired in the late 1980s and early 1990s by US and UK scholarship that definitively carved space within IR for feminism and gender studies. Like other critical perspectives, feminist thought arrived a bit late to the party compared with other fields in the social sciences and humanities—a sluggishness which seems to be somehow written into the field in indelible ink, or at least in ink that requires much rubbing before it blurs and fades. Notwithstanding, pioneering feminist IR scholars firmly made their voices heard in a statecentric, "previously gender blind and theoretically abstract field" (Ackerly et al. 2006: 1). Early iterations of feminist IR focused on critically revisiting core concepts (such as the state, sovereignty, war, and security) and assumptions (such as the idea that the world is made up of potentially warring sovereign nation-states, and that this is the world that IR should/must study) from a perspective that took gender and indeed women seriously as belonging in and of IR. Many of those whose work can be credited with establishing "feminist IR" as a self-identified field; mode of theoretical and ontological critique and creativity; site of innovative methodologies; and source for noticing and exploring marginalized subjects, sites, and knowledges had their institutional homes in the US (e.g. Carol Cohn, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Cynthia Enloe, V. Spike Peterson, Christine Sylvester, Ann Tickner). Others came from academic departments in the UK (e.g. Sarah Brown, Jill Steans, Marysia Zalewski). This is not intended to be an exhaustive list or to suggest that feminist IR thought *originated* in the US/UK or even the Global North or West in some primary sense. Clearly, feminist insights relevant to IR have hailed from many different sites across the globe and from other areas of study, practice, and protest. Instead, we mention these scholars and their research foci both to signal that "feminist IR" was first articulated as a self-identified academic field in the US and UK and to signal how much feminist IR seems to have moved—temporally, spatially, theoretically, methodologically, and empirically—over the past c. 35 years. In 2021, it is clearer than ever that scholars whose work is labeled feminist IR are situated all around the globe and that feminist IR includes myriad subjects, ranging from the materiality of stoves "that reduce rape" (Abdelnour and Saeed 2014) to the lived experiences of survivors of torture and sexual violence (Drumond 2019), as well as multiple ways of thinking, knowing, feeling, and being in the space of the international.

So, if feminist scholarship is inherently transnational, then why a volume on feminist IR in Europe? For one, the *TEIRT* series needs to include a volume on feminism—a series on the theoretical traditions of IR in Europe would be partial if it ignored the large body of feminist scholarship produced in Europe. Second, we see great value in the aim of the series editors to localize and situate IR scholarship. In bringing crucial attention to the politics of location in academic knowledge production, we hope both to contribute to more global conversations about international relations and IR (by presenting Europe as but one location where such knowledges are produced) and to interrogate where *within* Europe feminist IR tends to be produced, as "Europe" is not a coherent and given location. Our volume asks about the politics of location in as well as the international political economy of knowledge production: in what national and institutional settings is academic feminist scholarship in Europe produced; in what languages is this scholarship written and published; how might the national, institutional, and linguistic location help shape, set the terms for, and limit what kinds of questions are asked and the theoretical and epistemological approaches to addressing those questions? How does feminist IR scholarship transgress and unsettle any tidy notion of geographical location that would allow us to facilely categorize feminist IR scholarship as "European"? And how might coloniality have shaped and continue to shape the development of feminist IR, both in terms of what we recognize *as* feminist IR, as well as who we recognize as feminist IR scholars.

Our focus on Europe is but a start. While our volume has no comparative elements with other regions, it lays some groundwork and thus makes possible comparisons with mappings and analyses of feminist IR scholarship—or the seeming lack thereof—in other parts of the world. Indeed, we hope this volume will serve as a catalyst for similar studies of feminist IR in other regional contexts. To our knowledge, this is the only volume of this kind, and we are confident that it will be of great interest not only to feminist IR scholars around the world but also to the fields of international relations and gender studies more broadly.

These sort of mapping exercises are of course never innocent descriptions—they are always power-laden, partial, and generative of their own silences. Such mappings reveal as much through what they do not include as through what they do. Through the different contributions to this volume, we have attempted to draw a broad picture of feminist IR in Europe. Such a picture emerges through many choices of inclusion and exclusion—choices that, if made differently, would have materialized in a different picture. The smaller body of feminist IR scholarship from scholars situated in Southern as well as Eastern Europe compared to that of scholars situated in the Northern countries or in the UK, for instance, gives us much pause for thought. Is this a *seeming* paucity, a result of the situatedness, academic networks, and language skills of our chapter authors? Would a different set of authors, with different networks and more language skills beyond English, German and the Scandinavian languages, have unearthed a wealth of feminist IR scholarship also in Southern and Eastern Europe? Or is, in fact, much less feminist IR scholarship produced in these parts of Europe? If so, then why? And what might the theoretical, empirical, and methodological implications be?

We have put together an excellent line-up of contributors, consisting of leading scholars in feminist IR, covering major themes of feminist theorizing in Europe. Our aim was to create a diverse team, located in different parts of Europe, to mitigate some of the UK dominance that seems to characterize the field. We thus spent a considerable amount of time searching for potential contributors. Roughly half of the contributors are UK based, with the other half based in Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Clearly, this list of authors does not represent the many sites in Europe in which feminist IR scholarship may be produced. For example, we have not been able to engage scholars whose academic base is in Southern Europe, a fact that needs to be considered when reading the volume.

In turn, determining what constitutes "Europe," "IR," or "feminist" is each a topic worthy of its own volume. Indeed, the very political and vexed nature of centering an imaginary of a state-centric "Europe" as a site of production of IR scholarship (yet again) without also centering its racist, colonial past, or for that matter, quite simply starting elsewhere instead, is problematic for sure (Rutazibwa 2020). And simply noting this as problematic does little, if anything, to offset the harms that rote reproductions of such imaginaries cause. Furthermore, IR is finally a wider dwelling for thinking about global politics broadly understood. Firmly erecting the walls of this house in order to ponder its contents sits poorly with normative ideas about transdisciplinarity or with the clear evidence that IR—at least at its most exciting and influential—is largely a repository of creatively borrowed ideas from other fields of study or practice. Moreover, the nefarious consequences of policing the limits of feminism (Sylvester 2010; Zalewski 2013) occasion our unease in risking drawing firm lines between what is considered "feminist" scholarship and what is not.

We nonetheless believe that bringing to the fore an explicit discussion of the politics of location for feminist IR scholarship helps render visible the very political and economic nature of knowledge production in ways that hopefully open instead of foreclose continuing conversations about the contested place of Europe, IR, and feminism. So, with these caveats and sense of caution in tow, we nevertheless draw our coordinates in order for fruitful discussion to occur within the word limits of this thin volume. Indeed, our intention has been to provide initial definitions of these contested terms in order to enable the authors of the contributing chapters to problematize, challenge, refuse, reinscribe, or work within our delimitations in making the mappings and arguments that are specific to their chapters. Hence, in our instructions to our authors, we asked them to cover research that is produced by scholars employed by research institutions in the states of Europe. By "Europe," we mean EU member states, EU candidate states (Albania, Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey), EU potential candidate states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo), and Great Britain, Switzerland, and Norway. By "IR scholars," we roughly means scholars who identify their work in terms of international politics, generally in political science/international relations departments and/or who publish in what is labeled as IR journals. We use a broad understanding of "feminist" as scholars who self-label their work as feminist and/or whose research focuses at least in part on gender, sexuality, men, women, masculinities, femininities, non-binary/trans identities/practices/processes/relations/issues.

The volume is organized thematically, and the chapters cover the following themes: security, war and military, peace, migration, international political economy and development, foreign policy, diplomacy, and global governance and international organizations. The themes chosen are broad enough to include much work that is central to IR as it is broadly defined and taught globally. We chose just *these* themes and not others (such as social movements and the environment) not because others are less important, but because we deemed them to be broad enough that research on many central problems and issues could be included within their scope. The picture of feminist IR that emerges through this thematic nomenclature is, again, necessarily a partial one; one that we hope continues to be enriched through future endeavors. Our thematic approach also allows for the inclusion and discussion of feminist IR scholarship that might differ in terms of their ontological, epistemological, and theoretical perspectives as well as their methodological approaches, but that can be gathered under a similar theme. While there are indeed differences among feminist scholars, we also note that a large portion of contemporary feminist IR scholarship in Europe adopts a constructivist or post-structuralist approach to gender and its interaction with other power relations. Furthermore, there is little discussion of different feminisms across theoretical schools (e.g. Radical, Marxist, Liberal, or Psychoanalytical feminisms). Indeed, the arguably problematic use of the idea of "turns" within feminist IR (e.g. aesthetic, practice, emotional, affect, discursive, narrative or material) or categorizations based on empirical research subject or question seems to better capture varieties among feminisms within IR scholarship in Europe than any mapping according to schools of thought would. We have opted for an empirical, thematic organization for the reasons noted above.

In sum, then, the aim of our volume is to construct a narrative about feminist IR scholarship in Europe, focusing on theoretical and empirical themes and the intellectual/academic institutional contexts in which feminist IR scholarship has developed. Like the other volumes of the series, ours thus takes the form of both an intellectual history and a sociology of the discipline. The volume consists of eight thematic chapters. The contributors begin each chapter with a mapping, to provide a clear idea about where, when, and by whom the various strands of feminist IR scholarship in Europe have developed. When discussing the theoretical contents of the scholarship, the contributors have also been asked to think carefully about what feminist approaches have been present—and absent—in what institutional contexts in Europe.

Mapping out the national and institutional contexts that have been central to feminist IR in Europe allows us both to point out various strong research contexts and to critically interrogate what the geographical and spatial distribution of feminist work might imply for how international politics is theorized and empirically examined. We also see this as an excellent opportunity to make a strong statement to the broader IR community about the vitality and breadth of feminist IR traditions, as well as about the partial nature and silences of any such tradition.

# References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Disparities and Diversification: Feminists in Europe Study War and/or Militaries

# *Harriet Gray*

**Abstract** This chapter discusses the dynamic feminist scholarship on war and militaries produced in contemporary Europe, highlighting work on militarism and militarization, military masculinities, the inclusion of women in armed organizations, military families, conflict-related sexual violence, and 'everyday' experiences. It sketches the national and institutional contexts where scholars are located and discusses the political economies that underpin significant disparities in geographical distribution and research focus, despite efforts to diversify scholarship and challenge dominant storylines and assumptions. In emphasizing how ideas and communities of scholars span continents, the chapter troubles the reification of 'Europe' as a privileged site of knowledge production.

**Keywords** Feminism · Militaries · War · Conflict-related sexual violence · Continuum of violence

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_2

H. Gray (B)

Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK e-mail: harriet.gray@york.ac.uk

# Introduction

The body of feminist international relations scholarship on war and militaries produced by scholars working in Europe is large, dynamic, and increasingly diverse. There is, of course, significant slippage and overlap between feminist work on militaries and on war. Given that the main business of militaries is to fight wars, much scholarship is relevant to both. Key themes—such as the understanding that militaries and war are inescapably gendered social phenomena characterized by gendered logics and gendered roles, and the idea that we cannot understand the geopolitical without focusing on and understanding the 'everyday' lives of ordinary people—characterize feminist work on both wars and militaries. Similarly, key policies—such as those that emerge from the UN's Women, Peace and Security agenda (in-depth discussion of which is beyond the scope of this chapter, see Haastrup, this volume)—pop up repeatedly in the background of both sub-sets of scholarship. Despite these overlaps, this chapter is structured primarily around a discussion first of scholarship on militaries and second of scholarship on war.

The two central points I highlight in this chapter in an attempt to capture the current state of the literature, moreover, also apply to work on both wars and militaries. First, readers will notice that the scholarship cited below does not represent an even coverage in terms of the geographical location of the scholars who produce it, or the militaries/wars that are analyzed. Specifically, most scholarship is produced by academics in the UK. The Nordic countries, in particular Sweden, follow as the second most well-represented region. While this over-representation is perhaps partly attributable to how my networks have been shaped by my own location in the UK (and previous employment in Sweden), as well as my inability to read any European language other than English, it is doubtless also largely attributable to the different political economic realities across the countries of Europe. In addition, and with some exceptions, scholarship on *state* militaries tends to focus on the nation in which its author is located—there is, therefore, an significant emphasis on the British and Swedish militaries, with comparatively little literature on other European armed forces or on state armed forces outside Europe. In comparison, work on *non-state* armed groups is mostly focused on militaries in the Global South. In another, perhaps interlinked imbalance, scholarship on gender-based violence in war and militaries tends to focus on the Global South, with a surprising lack of literature on such violence within European armed forces. I return to these disparities, and the colonial ways of thinking they (re)produce, below.

Second, and working against, to a certain extent, the uneven distribution of scholars and case studies I refer to above, recent years have seen a significant push toward the diversification of feminist scholarship on war and militaries, and increasing efforts to challenge dominant storylines and assumptions. This includes progress toward recognizing the multiplicities of the gendered experiences and identities in military and conflict spaces; an improved engagement with the multiple axes of power that cut across gender such as race, class, sexuality, and nationality; and a greater reckoning with the impact of coloniality in shaping what and how we know. While much work is still to be done, and indeed, while dominant stories are often unintentionally reproduced even in work that seeks to disrupt them (Stern and Zalewski 2009), there is nonetheless a significant body of interesting work endeavoring to complicate our existing assumptions. I sketch out some of this dynamic and diversifying literature below.

# Vital Caveats: 'IR Scholarship,' 'On War and Militaries,' 'Within Europe'?

Before I move to the mapping of the literature, there are some important caveats that are worthy of a brief discussion. First, the volume and quality of research in this area mean that providing an exhaustive inventory here is impossible; instead, I seek to map broad trends that are inevitably debated by many more scholars than I can cite below. Second, while this volume seeks to map IR scholarship, defined roughly as that produced by scholars based in politics or international relations departments and/or who publish in IR journals, this draws an artificial line around debates, as relevant knowledge is built not just in IR but also across disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, and women's studies. Indeed, a failure to learn from other closely related disciplines has been identified as a significant weakness in IR scholarship (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2018; Parashar 2013). The boundaries between the focus of this chapter and others in this book are also to some extent fluid and leaky, in particular the chapters on Peace and Peacebuilding (Haastrup) on Critical Security Studies (Krulisova and O'Sullivan; on overlaps between studies of militaries/militarism and security, see also Åhäll 2016; Stavrianakis and Stern 2018 and the associated issue of *Security Dialogue*).

Third, and most importantly, the boundaries of 'Europe' are porous and politically constituted. Many of the 'big names' who have shaped the discipline are based elsewhere, as are multitudes of emerging and mid-career scholars doing compelling work within the same epistemic, methodological, and political frameworks discussed here. Of course, it is not the case that these scholars' ideas are *absent* from the text that follows; in many places, their work informs that cited to the extent that it is woven into the subtext of what I discuss here. Compounding this mobility of ideas, scholars themselves are also mobile, so that the boundaries of an overview of work produced by scholars employed by institutions in European states leave space for slippage. Should older work produced by scholars who are now based in Europe but were previously located elsewhere 'count'? What about work co-authored between those in Europe and those outside? In this chapter, I have included work that falls into these two grey areas; however, I have excluded publications by scholars who were once based in Europe but are now elsewhere. Exclusion of the work of scholars currently based outside of Europe means that I am inevitably presenting a somewhat incomplete, impoverished, and distorted picture of the debates in which Europe-based scholars themselves are engaged.

Moreover, questions should be raised about the politics of re-centering Europe as a primary site of knowledge production, in particular when much of that knowledge, especially when it comes to scholarship on war, takes places outside Europe as its empirical sites. The trope of European scholars extracting data from countries in the Global South and spinning it into authoritative 'knowledge,' allowing us to position ourselves as the 'experts' on the lives of 'others,' is, of course, a familiar one with a long history, intermeshed in and (re)productive of unequal global relations of power. Citation is political and it is performative: it is "a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies" (Ahmed 2013). As well as impacting upon the careers and reputations of individual scholars, citation plays a role in (re)producing disciplinary boundaries and in marking out the approaches and debates that are primary within them. Thus, including work by scholars (currently) based in Europe writing about the Global South (e.g. Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2017; Coulter 2008) but not work by scholars with (current) institutional homes outside Europe even when they write about Europe (e.g. Drummond 2018) risks reproducing 'Europe' as an innately better, primary site of knowledge production.

# Militaries

This section maps key trends in feminist scholarship on militaries. I begin by sketching the emerging field of feminist Critical Military Studies (CMS), into which much of this research falls, before discussing four substantive themes that have been of particular interest to feminist scholars in Europe: militarism and militarization, military masculinities, the inclusion of women in armed organizations, and military families. Most work produced by scholars in Europe focuses on European state armed forces, in particular the UK (e.g. Basham 2013; Bulmer 2013; Cree 2000a, b; Duncanson 2013; Higate 2012a; Hyde 2016; Gray 2016a, b; Welland 2013; Woodward and Winter 2007), but also Sweden (Åse and Wendt 2017; Eduards 2012; Stern and Strand 2021; Strand and Kehl 2019), Norway (Dyvik 2016; Rones and Fasting 2017), Denmark (Åse and Wendt 2017), Portugal (Carreiras 2006), the Netherlands (ibid.), and Finland (Lehtonen 2015), among others. In addition, European-based scholars have also engaged with military constructions of gender in non-European locations including Thailand (Streicher 2012), Myanmar (Hedström 2020), the DRC (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 2012; Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2017), Burundi (Friðriksdóttir 2018), Kashmir and Sri Lanka (Parashar 2014), and Peru, Columbia, and El Salvador (Dietrich Ortega 2012). While there are exceptions (Brown 2017; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2012), scholarship on the Global North is more likely to focus on state militaries, while that on the Global South focuses on non-state armed groups. This disparity is concerning because it (re)produces an unspoken assumption of a diametric difference between one kind of armed group 'here' (organized, modern) and another 'there' (unruly, not modern), thereby reinstating colonial ways of thinking (cf. Eriksson Baaz et al. 2018).

While perhaps primarily rooted in the traditions of feminist security studies, feminist scholarship on militaries draws on insights from studies of political economy (Chisholm and Eichler 2018; Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016; Hedström 2020), from postcolonial theory (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Henry 2012), and from disciplines including anthropology (Parashar 2013) and sociology (Carreiras 2006). Increasingly, many interested scholars identify their work as located within the interdisciplinary field of feminist Critical Military Studies (CMS). While studies of this kind of course have a much longer history, CMS has grown in recognition across Europe in recent years, particularly since the 2015 launch of the journal *Critical Military Studies* and the regular inclusion, since 2013, of a CMS section at the European International Studies Association's annual Pan-European Conference on International Relations. As far as it is an identifiable body of work, CMS draws on interdisciplinary influences and methodological plurality, seeking to "approach… military power as a question, rather than taking it for granted" and thus engaging in "a sceptical curiosity about how it works" (Basham et al 2015: 1). CMS is by no means exclusively a feminist intellectual endeavor; however, feminist scholarship occupies an important position in this field.

#### *Militarism and Militarization*

'Militarism' and 'militarization' are both terms that frequently appear in feminist scholarship. In contrast to classic definitions that focus on the glorification of military violence or the build-up of weapons, feminist work tends to focus on the level of the 'mundane' and the 'everyday,' examining how the exercise of military power on the global stage is made possible through the day-to-day (gendered) organization of ordinary lives and of "common sense" (Åhäll 2016: 155). 'Militarism' is approached by some scholars as a "value system" (Kronsell and Svedberg 2012: 5)—a way of making sense of the world that normalizes the use of, or the *idea* of the use of, military power (Åhäll 2016: 160). Scholars have demonstrated how contemporary "liberal militarism" is rooted in biopolitical, racialized, and "masculinist protection" orientated logics that position military action as the "'rational' course of action" required to protect 'our' way of life from racialized outsiders (Basham, 2018: 34). For others, militarism is the organization of gendered social relations in a way that makes the use of military force possible. Elsewhere, for example, I explore the intimate relationships between male service personnel and their wives as a site in which militarism is embedded, because these relationships enable military institutions to access military wives' domestic and emotional labor (see below) (Gray 2016b). 'Militarization,' in contrast, is generally used to refer to complex processes through which such attitudes or social relations are spread or strengthened throughout society (Cree 2020b; Hyde 2016); "the process of preparing and engaging in the actual war-related practices" (Kronsell and Svedberg 2012: 5); or a form of governmentality "that (re)produces the power of military rationalities, discourses, knowledges, and practices" (Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2017: 269).

#### *Military Masculinities*

Feminist scholarship on military masculinities questions the oftenassumed naturalness of the association between militaries and masculinity. Military masculinities are approached as social constructions that play a central role in persuading men to fight (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009: 499; Rones and Fasting 2017: 145–146); in legitimating war in the eyes of the public (Basham 2013: 140; Millar and Tidy 2017: 142–143); and in the causality of war itself (Cockburn 2010). In the dominant stories told about it in the literature, the hegemonic masculinity of the idealized combat soldier revolves around the central norms of physical prowess, courage and toughness, discipline and respect for authority, and the use of violence, as well as misogyny, hyper-heterosexuality, and homophobia (Basham 2013; Bulmer 2013; Carreiras 2006: 41–42; Higate 2003: 27– 30; Woodward 2003). Scholars have argued that the formulation of military masculinity has very often entailed the denigration of characteristics deemed feminine, with women and LGBT people positioned as the construction's necessary "referential 'other'" (Carreiras 2006: 43–44), and homoerotic group-bonding practices reliant upon the apparent exclusion of women and gay men (Basham 2009: 423; Higate 2012a; Welland 2013).

While it is certainly possible to trace this coherent story about military masculinity in much of the feminist literature, much recent scholarship works to trouble this narrative through specific exploration of the multiplicity, fluidity, and contingency of military masculinities. Scholars have explored the multiplicity of masculinities performed or aspired to by Western military men (Chisholm and Tidy 2017; Millar and Tidy 2017: 153), as well as the irrelevance of Western-centric aggressive warrior archetypes to many contexts in the Global South (Dietrich Ortega 2012; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2008; Friðriksdóttir 2018; Streicher 2012). Others have charted how military masculinities are further complicated (and racialized) when they are enmeshed with global labor supply chains in the workings of private military security companies (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016; Higate 2012a, b; Joachim and Schneiker 2012); how the particular experiences of peacekeeping might reshape military masculinities (Duncanson 2013; Holvikivi 2021); and how contemporary "soldier-scholar" masculinities might legitimate liberal internationalist warfare (Khalili 2011: 1486–1488). Scholars interested in drones debate how the increasing use of such technology in warfare is reshaping the relationship between masculinity and violence (Clark 2018; Kunashakaran 2016; Wilcox 2017), while those interested in embodiment and emotions consider the excitement, pleasure, and enjoyment, as well as pain and suffering, that comes from enacting military identities and activities (Dyvik 2016; Welland 2018). Scholars have also explored the significant changes that have enabled LGBT people to serve openly in many European (and other) militaries. Some have noted that militaries increasingly use the idea of LGBT-inclusiveness as a way to frame themselves as relevant to contemporary society (Strand and Kehl 2019), while others demonstrate that heterosexuality continues to shape 'public' military life, allowing militaries to remain presumptively heteronormative spaces (Basham 2009; Bulmer 2013; Lehtonen 2015). Recent work has begun to engage more comprehensively with gender as formulated through intersections with other axes of oppression such as race and class (Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016; Higate 2012b; Ware 2012); however, important silences remain here, as well as a problematic trend toward the depoliticization of 'intersectionality' as a concept in some CMS work (see Henry 2017).

#### *Fighting Women*

As they are interested in fighting men, feminist scholars are also interested in fighting women and have studied female fighters across Europe and beyond. While armed groups generally remain presumptively masculine, women have long been present in multiple roles and, indeed, the division between 'combat roles' and 'support roles' is in many cases highly unstable, political, and gendered (Millar and Tidy 2017). In state militaries, women have been increasingly incorporated into 'combat roles' (Carreiras 2006: 12–23). Women's participation as fighters in non-state armed groups, in which they have perhaps always taken on more varied roles (Brown 2017; Coulter 2008; Marks 2017; Parashar 2014), has been different across different groups: while some position women's active participation as a signifier of modernity and liberation, others use women as a symbol of a traditional culture that must be reclaimed, and are therefore more likely to contain women's participation within unarmed support roles (Parashar 2014). Scholars interested in the call to increase the numbers of women involved in peacekeeping missions enshrined in the WPS agenda have noted that this goal is largely based on the assumption that the presence of women will automatically improve civil-military relations in conflict zones and reduce sexual violence (Kirby and Shepherd 2016: 374–376), and have critiqued the ways in which the small increases that have been seen rely overwhelmingly on women from the Global South (Henry 2012).

Some feminist scholars take the view that the integration of women into militaries is a progressive move—either because it grants women greater access to full citizenship rights and broader equality (Kennedy-Pipe 2000: 36–37; Kronsell 2012), or because women's presence might "regender" the cultures of these organizations by undermining the association of masculinity with militarism (Duncanson and Woodward 2016). In opposition to this, anti-militarist feminists argue that the violence, environmental destruction, and imperialism inherent in militaries, as well as the spectrum of gendered discrimination, exploitation, and violence perpetrated by military personnel, and indeed the inherently patriarchal nature of military organizations, mean that the inclusion of women cannot significantly change the military system (for an overview of these arguments, see Duncanson 2017). While Duncanson charts anti-militarist feminist scholarship primarily in the US, it is worth flagging the work of Cynthia Cockburn here, perhaps Europe's most prominent anti-militarist feminist scholar. Cockburn's powerful analysis identifies the intertwined forces of patriarchy, ethno-nationalism, and capitalism as a root causes of war—arguing specifically that "patriarchal gender relations predispose our societies to war" (Cockburn 2010: 140).

#### *Military Families*

Feminist scholars are also interested in military families, particularly military wives. Civilian women married to servicemen are often described as situated in liminal space, on the borders of the military and civilian spheres (Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2017). Despite their lack of status as full members of military communities, however, a significant body of work has detailed the central importance of the unpaid reproductive labor performed by civilian women in intimate relationships with servicemen—in state militaries among both regulars (Basham and Catignani 2018, 2020; Eriksson Baaz and Verweijen 2017; Gray 2016b; Hyde 2016) and reservists (Basham and Catignani 2020), in parastate armed groups (Hedström 2020), and in private military security companies (Chisholm and Eichler 2018). This labor is crucial to military organizations, reproducing the individual soldier in much the same way as women's reproductive labor in capitalist systems enables men to participate in the labor market as workers, and thereby enabling armed organizations to wage war (Hedström 2020; see also Ware 2012: 207).

Military wives also carry out vital symbolic roles in domesticating and legitimating war in the minds of civilian publics. Military wives constitute the most immediate embodiment of the idea that military men protect the feminized space of the hearth and home (Basham 2013: 82–83; Gray 2016b). Representations of military wives (as well as, to a lesser extent, other family members) as vulnerable, heroic figures who sacrifice their family life in support of the nation, and deserve support from the nation in turn, render critique of military institutions in public discourse more difficult (Basham 2016: 889; Cree 2020a, b). Military wives are largely understood either as militarized subjects or as agents of militarization; others, however, have also explored how they may play a role in resisting militarism in various ways (Cree 2020b; Erikson Baaz and Verweijen 2017; Hyde 2017).

## War

While feminist scholarship has engaged with multiple elements and enactments of war, I focus here on three areas of study that have gained particular attention in recent decades. First, I map feminist calls to study war not (only) in terms of the actions of states, but through a focus on war as experienced by 'everyday' people. Next, I offer a brief sketch of work on the gendering of contemporary counterinsurgency practices—this is of particular interest to feminist scholars as it provides a counter-point to the 'masculine' way that war has generally been understood. Finally, I discuss perhaps the most common theme appearing in feminist studies of war: sexual violence in conflict spaces.

#### *Everyday War*

Parashar calls on us to pay attention to how war is lived through the "banal moments" which make up the lives of people who "live inside wars and confront the gory images and the sight of blood and bodies on a daily basis" (Parashar, 2013: 618–619). In this research vein, feminist scholars across Europe have explored, among other things, the "social orders" that war creates (Coulter 2008: 55–56), the multiple roles that women take on in conflict and post-conflict settings (Al-Ali and Pratt 2009; Coulter 2008; Parashar 2014), and the gendered experiences of male military personnel deployed to warzones (Dyvik 2016). Pushing back against the removal of lived, embodied lives from much mainstream scholarship on war, some scholars center bodily experience (Dyvik 2016; Wilcox 2011); others, the emotional experiences of warfare (Åhäll and Gregory 2015). The intention of scholarship focused on everyday life, on bodies, and/or on emotions is to understand how war is lived and experienced by embodied human subjects. In so doing, this scholarship does not simply flesh out accounts of what we already (think we) know about wars; rather, it centers experiences which traditional frameworks cannot explain and, thus, is deeply challenging to them (Parashar 2013). This approach does not seek to suggest that states and their actions are not important, but rather that it is impossible to understand war in its fullness without also paying attention to lived experiences and how they construct and prop up the geopolitics of war: as Basham contends, war is 'simultaneously a geopolitical and an everyday phenomenon'; it is 'simultaneously co-constituted by geopolitical and everyday practices' (Basham 2013: 14, 7).

#### *Counterinsurgency*

While conventional warfare is generally portrayed as 'masculine,' scholars analyzing the gendering of contemporary counterinsurgency have noted both that it is widely understood as a softer, 'feminine' way of warring and that counterinsurgency practices, because they target the civilian population rather than enemy military personnel, are centered on a feminized target. Often, counterinsurgency practices explicitly target women, because women tend to be assumed to be non-combatants and, moreover, to be a central lynchpin of the civilian society whose 'hearts and minds' must be won over (Khalili 2011; see also Dyvik 2014; McBride and Wibben 2012). Counterinsurgency is analyzed as a colonial feminist project, where privileged white women of the metropole justify their increasing role in policy circles in the 'feminist' and 'humanitarian' language of 'saving brown women,' and where women marginalized in their home countries can, as military personnel, wield power over colonized men while still being able to take on a role as "damsel in distress" in relation to the hypermasculinity of US special forces personnel (Khalili 2011; McBride and Wibben 2012). The use of Female Engagement Teams by the US military in Afghanistan has emerged from the literature as a particularly clear example of this (Dyvik 2014; McBride and Wibben 2012).

#### *Conflict-Related Sexual Violence*

Conflict-related sexual violence is a significant focus of feminist scholarship on war produced across Europe. One key theme of the debate circulates around the idea that conflict-related sexual violence functions as a 'weapon of war.' The weapon of war discourse is organized around four nodal points: the assumption of 'strategicness'; the belief in a culpable perpetrator who acts with rational intent; the idea that it is possible to stop rape; and the gendered assumption that a woman's sexual 'purity' somehow represents the purity of her ethnic or national collective (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013: 44–62). When it came to the fore in scholarship and policy in the aftermath of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, this narrative enabled wartime rape to be framed as *political,* rather than as an inevitability tied to men's sexual urges and war's cruelty. Such ideas have found traction among scholars in Europe (e.g. Seifert 1996) and continue to underpin much of the relevant policy discourse analyzed in European scholarship (Gray 2018; Kirby 2015). However, in the past decade, most scholarship emerging across Europe tends to be critical of the weapon of war discourse. This critique comes in several forms.

Some critique the weapon of war framework because it obscures the continuum of violence by producing a "hierarchy of harms" (Kirby 2015: 463) between different forms of violence. It has now been compellingly demonstrated that rapes understood to constitute a 'weapon of war' mostly those perpetrated by armed men against (mainly) women of 'enemy' collectives—are not the only form of gender-based violence in warzones and indeed are unlikely to be the most prevalent (Swaine 2015: 759–760). Scholars have therefore argued that the political focus on this one form of violence obscures the continuum that connects 'everyday'/'individual' and 'extraordinary'/'mass' forms of gender-based violence across war and peace, public and private, and thus makes it difficult to understand and to tackle such violence in a comprehensive way (Boesten 2014; Gray 2018; Kirby 2015; Swaine 2015). While many working in this area have drawn primarily on critical war or critical security studies perspectives in drawing the connections between sexual violence across the continuum, others have done so through a political economy approach, highlighting the material bases of sexual violence that stretch across war and peace (Kostovicova et al. 2020) (and it should be noted, of course, that these approaches are not mutually exclusive but often inform and reinforce one another).

Another important line of critique comes from postcolonial feminist thinking. Zalewski and Runyan (2015) explore the racialization that underpins how the hypervisible "spectacle" of sexual violence in the Global South is framed for consumption by those in the North. Similarly, others have explored how 'weapon of war' narratives often rely upon colonial and racialized imaginations of the conflict rapes that take place in the Global South as barbaric, inexplicable, savage, and inhuman—something that could never happen 'over here.' This framing calls for a white savior and risks the commercialization of conflict rape in certain parts of the world, in that it skews Western donor funding toward particular forms of harm at the expense of others (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013: 88–106; see also Douma and HiIhorst 2012).

A third critical approach queries the "curious erasure" (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2018) of bodies and sexualities from discussions of 'weapon of war' rape. Recent scholarship draws on insights from feminist scholarship outside IR to complicate understandings of sex, violence, pleasure, and power (ibid.) and explores how sexuality appears in the stories of wartime sexual violence told by many perpetrators and victim-survivors (Boesten 2014; Dolan et al. 2020; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009, 2018). This makes room to explore how bodies themselves come to be intelligible as a deployable 'weapons' (Kirby 2020), how sexual violence can be caused by a breakdown in military order as much as it can result from the following of military orders (Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013: 64–87), and how a removal of 'the sexual' from our understanding of conflict-related sexual violence may have the unfortunate side effect of opening up space for such violence to be framed as a legitimate tactic of warring (Gray and Stern 2019).

Finally, recent years have also seen increasing recognition of male sexual victimization in conflict settings. Generally speaking, this literature identifies the importance of patriarchal gender relations and structures in shaping how sexual violence against men is perpetrated and given meaning, further developing conceptualizations of how gender underpins sexual violence more broadly (Dolan et al. 2020; Gray et al. 2019; Touquet and Gorris 2016; Zalewski et al. 2018). This literature itself is also becoming increasingly complex and nuanced. Recent scholarship has begun to critique and complicate some widespread assumptions about male victimization in the existing literature, including heteronormative ideas (see Schulz and Touquet 2020) and the sense that such violence necessarily results in the 'emasculation,' 'feminization,' or 'homosexualization' of its victim-survivors (Schulz 2018).

# Concluding Remarks

As the above mapping demonstrates, there is a significant push within feminist scholarship to disrupt the dominant storylines of academic knowledge on war and militaries, both those contained within 'malestream' scholarship and those that animate much of the existing feminist scholarship itself. Significant silences, however, remain. Multiple potential avenues for future research could be noted; however, for me the most striking gap is the paucity of literature on gender-based violence within European militaries themselves. There are some examples—e.g. a small amount of work on domestic violence in the British military (Gray 2016a, b), and some studies on sexual abuse, harassment, and discrimination against women and LGBT personnel (Alvinius and Holmberg 2019; Bulmer 2013; Carreiras 2006: 46–54; Woodward and Winter 2007) however, this body of work is very small and undeveloped in comparison with the significant amount of scholarship on gender-based violence in the US military, as well as that produced by European scholars on sexual violence in warzones overseas. It is unlikely that this can be explained by a lack of violence to investigate—in the British military, for example, a handful of high-profile cases as well as the significant proportion of Court Martials linked to sexual assault, rape, or child pornography (Rayment 2019) suggest an issue worthy of study. This disparity in research knowledge (re)produces colonial divides, by positioning military gender-based violence as something that primarily takes place 'over there.' That is, while scholars are increasingly seeking to produce knowledge on conflict-related sexual violence that pushes back against colonial narratives, when we look at the body of research as a whole, coloniality continues to underpin modes of knowledge production in multiple ways. As I note above, a similar point can be made about the focus of scholarship in the Global South on non-state armed groups and not on state militaries.

Another glaring gap in the literature relates to the relative lack of research on European state militaries other than the UK (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Sweden). This leads to my final point—a discussion of where the literature cited in this chapter is produced and of the impact this location has on the knowledge constructed. Most feminist scholars working on war and militarism in Europe are based in the UK (followed by Sweden and the other Nordic countries). The over-representation of UK-based scholars can be explained by factors including the large numbers of academic institutions, the availability of research funding, and a political atmosphere that is (at the current moment in time) generally permissive to feminist research.

In the UK, perhaps the highest profile institution hosting feminist scholars working on war and militaries is the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). This status was solidified with the 2015 launch of the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security and the announcement in 2019 of the large five-year Gender, Justice and Security Hub, funded by the British Government's Global Challenges Research Fund, and housed at LSE, which brings together multiple research streams and research sites into a large, multi-stranded project. At the time of writing, however, much of this work has been somewhat thrown into uncertainty due to cuts to Britain's Overseas Development Assistance commitment (Kirby 2021), and it remains to be seen whether cuts such as this will weaken the dominance of UK-based scholarship in the post-Brexit world. Outside the LSE, many British institutions seem to house one feminist academic working in this field, and I wonder if it may sometimes be felt that one such scholar is required in order to 'tick the box' for an IR department in terms of teaching needs and research profile, but that (as this presumably remains a 'fringe' focus within IR more broadly) any more might be superfluous to requirements. There is at the time of writing, however, more than one feminist scholar of war and/or militaries to be found at, among others, Cardiff University, Kings College London, the University of Manchester, Newcastle University, the University of Sheffield, SOAS, the University of Sussex, and the University of Warwick. In the Nordic countries, the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg stands out as the institutional home of a large number of scholars interested in gender, war, and the military, who often collaborate together as well as publishing independently. The Swedish Defence University in Stockholm and Lund University also boast several interested scholars. In Norway, Oslo's PRIO is worthy of mention, particularly as the institutional host of the SVAC and GEO-SVAC datasets on sexual violence and armed conflict (see Bahgat et al. 2016; Cohen and Nordås 2013).

Representation across the rest of Europe is significantly more scant, with some scholars scattered across Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Portugal, and Serbia, among others, and some countries, including Greece, Hungary, Italy, and Poland, in which I am not aware of any relevant scholars (although my limitation to the English language may play a role in producing my ignorance here). The experiences of the Central European University, which previously housed feminist scholarship on war and militaries in Budapest in its Gender Studies Department before moving most of its operations to Vienna as a result of attacks by the right-wing Hungarian Government, including particular attacks against gender studies as a discipline (Redden 2018), are worthy of note as an example of how hostile political environments can stymie scholarship.

Scholars' geographical locations matter for a number of reasons to do with the politics of knowledge (some of which are discussed above), and they also matter because they can shape the types of research that is possible. While in some locations (e.g. in Hungary) it may be impossible to conduct feminist research in an academic institution at all, practical issues in other locations—such as the priorities and methodological biases of funding bodies, the relative permissiveness of risk assessment regimes, and the possibility of getting research access into military institutions—all shape *what types* of feminist research are possible. This likely plays out in different ways across Europe, but I offer a couple of examples from the UK here because, given that most scholars are located in the UK, this likely has the most significant impact on the field as a whole. The most immediate point here is that the concentration of scholars in the UK leads to an disproportionate focus in the literature on the UK military, but there are also more subtle factors at play. Many UK institutions have cautious travel risk assessment policies that somewhat simplistically (and influenced by a colonial mindset) divide the world into 'low risk' and 'high risk,' or even 'hostile' locations. Anecdotally, this may result in researchers being denied permission to carry out fieldwork in certain locations in a way that would not happen, for example, in Sweden, where universities do not seem to follow restrictive travel risk assessment regimes. Similarly, the quantity of scholarship that does exist on the British military perhaps masks the often difficult processes required to gain approval to conduct research with members of the institution itself, which particularly constrain research that is interpretive, critical, and/or feminist. The power and biases of military gatekeepers in the British context have doubtless prevented and/or reshaped feminist research that would otherwise have been conducted (Basham and Catignani 2021). It is not possible, of course, to conduct a review of literature not published and research not carried out. However, the point I want to make here is that it is not only intellectual interest that drives how feminist scholars in Europe select the focus of their research, it is also political economic realities and the constraints of requiring various forms of institutional permission. These realities shape the body of feminist literature on war and militarism that is produced across Europe in powerful, if usually unseen, ways.

# References


#### 32 H. GRAY

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# Feminist Security Studies in Europe: Beyond Western Academics' Club

*Kateˇrina Krulišová and Míla O'Sullivan*

**Abstract** This chapter maps contemporary debates in feminist security studies (FSS) in Europe, showing the variety of issues studied via different theoretical and methodological lenses. While celebrating the richness of contemporary FSS debates, the chapter also highlights the asymmetry in knowledge production across the continent. FSS is clearly dominated by academics based in globally recognized 'Centers of Excellence' in Western and Northern Europe; yet our mapping also highlights scholarship in Central, Eastern, Southern, and South-eastern Europe. This underscores some obstacles scholars outside of the 'West' face when engaging with the discipline and calls for more inclusive transnational FSS debate in Europe.

Department of Social and Political Sciences, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

e-mail: katerina.krulisova02@ntu.ac.uk

M. O'Sullivan (B)

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_3

K. Krulišová

Centre for Global Political Economy, Institute of International Relations Prague (IIR), Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: osullivan@iir.cz

**Keywords** Feminist Security Studies · Central and Eastern Europe · Southern Europe · Core · Semi-periphery

# Introduction

The contemporary debates in feminist security studies (hereafter FSS) are rich and varied. Whether this richness lies in theoretical or methodological innovation, blending of scholarly disciplines, or studying issues others have overlooked, current scholarly debates show FSS as a dynamic, impactful, and influential discipline.

The key aim of this chapter is to map the depth and breadth of contemporary feminist security scholarship produced in Europe. Amidst the celebration of the rapidly growing and influential field, we identify existing silences, exclusions, and, importantly, possibilities for more productive feminist engagements. We follow the calls to engage with FSS 'in its entirety' (Shepherd 2013, 438) and strive to bring attention to less visible locations of FSS scholarship.

We argue that 'Western' FSS knowledge flows globally, yet the debates held in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Southern and South-eastern Europe do not sufficiently shape the discipline. FSS scholars continue to debate knowledge production asymmetry in terms of 'Global South' and 'Global North' (Shepherd 2013). The 'North' and 'South' remain geopolitically undefined; it is assumed that the reader knows where the border between the two lies. We argue that CEE, Southern and South-eastern Europe are difficult to categorize as such. Independently whether you place these countries in the imagined South or North, European FSS is dominated by scholarship produced in the UK, Nordic countries, and to a certain degree Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The rest of Europe appears mostly silent.

We therefore highlight existing scholarship produced both in and, importantly, outside of the dominant locations and uncover some of the challenges of this uneven feminist knowledge production. This, we hope, will open up a pan-European dialogue that could lead to more inclusive transnational exchanges and truly pluralistic feminist knowledge production. To this end, we firstly trace contemporary debates on what, where, and who is FSS. We identify what, inter alia, is missing from these conversations, highlighting regional divides and asymmetrical knowledge production on the European continent. To celebrate the depth and breadth of FSS in Europe, we map the theoretical debates, methods, and variety of topics studied. In this overview, we highlight some of the FSS scholarship originating from CEE, Southern and South-eastern Europe. To show the asymmetries, we visually present the 'density' of FSS researchers in each country based on our list of nearly 300 scholars publishing on feminist security.

As any mapping exercise, ours is political and imperfect. This project is bound to miss some work. We hope that this initial mapping can provide a useful guide for security analysts and practitioners and open up new debates. Although this chapter is authored by the two of us, it is a result of a collective feminist effort. To map the scholarship as best as we could, we have not only analyzed leading academic journals, but also contacted our wide networks for help. It was the effort of many of our friends and colleagues that helped us create a more complete map of European FSS; needless to say, all errors and omissions are ours.

# What, Where, and Who Is Feminist Security Studies?

FSS builds on early Feminist IR (e.g. Enloe 1983; Cohn 1987) which reconceptualizes security in multilevel and multidimensional terms as absence of violence, be it military, economic, sexual, or environmental (Tickner 1992, 128). Sjoberg (2011, 602) characterizes FSS as 'the narrative generated by [FSS scholars'] arguments, disagreements, and compromises.' The question of *who* and *where* gets to be part of this arguing, disagreeing and compromising, becomes key to our inquiry. Before we proceed to the question of who and where, we discuss *what* scholarly commitments FSS promises.

Basu (2013, 455) reminds feminist scholars of the debt we owe to women's movements—not only the Western white activists, but crucially also the 'third world, black, and queer feminists.' FSS often focuses on lived experience, positionality, reflexivity, and emancipation of marginalized subjects (Shepherd 2013; Sylvester 2013; Wibben 2011a). It pays attention to the complexities of power and context and 'is directed toward transformations of gendered hierarchies inherent in relations of insecurity that make people vulnerable' (Basu 2013, 457). FSS should also take on an obligation to be resolutely anti-imperialist (Wibben 2011a).

The ongoing debate of what FSS is and should be, including its relation to the mainstream, provides an interesting insight into disciplinary dynamics. In 2011, *Politics & Gender* published a Critical Perspectives section on FSS (Lobasz and Sjoberg 2011, hereafter CP). All the authors of the CP section were based in the US. This was noted in the 2013 'The State of Feminist Security Studies: Continuing the Conversation' Forum (hereafter 'Forum,' Shepherd 2013). Shepherd (2013, 438) warns against constructing 'FSS in the image of White Western femininity' and calls for sympathetic, systematic, and critical engagement with FSS 'in its entirety.' Parashar (2013, 440–441) notes that the 'complete oversight' of works produced 'in locations where "(in)security" is not a matter of discourse alone but is embodied in everyday living and in "doing" research.' The Forum discusses some European FSS, but none of the European scholars in it are located outside of Western/Northern Europe. Sylvester (2013) highlights scholarship produced in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Norway. McLeod (2013) is the only scholar who cites non-Western research.

Sjoberg (2016, 52) further addresses the issue of representation and notes that postcolonial scholarship and concerns are not fully incorporated into FSS scholarship. She calls for FSS to be both 'substantively and representationally inclusive' (ibid., 55). Nearly a decade since this debate, FSS does not appear to be truly inclusive. Haastrup and Hagen (2021) focus on one of the key FSS research foci, the UN's Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, and note that the key Centers of Excellence on WPS are based in universities located in the Global North. Parashar observes that 'intellectual economy of WPS privileges normative whiteness and the voices of western feminists who command resources, claim expertise and advance theories to understand conflict outside of the global north' (cited in Haastrup and Hagen 2021, 3).

The ongoing FSS conversations clearly call for inclusion of the Global South. What these debates omit is the (lack of) inclusion within the broader European continent. FSS knowledge is produced in and around a few centers of scientific excellence (Henry 2021), and the rest of Europe remains invisible. The body of edited volumes produced in recent years within the frame of FSS and feminist IR demonstrates this exclusion, albeit the diversity of scholars and themes included vary (e.g. Gentry et al. 2018; Davies and True 2018; Ní Aoláin et al. 2018; Väyrynen et al. 2021). Similarly, one has to look very hard to find the work of scholars from CEE, South-eastern and Southern Europe in top feminist and IR journals.

# What is Missing?

Our visualization of FSS scholarship in Europe (see Fig. 3.1) clearly displays the regional asymmetries in academic knowledge production mentioned above. Such differences have been sometimes referred to in feminist research through geopolitically defined categories of European 'core' versus 'semi-periphery,' East–West divisions, or 'in-betweenness' (Blagojevic 2004; Kulawik 2019). Scholars emphasizing local context have used these concepts to show that feminist knowledge produced from the semi-periphery is considered as 'semi-knowledge' and 'never quite there' (Blagojevic 2004). Other feminist scholars have, however, called for more transversal feminist dialogue and more localized research with transnational relevance (Nyklová 2017, 54; Pereira 2014). They argue that the narrative of difference has limited the mutual travel of feminist thought between what is referred to as the core and the semi-periphery (Cerwonka 2008 in Nyklová 2017, 54), reinforcing rather than challenging the existing hierarchies in knowledge production (Nyklová 2017, 55).

We identify similar limitations in the flow of feminist security knowledge. Gender research emerged rather late in the 'semi-periphery' in the 1990s as part of social sciences and humanities discipline, around the same time as feminist IR and later FSS in the West. Today, Gender Studies occupy an academically insecure position in most of the semi-periphery countries (Aavik and Raili Marling 2018). Most feminist security-related research focusing on local themes can be found in Sociology, Gender Studies or Women's Studies, although FSS is sporadically emerging in the discipline of IR as well (Gasztold 2018; O'Sullivan and Krulišová 2020).

Our analysis reveals that the lack of recognition of feminist IR and the FSS subfield is a shared trait outside of Western and Northern Europe. Available research attributes this absence to conventional local academic cultures. In Italy for instance, the important feminist tradition that links grassroots activism and academia is missing in the field of IR and security studies.i In the Czech Republic, the masculine IR foundation entails a hierarchical and rivalry 'macho' culture, which ignores and/or devalues feminist research (Nyklová et al. 2019, 16). In Poland, security studies are dominated by men with practical experience (ex-military, police officers, secret services) who 'react allergically' to gender topics.ii

FSS has neither been academically established within the discipline of IR in most of South-eastern Europe. Specifically in the Balkans, many feminist scholars writing on related topics would not consider themselves to belong to FSS, as security studies is, with notable exceptions, still perceived in terms of 'hard' security.iii Similar response to our inquiries came from Estonia, France, Italy, Slovakia, or Turkey, all indicating the absence of FSS as an established academic field. Scholarship produced from these locations is thus limited in scope and influence over the FSS field.

# European Feminist Security Studies: Theories, Methodologies, Issues

European FSS scholars have been shaping FSS through their theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions. There are a number of ongoing academic conversations that resonate throughout the discipline with European scholars at their core. While it is difficult to discuss all of these, below we offer some examples of feminist research conducted in Europe. We pay special attention to research produced outside of Western/Northern Europe and also highlight some issues and areas European FSS have not yet discussed.

# Issues and Silences

European feminists have studied the 'everyday' security and militarization for some time (Basham 2013). They also focus on identity (Stern 2005), trauma and memory (Ketola 2021), embodiment (Wilcox 2015; Dyvik 2016), or affect (Åhäll 2018; Chisholm and Ketola 2020).

A number of researchers discuss the causes and consequences of sexual violence against women and men in and out of armed conflicts (Kirby 2013; Swaine 2018; Schulz and Touquet 2020; Zalewski et al 2018). Analyses tend to focus on sexual violence perpetrated during war outside Europe: for example, Schulz (2018) studies sexual violence against men in Northern Uganda; Baaz and Stern (2009) focus on the Democratic Republic of Congo; Boesten (2014) studies Peru. The few exceptions seem to be studies on Europe's recent conflicts. These focus on domestic violence in politically contested Northern Ireland (Doyle and McWilliams 2019) and on gender-based and sexual violence during and after war in South-Eastern Europe (Kostovicova et al. 2020; Meznaric 2019; Žarkov 2007; Suboti´c and Zaharijevi´c 2018).

Feminists also focus on the questions of agency and activism during conflicts (Mladjenovic 2001); sexuality (Moˇcnik 2017); transitional justice (Björkdahl and Selimovic 2015); R2P (Kolmasova and Krulisova 2019); gender in/and DDR and SSR (Duriesmith and Holmes 2019); peacebuilding (Partis-Jennings 2017); peacekeeping (Loftsdóttir and Björnsdóttir 2015); or post-conflict justice (Brown and Ní Aoláin 2015; O'Reilly 2018). Closely related to this are discussions on militarization and militarism (Grzebalska 2016, 2021), hegemonic and military masculinities (Woodward and Duncanson 2017), or feminist perspectives of wartime memory sites (Reeves 2020). The link between the focus and location is clear here—the UK has a large military and is, like Sweden, engaged in field operations outside of Europe (Duncanson 2013; Kronsell 2012). European FSS also discusses issues of health (Harman 2021) and reproductive health (Thomson and Pierson 2018).

Another key area of investigation is the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda. The UK, being the home of the WPS 'Center of Excellence,' produces most knowledge on WPS alongside with the Nordic countries (Kirby and Shepherd 2021; Olsson and Gizelis 2015). WPS is central to the study of feminist foreign policy which is similarly based in Sweden (Aggestam et al. 2019) or the UK (Thomson 2019). WPS research has been indeed thriving, focusing on themes such as arms trade and political economy of militarism (Acheson and Butler 2019), exclusion of refugees from European WPS policy (Holvikivi and Reeves 2020), climate change (Cohn and Duncanson 2020), but also institutions like NATO (Wright et al. 2019) or the OSCE (Jenichen et al. 2018). Feminist scholars have also approached WPS through lenses informed by the political economy of conflict and called for re-bridging feminist security and feminist political economy (Lai 2020; O'Sullivan 2020; Stavrevska 2020).

There is limited research produced on gender and conflict from the locations outside of the 'Centers of Excellence.' Yet, there is a reason for optimism; FSS scholars outside of the core produce introductory FSS texts in local languages (Gasztold 2018; Krulišová and Rychnovská 2020) and engage with productive academic conversations with the West. This is the case of the monograph *Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism* (2020) by a Polish academic Aleksandra Gasztold. FSS research is also gaining ground in Spanish (Romero 2021) and Portuguese academia (Deiana 2018; Palacián De Inza 2019). Among the studied issues is the question of nationalism in the adoption of WPS agenda in the Balkans (Suboti´c and Zaharijevi´c 2018), Ukraine (O'Sullivan 2019), or the emergence of WPS policy out of hostile anti-gender setting in the Czech Republic (O'Sullivan and Krulišová 2020).

The previously less visible post-socialist region and the fragile contexts East of Europe have gained some notice in FSS scholarship across Europe with the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine and with growing antigender tendencies globally. Western feminist scholars produced works on Russia as an illiberal norm entrepreneur in Ukraine (Ketelaars 2019), the gendered impact of economic insecurity in Ukraine (Mathers 2020), or on Putin's gendered securitization of the COVID-19 pandemic (Kuteleva and Clifford 2021). A rare example of transnational European cooperation is the volume *Women's Everyday Lives in War and Peace in the South Caucasus* edited by Ziemer (2020) and a collection entitled *Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories* (Altınay and Pet˝o 2016).

Pet˝o is also one of the key scholars writing on transnational anti-gender movements in Europe. This interdisciplinary research reveals that 'antigender ideology' campaigns create new insecurities in the form of cyber violence, reproductive health insecurity, gender-based violence, or threats of physical destruction to feminist scholars (Pet˝o 2021). Korolczuk and Graff (2018, 802) explain that antigenderists have used the term 'cultural wars,' and other militarizing narratives such as 'fight' or 'weapon,' whereas their key focus has been on the politics of reproduction. Given the transnational character of this phenomenon, the existing scholarship engages with wider European locations, contributing thus to more pluralistic feminist exchanges. Such exchanges also inform the edited volume on anti-gender campaigns in Europe (Kuhar and Patternote eds. 2017) with contributors from the Netherlands but also France, Poland, or Hungary.

# Theories and Methods

FSS offers both a critique of existing main/male stream theoretical discussions and, perhaps more importantly, theoretical innovation. In terms of critique, European FSS actively engages with other European IR and security studies theory. As apparent from our discussion below, FSS theorizing is a domain of Western/Northern European academia.

The feminist critique of the Copenhagen School starts with Hansen's (2000) work and recently culminated in a still ongoing discussion between Howell and Richter-Montpetit's (2020) critique and Hansen's (2020) reply. Scholars also use the securitization framework to focus on gendered issues (e.g. Brown 2008; Gray and Frack 2019). Security as emancipation, the core tenet of Aberystwyth school, has also been extensively debated by FSS (Åhäll 2016).

FSS engages with disciplines other than security studies or IR. Several European researchers analyze security policies and issues via feminist institutionalism, demonstrating the relevance of this framework for FSS (e.g. Thompson 2019; Chappell and McKay 2021). Researchers who study feminist foreign policy highlight not only the lack of gender lens in foreign policy analysis (e.g. Haastrup 2020), but also engage with the English School (e.g. Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond 2016) or postcolonial approaches (e.g. Achilleos-Sarll 2018; Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019). Researchers focus on political economies of gender (in)security (e.g. Rai 2013) and debate the convergence of FSS and Feminist International/Global Political Economy (Elias 2015; Stern 2017; Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2017; de Almagro and Ryan 2020). There is also a growing network of scholars who identify their research as feminist peace studies (e.g. Wibben et al. 2019). A lot of work also closely engages with International Political Sociology (e.g. Tidy 2018), critical terrorism studies (e.g. Pratt 2013), or critical military studies (see Gray's chapter in this volume). Queer theory forms another framework with which FSS scholars engage. Works by Richter-Montpetit (2018), Leigh and Weber (2018), or Hagen (2016) are just some examples of queer conceptualization of security. Race is a key element of study of security. For instance, Pratt's (2013) work focuses on race and sexuality in relation to the WPS agenda.

The FSS commitments discussed earlier allow for variety of methodologies. Feminist research often challenges conventional ways of knowing. Many FSS scholars employ what Halberstam (2019, 13) calls 'scavenger methodologies.' Such methods 'seek to centre subjects, processes, and practices historically excluded, ignored, and minimised' (Kinsella and Shepherd 2020, 299). FSS thus aims to democratize the production of knowledge, which results in exciting methodological innovations, while allowing use of conventional methods to answer questions about gender and security.

There is a number of scholars who use quantitative methodologies to examine issues of gender and security (e.g. Joshi and Olsson 2021; Forsberg and Olsson 2021). This scholarship tends to be based in the research centers that are home to the conflict databases, notably PRIO and Uppsala. For instance, Kreft combines statistical analysis (2019) and qualitative methodologies (2020). The majority of the FSS scholars, however, use qualitative methodologies.

Studying texts and images, which could also be linked to the so-called discursive, narrative, and visual turns,1 forms a large part of contemporary FSS. Discourse analysis is used to analyze variety of policies and practices (Gentry 2016). Wibben (2011b), for instance, develops a feminist narrative approach to security. The method of visual analysis is applied by Cooper-Cunningham (2019) or Wright and Bergman-Rosamond (2021). Feminist researchers also engage with variety of empirical sites. For example, scholars who focus on conflict textiles (Andrä et al. 2020) use curation as a method of knowing.

European FSS offers examples of ethnographic research (e.g. Björkdahl and Selimovic 2018; McLeod 2013) and excellent studies using interviews with various gendered actors (e.g. Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2009). Scholars also engage directly with actors inside hegemonically masculine institutions as 'critical friends' (Wright et al. 2019). Importantly, feminist scholarship considers how to study silence (e.g. Kronsell 2006) and unease (Baaz and Stern 2016). There are also a number of reflective pieces on various aspects of subjectivity and fieldwork (Bliesemann de Guevara and Bøås 2020; Cole 2017).

# Concluding Thoughts

FSS is a disciplinary home for a wide range of research questions, theoretical frameworks, and methods. It challenges and enriches mainstream IR and Security Studies. European FSS is a home full of researchers who

<sup>1</sup> Furthermore, feminist scholarship makes important contributions to the other seemingly endless array of so-called turns (e.g. the emotional, affective, corporeal turn, material, everyday, etc.) now fashionable in security studies; indeed, much feminist work predates the nomenclature of such 'turns' at all (e.g. Enloe 1983; see Stavrianakis and Stern 2018, 8).

largely practice what they preach: self-reflection, inclusivity, and ethical research, as well as speaking truth to power. It can no longer be seen as marginal; if you have not engaged with it you have not been paying attention. We see ourselves as part of this disciplinary home; it brings us a lot of joy, scholarly inspiration, and, importantly, support.

Our aim was to celebrate the existing FSS research in Europe as well as to point out its shortcomings. We hope that our chapter speaks to debates about the production of knowledge. This mapping shows there is now a strong FSS network of scholars based in Western and Northern Europe which dominates knowledge production and shapes the discipline. They produce innovative and engaging knowledge that often crosses disciplinary lines, offers new methodological tools, and informs policies. This scholarship has been highlighting the dominance of Global North for nearly a decade now. However, in these discussions, a large part of the European continent appears to be left out. Central and Eastern, South-Eastern, and Southern Europe do not clearly belong to either the North or South and the limited FSS scholarship produced there does not shape the discipline.

Our mapping shows a strong connection of location to research agendas. Sweden's feminist foreign policy gets scrutinized by Swedish feminist academics. Active engagement of Nordic countries in conflict management—be it mediation or peacekeeping—results in publications, funding, and establishment of research centers. Large militaries draw feminist attention in the UK. Yet, the rest of Europe has its issues too—be it anti-gender movements and their impact on the security of feminist scholars, women's political activism, or local iterations of continuum of violence. Such studies are often based in different disciplinary homes—Gender Studies, Sociology, or History and rarely speak to FSS.

We hope this chapter will encourage further research into the conditions of knowledge production outside Western and Northern Europe. We also hope that it reaches those who, similarly to us some years back, had to struggle for institutional recognition of their feminist scholarship. Finally, we wish that our discussion will stimulate more transnational FSS scholarship and mentorship collaborations. There are indeed so many pressing issues European FSS should address, be it the hypermasculine far right/populist leadership; gendered health security including reproductive injustice; gendered diplomacy; feminist peace analyses; or local iterations of WPS.

## Notes


## References


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# Feminist Peace Research in Europe: A Snapshot

# *Toni Haastrup*

**Abstract** This chapter explores the long trajectory of European feminists' contributions to peace research. Specifically, the coalescing of knowledge via specific Centers of Excellence has supported the recent development of feminist peace research (FPR) in Europe. FPR has also been influenced by the global normative framework of the Women, Peace and Security agenda (WPS), which relies on research conducted outside of Europe. While the diversity of WPS informed research evidences a thriving FPR field in Europe, it also reveals the limitations of what constitutes 'Europe.' Ultimately, the chapter shows how FPR remains exclusionary, with implications for knowledge production hierarchies.

**Keywords** Centers of Excellence · Feminist peace research · Knowledge production · WPS agenda · Hierarchies

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_4

T. Haastrup (B)

History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK e-mail: toni.haastrup@stir.ac.uk

# Introduction

Peace research is a multidisciplinary field and often inclusive of work that might also be designated as security studies, international relations, war studies, sociology, anthropology, and law among others. The overall goal of peace research is to capture the ways in which peace can be achieved and sustained for all people. As such, it is fair to say that peace researchers are often normative in their approach and draw from insights from academic scholarship, practitioner experiences, and political activism. Peace research brings together the studies of peace, activism, education, and specific practices undertaken by a broad range of political actors. However, as with many social science subject, feminist interventions have highlighted the tendency to erase the experiences of women and the implications of gender for what we know in peace research (Moran, 2010; Duncanson, 2016).

As the chapter shows, feminist scholars and activists have been at the forefront of the development of peace research itself through theorizing and practice (see Boulding, 2017). Despite the contributions of feminist scholars and activists, feminist insights that draw attention to gendered power relations are still often excluded from mainstream peace research (cf Confortini, 2010). It is why recent works have sought to excavate the importance of feminist engagements for peace research and its practices (Mcleod and O'Reilly, 2019; see also Väyrynen et al., 2020).

Of course, there are many feminisms and gender itself is not a fixed concept, which further complicates how we can capture the vastness of feminist interventions in peace research. But, as noted in the first *Handbook on Feminist Peace Research*, "any purported solution to global problems without critical and interdisciplinary feminist analysis" is partial (Väyrynen et al., 2020, 1). Feminism is thus necessary for a holistic understanding of peace research. In accounting for the breadth of feminist contributions to peace research, particularly those that constitute a sort of 'canon,' this chapter understands feminist peace research to be "all research, thinking, and action that uses, implicitly or explicitly, feminist insights to understand and act upon the world in ways that foster peace with justice" (ibid., 2)**.**

While feminist contributions are global and introduce criticality to peace research, the nature of global knowledge hierarchies means that Global North voices are overrepresented including in the conversations around peace research (Parashar, 2020; Haastrup and Hagen, 2021). This chapter is, to an extent, a meditation on what the European landscape of feminist contributions to peace research reveals about themes of positionality, power, and power hierarchies in knowledge production. To do this, the chapter draws on decolonial thinking and proceeds as follows:

First, the chapter maps a broad history of feminist contributions to peace research, highlighting key figures and international historical moments. Second, I explore *where* Europe-based feminist scholars are researching different areas of peace research. Here, I argue that some of the innovation that has emerged in feminist peace research has coalesced around specific Centers of Excellence (CoE) which are based in specific institutions and in countries in Northern Europe, and nurture critical scholarship. Yet, the CoE model can also have the unintended consequence of being exclusionary. The chapter then turns to emphasize the impact that adopting the global normative framework, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, has had in developing feminist peace research in the last 20 years. While acknowledging the breadth of work undertaken in the context of the WPS agenda, I zero in on three areas: the explosion of work on sexual violence; work on women's participation, especially via negotiation; and the emergence of studies in hybridity. The concluding section reflects on the limitations of this mapping exercise. In particular, this chapter calls attention to how knowledge making up feminist peace scholarship in Europe provides important critical direction in peace research and yet potentially reproduces the problematic knowledge hierarchies that dominate international relations (IR) as a discipline.

# Feminist Engagements with/for Peace

Galtung's notion of positive peace shows an awareness of thinking about structures of power, including gender, race, and class (2011).<sup>1</sup> And yet, the mainstream approaches to peace research have tended to exclude these perspectives in their broader analysis. Even critical interventions have only recently considered the gendered structures of power and their implications for the practices of peace. Feminist peace research sits within the critical interventions into studies of peace.

According to Väyrynen et al. (2020), feminist peace traditions challenge the notion of peace being the absence of violence/war/conflict.

<sup>1</sup> Galtung's approach has of course been critiqued by many. See Lawler (1989), Hansen (2016).

This is in keeping with Galtung's peace studies tradition. However, feminist engagements go beyond this to challenge the "polarisation of violence and peace" (Väyrynen et al., 2020, 4) and reconsider the linkages of peace with ideas of femininity. Feminists have challenged this sort of essentialism within international relations, yielding research about women that showcased their agency (e.g. Ketola, 2020). Beyond this, feminist works draw attention to how everyday violence, such as domestic abuse within 'peaceful' societies, is worthy of consideration in IR's preoccupation with peace and violence. In so doing, feminist contributions break the seemingly strong dichotomy between peace and violence, suggesting instead a continuum (Yadav and Horn, 2021).

As Wibben (2021) suggests, no history of feminist peace research is complete without acknowledging the work and impact of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). A self-described feminist peace organization, WILPF was created when women came together in the wake of World War I in The Hague to condemn the war and outline their principles for permanent peace (see Confortini, 2010, 2012). Although it is not the first such organization (Confortini, 2010), it has had staying power (Wibben, 2021; see also Confortini, 2010, 2012). As an organization, WILPF is firmly against militarism given its link to violence, denounces nuclear proliferation, and is a key international proponent of disarmament. In almost every sense, WILPF embodies feminist engagements in peace research—it merges education with activism and research in the context of specific beliefs that "women matter, that equality matters, and that gender is a construct: the product of unequal power structures" and that peace that is sustained is feminist, which is contingent on the end of patriarchy (WILPF website, n.d).

This was indeed the thrust of Norwegian-born Elise Boulding's (1920–2010) contribution to peace research. Boulding is considered a key contributor to the field of peace research. She documented the history of women in peace processes in her first book, *The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time* (1976). This work challenged the tendency to erase women's presence and contributions to peace via male-dominated social institutions that are implicated in militarization and violence.

Another theme that feminist peace scholars have championed has been peace education. The work of Norwegian educator and politician Birgit Brock-Utne is exemplary of feminist peace education (see Brock-Utne, 1985, 1989). For Brock-Utne, peace goes beyond the eradication of structural and physical violence (as in Galtung's notion) to include equality of rights. In this articulation, peace is impossible without social justice. In her approach, Brock-Utne challenged the tendency of peace education to ignore questions of gender and introduced the idea of gender-specific socialization. Takala interprets Brock-Utne's genderspecific socialization as: "women's potential for promoting peace, crystallizing in the possibility that (feminist) mothers can bring up their sons so that they might grow up to refuse military service" (Takala, 1991, 233). Brock-Utne's works further outline the importance of women's activism against militarism, especially through disarmament advocacy as experiential knowledge of peace-making, which can be deployed in the service of peace education outside of formal education. There is, however, the tendency to frame women in essentialist terms as it links them to peace because of their capacity for motherhood.

No study on feminist peace research would be complete without acknowledging the work of Cynthia Cockburn. Cockburn (1934–2019) was a feminist peace academic and activist. She was known for working with (rather than on) feminist peace activists. In a sense, her work allowed the peace activists to articulate theory from experience (e.g. 2012). This tradition of scholarship is in part continued by feminists like Catherine Eschle, whose anti-nuclearism work focuses on the study of peace movements (see Eschle, 2016, 2020), peaceful protest camps, and anti-nuclear activists.

Feminist peace research has also emerged because of significant events and frameworks (legal and normative) in international relations. For example, the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in October 2000 has led to the explosion of work that constitutes a part of the recent feminist peace research canon. But this is nothing new. For example, the United Nations (UN) conferences on women have generated scholarship, activism, and education that reflect feminist insights into peace, drawing on the experiences of women transnationally.

# A Mapping of Feminist Peace Research in Europe

How does one define 'Europe' in general and in the context of feminist scholarship given the importance of transnational connections for feminist work? To do this, I decided early on that the scope of this work would be limited to scholars who were based institutionally in Europe. Europe, in my imagination, includes the European Union (EU) member states; EU candidate countries; EU potential candidate states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo); Iceland; Norway; Switzerland; Ukraine; Belarus; Russia; and the UK. However, language limitation soon excluded many of those countries. For example, Russian language research on peacebuilding is inaccessible to me because of my language deficits, as is Spanish; Gaelic; and indeed anything that is not published in English. This is a significant limitation, as it narrows the scope of 'Europe' immensely to those works published in English.

Following this initial narrowing, I mined the journals *Peacebuilding*, *International Peacekeeping, Journal of Intervention and State-building*; *International Feminist Journal of Politics*, *European Security, International Negotiation; Conflict Security and Development; Cooperation and Conflict and Journal of Peace Research* using keyword searches for the terms 'feminist,' 'feminism,' 'gender,' 'gender equality,' 'equality,' 'masculinities,' 'inclusion,' and 'critical' as proxies for identifying feministlinked research. These journals were chosen for their titles, scope, and their extent of cross-referencing feminist peace research. Using the search term 'critical' yielded an unmanageable number of articles. Following an initial set of results however, I manually sifted through the resulting articles by reading through abstracts to check for relevance including those works that used an explicitly feminist or gender analysis focus as well as those that did not. Among those works where a feminist or gender analysis was not the focus, I sifted through bibliographies that had the proxy search terms in their title. I then checked the authors of these works against their given institutions to delimit to 'Europe.' From there, I derived the first corpus of 'feminist peace research scholarship.' This approach is necessarily limited. As Wibben (2021) argues, focusing on key journals offers only a partial perspective, since the prominent journals can function as gatekeepers (Wibben, 2021, 17). Consequently, the hierarchies inherent in knowledge production, often facilitated by sexism and Eurocentrism, can be reproduced by such an approach. Therefore, to enhance representation, the second mode of searching was to use the www.womenalsoknowstuff.com website to search for the terms 'peacebuilding' and 'peace,' and sift through the biographies to identify those who adopted a feminist or gender analysis in their work. As this is a USbased database, there is a skew toward US-based scholarship. Finally, the recently published *Routledge Handbook on Feminist Peace Research* has been an immense resource in which all contributors made up the third corpus of feminist peace scholarship.

This approach is imperfect inasmuch as it likely excludes early career scholars without journal article publications, or whose work may fall within this approach but does not self-identify as working within feminist peace research/peace studies. Moreover, this focus means that Europeanbased feminist research is time limited to the last two decades. Seemingly incomplete, this is a necessary step to manage the scope of this chapter. Consequently, the following analysis does not claim completeness but rather offers an entry point to the ways in which feminists based in Europe have contributed to peace research in IR. This approach yielded a database that included approximately seventy names. These scholars, mainly women, are located across 'Europe,' but clustered around certain countries and even specific institutions in some cases. Countries that dominate in this database on feminist peace research are Finland, Norway, Sweden, and UK. Beyond these four sites, scholars from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Ireland also feature, as does those from Spain and Italy to a very limited extent.

# Centers of Excellence and the Production of Feminist Peace Research

In Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, scholarship clusters around certain institutions with long-standing histories of peace and conflict studies. The institutional diffusion of feminist peace researchers in specific institutions suggests that there are notional Centers of Excellence (CoEs) of feminist peace research. CoEs are "institutions that concentrate expertise and/or train the top experts" (Mieg, 2014). In these spaces, peace research encompasses both the research within peace studies undertaken by academic affiliates and peace education inclusive of modules and degree programs. CoEs "possess the ability to absorb and generate new knowledge," which can be used to build new capacity in the specified fields (Hellstrom, 2018, 544). For example, in Finland, the Tampere Peace Research Institute based at Tampere University is an institutional home for several self-identified feminist peace scholars (see Väyrynen et al., 2020).

In the UK, feminist peace research is more diffused across several institutions. The University of Bradford is the ideal type example of a CoE—the oldest department of peace studies—and claims to be the world's largest university center for the study of peace and conflict. The department hosts two prestigious peace projects: the Rotary Peace Centre and the Quaker Peace Studies Trust. Despite the long history of peace research, feminist peace research hardly features at the center. Other noteworthy sites of peace research include the University of Manchester (Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute—HCRI), Durham University (Durham Global Security Institute—DGSi), and the University of Kent (Conflict Analysis Research Centre—CARC), and within them, some important feminist work is being undertaken.

For example, at CARC in Kent, feminist peace captures the interdisciplinary nature of peace research sitting at the nexus of conflict resolution/conflict transformation, peace studies, and terrorism studies (Toros et al., 2018). This feminist-informed research work primarily focuses on the experiential nature of war and invariably peace, drawing on a range of feminist methodologies and interrogating the masculinities of violent extremisms (Brown et al., 2020). Other research at CARC has expanded beyond into security studies by integrating the analysis of peace in the context of Global North interventions in the Global South. This work explores, in particular, the gendered implications of institutional practices of security sector reform (SSR) (Ansorg, 2017) and the role of unique Global North actors like the European Union (EU) (see Ansorg and Haastrup, 2018).

At Lund University (Sweden), there is a long-established peace and conflict studies program and feminist research. Work coming out of Lund explores themes like women's participation in mediation and hybridity with respect to peacebuilding practices. Sweden indeed appears to disproportionately nurture feminist peace research via research clusters and teaching programs at University of Goteborg (Peace and Development), Uppsala University (Peace and Conflict), Malmö University (Peace and Conflict Studies), and the National Defence college in Stockholm. For example, Uppsala University's peace and conflict research department is the home of the Nordic Africa Institute, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), and, like Bradford, includes a Rotary Peace Centre. In short, Uppsala is a world renown hub for peace research. Unsurprisingly, some feminist peace research has also emerged from this space including themes on the links between war-trauma and gender (see Brounéus et al., 2017). Within Europe, Sweden is arguably the leader with the highest proportion of CoEs contributing to (feminist) peace research.

The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) hosts the Journal of Peace Research as well as the Centre on Gender, Peace and Security. An interdisciplinary center, feminist researchers there have worked on themes like peacebuilding architecture (Tryggestad, 2016), women's inclusion in peace processes (Lorentzen, 2018), and conflict-related sexual violence (e.g. https://www.prio.org/Data/Armed-Conflict/GEO-SVAC/).

While by no means exhaustive, a mapping of feminist peace research via specific institutions is instructive. Institutions play a role in nurturing and professionalizing peace research—they are not only places where this research happens, but they also train students, practitioners, and other researchers. Indeed, as Centers of Excellence, these institutions legitimize specific approaches to peace research, including feminist peace research, although not equally. In the UK context, for example, feminist peace research is still marginal in these centers, particularly when compared to the CoEs in Scandinavian countries. The ability to develop research tracks within CoEs mainly depends on the availability of funding, and the funding for feminist research has been generous to the Scandinavian institutions (Brorstad Borlaug, 2016). Coalescing institutions within specific sites of knowledge can, however, be exclusionary since these institutions serve as gatekeepers and the 'pure' sources of knowledge (Haastrup and Hagen, 2021). In Manchester, the HCRI can be associated with the peace research that has critiqued liberal peacebuilding and its impact, while Durham may be associated with the 'local turn' in peacebuilding research.

While a focus on Europe may be a logical delimitation based on geographical scope, it may also be one that reifies Eurocentric knowledge production and consequently, the coloniality of knowledge. Coloniality of knowledge refers to the ways in which knowledges of colonizing cultures are elevated over those of colonized cultures through a process of canonizing and normalizing "historically rooted, racially inflected practices" (Tucker, 2018, 220). What knowledge is being used when we think about the philosophies of humanitarian interventions, for example? Whose knowledge is integrated when thinking of models of best practices, of how we investigate and do research? Who determines the scope of inquiry?

In undertaking a mapping via institutions in this way then, I accept that this may also reproduce well-entrenched knowledge hierarchies around peace research. Importantly however, institutional mapping also reveals the ways in which the scholarship has leveraged the adoption of the global normative framework, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, while also highlighting blind spots in the type of work that is noticed. Indeed, the WPS agenda is likely the single most impactful policy frame for peace research since 2000. The WPS agenda originated with United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325. Several other resolutions later, the agenda has been informed by feminist peace activism and scholarship. The subsequent section outlines the ways in which feminist peace scholarship coalesces around the WPS agenda through three tracks of research: negotiations, sexual violence, and hybridity.

# Leveraging the WPS Agenda in Peacebuilding: Negotiations, Sexual Violence, and Hybridity

The WPS agenda is constitutive of 10 United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions as of 2020. In the first resolution, four pillars were delineated as the focus for implementing the agenda: participation, prevention, protection, and relief and recovery. The participation pillar focuses on the representation of women at 'all levels of decisionmaking, including peace-processes, electoral processes … and the broader social-political sphere.' Within peace research, this directive has informed a large range of recent work on negotiation practices specifically, including mediation, and on the different meanings of participation in the context of the WPS agenda (O'Rourke, 2014; see also, Krause et al., 2018). The prevention pillar—the most visible pillar of the WPS agenda—integrates gender perspectives into conflict prevention and focuses on ways in which women can take part in prevention, as well as on how women's experiences can inform conflict prevention. The fourth pillar focuses on relief and recovery, which extends the protection focus of the third pillar (protection) by prioritizing relief for the most vulnerable women from, predominantly SGBV (Haastrup, 2019).

There is now a vast body of work on UNSCR 1325 and WPS more widely, which balances empirical research with theorizing. Importantly, the subjects of inquiry largely encompass the broad definition of peacebuilding, first coined by Johan Galtung (1976). Galtung understood peacebuilding as the structure on which peace is built on to "remove the causes of war and offer alternatives to war in situations where war might occur" (Galtung, 1976, 297–298). Similarly, Lederach adopted a definition of peacebuilding as "more than post-accord reconstruction" but rather a "comprehensive concept that encompasses, generates and sustains the full array of processes, approaches, and stages needed to transform conflict towards more sustainable, peaceful relationships" (Lederach, 1997, 20).

As True (2013, 1) noted, peacebuilding offers important opportunities "for advancing women's rights and gender equality" which are core feminist objectives within peace research. Indeed, many feminist works have made the case for a feminist perspective in peacebuilding broadly (Tryggestad, 2010; 2016). Yet, despite the opportunities provided by the WPS agenda, the systematic inclusion of feminist visions within the peacebuilding arena is lacking (True, 2013). The impetus to respond to this gap has driven a lot of the research I categorize here as feminist peace research on peacebuilding. Within this domain, I focus on the evolution of three key themes: negotiation as previously discussed, tackling sexual violence, and the notion of hybridity.

A first track of WPS research centers on international negotiation and mediation, which in turn has focused on patterns of representation within diplomatic institutions (Towns and Niklasson, 2018; Niklasson and Robertson, 2018; Rumelili and Suleymanoglu-Kurum, 2018) and on mediation. The work on mediation explores women who participate in mediation (Aggestam and Svensson, 2018) and women's influence in international peace negotiations (Paffenholz, 2018; Turner, 2018, 2020). These works capture an area in the practice of the WPS agenda where much is still unknown. Mostly, the feminist engagements in Europe are focused on practices in the Global North, exploring for example, including WPS within the mediation architecture of the EU (Haastrup, 2019) or how women are positioned within these architectures. Much of this work confirms that women are still underrepresented in international negotiations; the WPS agenda has heightened both scholarly and policy awareness of this gap.

A second track of WPS research centers on sexual violence (SV). As the focus of one of the four pillars established in UNSCR1325, the issue of SV within recent feminist peace research has a seemingly outsized position (Meger, 2016). Some of the research on SV focuses on its institutionalization as a focal point of WPS within various arenas from the UN itself to the state level (cf O'Gorman, 2019; Kirby, 2015; Wright 2015). Other works have been case study specific, drawing on regions or countries to illustrate how SV manifests in conflict situations (e.g. Muvumba Sellström 2016, 2019; Swaine, 2020; Yadav, 2020). Both types of feminist peace research reinforce the ongoing challenge of tackling SV as gendered violence in conflict-affected context. More recent work has asked for attention to men's experiences of SV (Touquet and Schulz, 2021). Yet, some of the scholarship on SV has been critical of its overt prioritization within the WPS context in Africa (see Aroussi, 2017). Some of this more critical work has shown that while feminists have rightly called attention to this issue, the nature of the challenge must also acknowledge the messiness not often accorded in the bid to identify perpetrator versus victim (Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013). Other works like Boesten and Henry make the epistemological case for a reflexive feminist approach "that allows us to question the need and context of interviewing survivors and the associated insistence on disclosure" (Boesten and Henry, 2018, 568).

A third track focuses on themes of hybridity in the WPS agenda. Postcolonial scholars have engaged with the notion of hybridity within cultural studies. Building on the work of Edward Said, Bhabha's exploration of hybridization highlights the space in which the cultures of the colonized and colonizers meet to disrupt hierarchies and indeed the status quo that privileges the colonizer's culture (Bhabha, 1994). In the context of peace research, however, Roger Mac Ginty defines hybridity as the "interface between internationally supported peace operations and local approaches to peace that may draw on traditional, indigenous and customary practice" (Mac Ginty, 2022, 391). Unlike sexual violence, the study of hybridity generally, and in feminist contexts, is recent and emergent. It focuses on the interplay of power between 'local' and international interventions in peacebuilding processes and practices.

However, despite the innovation of hybridity, a feminist reading comes late. Mcleod (2015, 48–49), for example, offers a feminist critique of hybridity that provides a "textured understanding of the power relations between local and international gender-change agents," drawing on examples from Southeast Europe. As Mcleod identifies, while the study of hybridity shows the utility of critical perspectives for critiquing the liberal practices of peacebuilding, a feminist reading treats gender as central to the peacebuilding landscape to understand how the local and international interact. Partis-Jennings' work on Afghanistan (2021) demonstrates this clearly through this examination of female international humanitarian workers who occupy an uncomfortable space between the local and international due to the gender they occupy. This theme also resonates in Björkdahl and Höglund (2013) who focus on the 'friction' or precarities within the practices of hybridity. Hybridity in this sense unsettles the boundaries of local/international and what implications this has for post-conflict sites.

Feminist peace research in the context of WPS implementation in peacebuilding and beyond is not restricted to the three themes captured so far. For instance, recent leadership in theorizing feminist peace research has been undertaken by Europe-based feminist scholars (Väyrynen et al., 2020; Wibben and Donahoe, 2020; Lyytikäinen et al., 2021). Others have focused on themes like nuclear non-proliferation (Duncanson and Eschle, 2008; Eschle, 2017; 2020) peacekeeping (Holvikivi, 2020) and masculinities (Duriesmith, 2020) often straddling peace research, and other subfields of international politics. While these feminist works offer important critiques to mainstream engagements of peace research (and international politics broadly), they too have their own blind spots.

# Conclusion

The focus on the three themes highlights the dominant and innovative directions within this field. Yet, in accepting these as somewhat exemplifying the field, it is also useful to reflect on the absences or silences in the story.

One thing that is keenly observed is the knowledge hierarchies that become apparent in an exercise such as this. We cannot ignore the dominance of Northern Europe in feminist peace research knowledge production, as this has implications for the politics of such production. With Europe being the focus and English language sources dominating, there is an inherent Eurocentrism that is compounded by the fact that the object of study is often 'Othered.' Moreover, the key journals in the field are English language journals so that even when they serve any demographic, the knowledge therein produces and reproduces the hegemonic language.

Insights from Black feminism and/or postcolonial/decolonial feminism show that such dominance often prompts a lack of reflexivity within critical feminist approaches (Haastrup and Hagen, 2021). The body of work undertaken by feminist peace research scholars such as Swati Parashar (2019) warns of the ways in which what and how we know, even within feminist undertakings, have blind spots. For example, Hagen challenges the field to engage more queer perspectives (Hagen, 2016), as to ignore the rich scholarship and perspective is akin to erasure. Other postcolonial/decolonial critiques (e.g. Ansorg et al., 2021) have underscored ongoing blind spots of feminist knowledge produced in the Global North that are invariably extractive, i.e. research that reproduces power asymmetries in the research process between the researcher and researched (see Haastrup and Hagen, 2021); peace research is not exempt. Yet, a feminist research ethic can ensure constant reflexivity on positionality, including what research is undertaken and how it is executed.

Reflecting on the limitations brought on by the politics of location, this chapter advises caution against drawing the boundaries around Europe, since the knowledge that 'Europe' brings depends on the outside. In other words, knowledge-making in Europe that constitutes peace research often relies on cases in 'other' places, often outside of the boundaries of the Europe conceived here and particularly in Africa. Consequently, theorizing contributions to feminist peace research 'in Europe' is very messy. And it should be—an enduring contribution of feminist studies in international relations is messiness. Still, the sheer scope of works produced required making (the best) choices and thus is as good a start as any to understand the significant contributions of feminist peace research to understanding the world around us a little better.

# References


[eds] Cheldelin, Sandra and Martha Mutisi. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, pp. 228–254.


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# Feminist Scholarship in Europe on the Politics of International Migration

*Laura Cleton and Saskia Bonjour*

**Abstract** This chapter presents an overview of feminist scholarship on the politics of international migration by Europe-based scholars, explaining that feminist IR scholarship makes up a small and recent part of a wider, rich tradition of feminist migration studies. It shows how feminist IR scholarship on migration focuses on familiar IR themes (security and conflict); shifts traditional IR frames from the global to the local; and foregrounds the discursive constructions of people on the move and their embodied experiences. In drawing parallels between these studies and the wider field, the chapter highlights pathways for future interdisciplinary and global collaboration.

L. Cleton (B)

S. Bonjour

Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: S.A.Bonjour@uva.nl

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_5

75

Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail: laura.cleton@uantwerpen.be

**Keywords** International migration · Migration politics · Borders · Refugees · Feminist analysis

# Introduction

This chapter explores the feminist scholarship on the politics of international migration produced in European institutions, both in international relations (IR) and in other social science disciplines. Until the late 1990s, international mobility has generally been overlooked by IR scholars, even though crossing borders is an inherently international affair (Pettman & Hall 2015).<sup>1</sup> Accelerated by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which pervasively reinforced fears on the link between migration and terrorism, IR scholars increasingly paid attention to the way states mobilize notions of security and sovereignty in how they address international movement (Adamson 2006, see also Faist 2006). By focusing on social networks, transnational communities, political discourse, and identity politics, they unpack concepts inherent to international relations, such as "national interests" (Sassen 1996) and "security" (Adamson 2006). Within this more general IR scholarship, feminist approaches to international migration are scarce.

In this chapter, we therefore discuss the work by feminist IR scholars2 on migration as a small and recent part of a wider, very rich tradition of feminist migration studies that has grown into a flourishing scholarly field since the 1970s, especially in North America and West and Northern Europe. Feminist approaches to international migration have been interdisciplinary since their inception, bringing together sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, socio-legal scholars, and geographers.

Our contribution to this volume's mapping of feminist IR traditions will therefore include contributions to feminist migration studies

<sup>1</sup> While feminist migration scholars also interrogate internal displacement and domestic (rural–urban) mobility, this chapter will limit itself to international mobility.

<sup>2</sup> We understand feminist IR scholarship as composed by feminist researchers who are employed in/affiliated with political science/international relations departments, as well as those who publish in feminist IR, feminist, and IR journals.

from various disciplinary angles, with a particular focus on scholarship produced in Europe. We understand 'Europe' as a spatial term that sensitizes us to the fact that all knowledge is situated and therefore pushes us to ask what kind of feminist migration scholarship is produced within Europe. Knowledge generated in Europe is always co-created within wider scholarly communities that transgress university walls and geographical borders. In this chapter, we therefore include work produced by members of European institutions and their colleagues in these wider transnational networks. We ourselves are trained and employed as political scientists in Western European universities. Neither of us specializes in IR. Our academic working languages are English and Dutch and our access to scholarship in other languages is limited to work in German and French. The chapter therefore reflects our partial overview of the scholarship on the politics of international migration from feminist perspectives.

The chapter will first outline a brief history of feminist migration studies, situate it in migration studies more broadly, and point to their major contributions. Next, it highlights work on international migration by feminists IR scholars and shows that these tend to focus on two classic IR themes: security studies, and conflict and displacement. We simultaneously discuss how wider feminist scholarship on migration has broached these issues. Next, the chapter describes two bodies of feminist migration scholarship with which Europe-based feminist IR scholars can further dialogue: studies of intimacy, belonging and nationalism, and second, the study of global labor and care migration. The chapter concludes by questioning disciplinary politics and calling for further interdisciplinary and global collaboration.

# Critical Feminist Interventions in Migration Studies

Well into the 1970s, scholarship on migration implicitly assumed that people who migrate are men. Feminist scholars from Europe and North America reinforced each other in changing this dominant perspective. First, by recognizing that women are migrants too and exploring why and how women migrate. Later, by applying gender as a category of analysis, asking how conceptions of femininity and masculinity shape the motivations, conditions, and consequences of international mobility. These developments within migration studies reflect the broader scholarly context: from the introduction of women's studies in the 1970s and 1980s, to its transformation into gender studies from the 1990s onward.

The interdisciplinary field of migration studies should be understood as a 'state science' (Gabaccia 2014): it grew around the demands of states and the international community to track and account for the movement of people globally. This was particularly so in the period after World War II, as decolonialization led people from the "Global South" to move to the "Global North". The increasing funding that came available to document the costs and benefits of international migration and its demographics reflects a biopolitical interest of managing mobile, racialized bodies (Mayblin & Turner 2021). Until the 1970s, this endeavor to understand why and how people move was dominated by supposedly "gender neutral" economic theories. While neo-classical theories explained mobility decisions as benefit-maximizing, a matter of balancing push and pull factors, new Marxist theories understood international migrants as a cheap labor force, resulting from unequal global distribution of economic and political power. Both models implicitly assume that men are "primary migrants" who move for work, while women as "secondary migrants" merely follow their male relatives (Kofman et al. 2000). From the late 1970s onward, feminist migration scholars strove to counter these assumptions of female dependency and passivity by documenting the predominance of women in migration flows. Known as the "add women and stir" approach, this was the first step toward the study of gender and migration.

The close alignment between migration studies and governments' policy agendas has led migration scholars to uncritically adopt statecentric concepts such as 'country of origin,' 'integration,' and 'sovereignty' (Schinkel 2018). Feminist migration scholars have been at the forefront of problematizing such methodological nationalism and introduced a focus on power relations in migration studies. A major contribution of the 1980s was a focus on household strategies as units of analysis. Feminists pointed out that migration decisions are taken not by isolated individuals, but by families. In households, gendered roles and relations—between husband and wife, father and daughter, aunt and nephew—shape who gets to move, when, and how (Nawyn 2010). This paved the way for more critical thinking on the impact of (gendered) power relations in migration from the 1990s onward. Scholars show how gendered power relations operate in transnational social fields (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004), including relations among family members living in different parts of the world. Since then, studies focus on how gender affects the composition and direction of migration, on the gendered experiences of migration, and on how migration transforms gender relations. Intersectional frameworks are more and more prevalent, highlighting the importance of studying gender in relation to race, ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, and health, given a particular social context (Nawyn 2010).

In recent years, calls to 'decolonize migration studies' (Mayblin and Turner 2021) became louder and led feminists to critically examine the Eurocentrism that is at the heart of much scholarship on migration today. Dahinden (2018), for example, pushes us to 'demigranticize' migration studies—to move away from treating "the migrant population" as a separate unit of analysis that warrants particular attention. Others 'decenter Global North knowledge' (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2019, 22) about migration by centering South-South migration and engaging critically with the politics of knowledge production (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020). Drawing among others on black feminist thought and queer-of-color critique, Mayblin and Turner's (2021) *Migration Studies and Colonialism* shows convincingly that migration scholars have failed to engage with past and ongoing forms of colonialism and imperialism that shape migration today.

# Border (In)securities and Sovereignty

Just like the feminist migration scholars discussed in the previous section, feminist IR scholars devote themselves to making the gendered nature of key IR concepts and theory visible (Tickner 1997). Two of these concepts are "security" and "sovereignty". The well-established field of feminist security studies has, among others, reconceptualized security as multidimensional and not necessarily associated with national security (Prügl and Tickner 2018), highlighted the mutually constitutive relationship between masculinity and statehood (Weber 2016), and showed that the sovereign state is a masculinized political institution (Stachowitsch 2013). Combining these insights with critical border studies and emotions in world politics, UK-based Ali Bilgiç (2018) analyzes European border security actors' encounters with irregular migrants and understands these as moments of emotional performance of sovereignty that are constitutive of the EU's neo-colonial masculinity. In these performances, the EU produces migrating bodies from the "Global South" as racialized and gendered "others" of the "Global North" through invoking colonial emotions of fear, disgust, and compassion. Such gendered and racialized othering and its importance for sustaining the notion of a superior, progressive, and white Europe have been identified by other IR scholars as well (Stachowitsch and Sachseder 2019; Gray and Franck 2019). Building on this work, feminist IR scholars working in North-Western Europe recently focus on the discursive construction of refugees both as *a* risk and being *at* risk during the so-called "European refugee crisis." They point to the necessity of an intersectional approach to refugee men and masculinity and expose how heteronormative family ideals and stereotypical assumptions about "youth" and masculinity render refugee men "vulnerable" and "dangerous" at the same time (Allsopp 2017; Pruitt et al. 2018; Hall 2020).

While these studies turn their feminist curiosity to the everyday practices of border management, others focus on individual experiences and feelings of (in)security to challenge the disembodied state-centric narrative dominant in IR, which has been critiqued since the 1990s (Pettman 1996). Following the pioneering question raised by Peterson (1992)— 'security for whom?'—US-based Jennifer Lobasz (2009), for example, questions what kind of threat human trafficking poses and argues that it is first and foremost a violation of human rights. Understanding trafficking as a (national) security threat neglects the voices of trafficked persons, which should be at the center of analysis (see also van Liempt 2011). Aradau (2004) argues that the schizophrenic identification of trafficked women as both victims at risk and as risky suffering bodies can be explained by the intertwinement of humanitarian and security discourses—the wish to govern bodies in pain through governmental risk technologies. Such risk technologies are also central to Wilcox's (2015) work on airport security, which shows that mobile, trans-bodies are produced as 'deviant,' as they do not conform to gender expectations and the state's desire to regulate bodies as fixed and unchanging. More recently, Bilgiç and Gkouti (2020) called for a focus on everyday practices and experiences, as doing so challenges the sovereign security logic that produces some people as meriting security at the expense of others. This links closely to sociological approaches to international migration and security. Paris-based scholar Jane Freedman (2012) has been especially influential in documenting the gendered insecurities refugee women face in attempting to cross borders. Freedman shows how refugee women's security might be threatened due to gendered power relations and violence, while also emphasizing their survival strategies and agency. Similar points have been raised by criminologists who are largely based at Monash University in Australia and hold a long-standing partnership with Oxford University in the UK. These scholars rely on participant observation and interviews to interrogate how border enforcement differentially impacts populations, pointing to gendered violence in so-called "transit countries" (Gerard and Pickering 2014). The practice of abandoning women and children who cannot "keep up" with smugglers, for example, leads to gendered border deaths (Pickering and Cochrane 2012). They also show how gendered and racialized processes of deterrence (Gerard and Pickering 2014) and border detention (Bosworth et al. 2017) lead to immobilization of refugees.

# Conflict and Displacement: Determining Inclusive Refugeehood

A second field of feminist inquiry on migration concentrates on traditional IR themes of conflict and violence, specifically international displacement and humanitarian work with refugees. The relationship between gender and violence has animated feminist IR from its beginning (Prügl and Tickner 2018), yet only few scholars have made the gendered violence experienced by refugee populations the main focus of their research. Following feminist IR scholars' insight that sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) continues between wartime and peacetime (Freedman 2011), Germany-based Ulrike Krause (2015) shows that SGBV endures after conflict in displacement, both during flight and encampment. Feminist IR inquiry has directed much of its attention to humanitarians' understandings of refugeehood and their activities within refugee camps. While they demonstrated that 'womenandchildren' (Enloe 1990) have become the uncontroversial object of humanitarian concern in refugee contexts, there is a growing literature that explicitly interrogates the position of refugee men within humanitarianism. Much of this work, some of it produced in Scandinavia, discusses the perceived security risks posed by refugee men (Grabska 2011; Olivius 2016). Grabska (ibid.) and Olivius (ibid.) show that gender equality trainings in refugee camps worldwide are efforts to create "modern," "civilized" individuals, thereby implicitly casting refugee men and masculinities as violent and troublesome. UK-based Turner (2018) argues that humanitarian actors prioritize their own goals, logics, and understandings of gender over those of Syrians refugee men themselves, making the latter uncertain objects of humanitarian care. Welfens and Bonjour (2020) show that apart from gender and sexuality, the mobilization of family norms is crucial in determining which refugees are resettled from Turkey to Germany. These studies build upon a great legacy of feminist scholarship in geopolitics—flourishing in especially Canadian universities—which challenges the idea of refugeehood as passive, feminized, and depoliticized in the context of protracted displacement in the "Global South" (Hyndman and Giles 2011, see also Johnson 2011).

There have been attempts more recently by Europe- and US-based scholars to examine the alignments between the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and responses to conflict-affected individuals on the move. While Hall (2019) argues that there is significant potential for the WPS agenda to be more closely aligned with protection frameworks for displaced women, UK-based Kirby (2020) demonstrates that the wrongs of sexual violence in Libyan detention sites are explicitly recognized by various stakeholders, yet are also re-articulated in ways that lessen the obligation of states and organizations that otherwise champion the WPS agenda. Holvikivi and Reeves (2020, 137) moreover show how solely a minority of European states currently include refugee women in their WPS policies. They conclude that this 'refugee blind' policy is built on a fantasy of Europe as peaceful and secure for women, which legitimizes the selective fortressing of Europe and obscures Europe's complicity in producing insecurity at its borders. The common notion that WPS policies should be focused on foreign policy only and therefore exclude questions of asylum, they argue, reveals the colonial underpinnings of the WPS agenda, as it produces an 'unsafe, extra-European space.'

While feminist IR scholars center the discourses and everyday experiences pertaining to conflict and refugeehood in their analyses, socio-legal scholars in Europe have firmly critiqued the legal texts and processes leading up to the 1951 Geneva Convention. NGOs have voiced such critiques since the 1980s; academics, however, took up the question of protection frameworks for refugee women in the aftermath of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, as it became clear that the problems women face in areas affected by conflict differ significantly from those of men (Spijkerboer 2000). Scholars in the UK and the Netherlands argue that the Convention implicitly assumes that refugees are heterosexual men and thereby fail to recognize women and LGBTQI-refugees' specific protection needs. Crawley (1999) shows that this is rooted in a persistent public–private division: gender-specific threats women might face, such as female genital mutilation, are understood as beyond the scope of the Convention because they take place in the private or familial sphere, making them not "political." Similarly, asylum-determination procedures often fall short in recognizing women's political activism and interpret their protest to the disappearance of relatives, for example, as "personal" rather than "political" (Spijkerboer 2000). While the UNHCR has published Gender Related Persecution Guidelines that explicate the recognition of gender-specific persecution under the Geneva Convention—often under the header of belonging to a 'particular social group' these guidelines still perceive female refugees, children, and LGBTQIrefugees as "deviant" and in need of "special protection" (Freedman 2015). Finally, Edwards (2010) warns against the recent shift in international refugee law and policy away from a focus on women's rights to equality and diversity. She argues that this shift potentially undermines the goals of sexual equality and social justice by downplaying the gendered power dynamics at play.

More recently, Europe-based scholars have adopted decolonialist, intersectional approaches to study refugee migration, critiquing the strong Eurocentric bias in most policy and programmatic responses to migration and displacement. Nasser-Eddin and Abu-Assab (2020), for example, discuss how policy narratives on "economic migration" reflect an idealized understanding of the "Global North" as a destination of preferred arrival for refugees from the "Global South", whereas empirical research shows that this is not the case. The recent 'South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub'3 led by UK-based Heaven Crawley aims to decenter the production of knowledge about migration and its consequences from the Global North toward those countries where most migration takes place. One example is Brankamp and Daley's (2020) study that traces the ongoing legacies of colonial migration regimes and highlights how 'African bodies' have been racialized and subjected to different forms of exclusion in postcolonial states like Kenya and Tanzania.

<sup>3</sup> For more information, see the project website: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/ research-directories/current-projects/2019/ukri-gcrf-south/.

# The Politics of Intimacy and Belonging

We see potential for fruitful dialogue between Europe-based feminist IR scholars who write on migration in relation to security and sovereignty and the wider feminist literature on national identity and the politics of belonging (see Turner 2020). Feminist scholars of nation and empire show that national, racial, and cultural identities and boundaries are defined in deeply gendered ways, since gender is represented as 'the "essence" of cultures' (Yuval-Davis 2008 [1997], 43–45, 67). Stoler (2001, 829) has argued that these politics of belonging are not just about gender norms but also about the wider field of intimacy: 'sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement, and child rearing.' From colonial times to the present day, defining how "We" are different and superior to "the Other" involves reference to proper roles of men and women, proper dress, proper parenting, and proper loving (Bonjour and De Hart 2013).

Building on this work on intimacy and belonging, a new body of scholarship on family migration politics emerged in Europe from the 2000s onwards. Until then, research on the politics of migration and citizenship focused on economic and identity rationales, on humanitarian and security perspectives, but never on family (Kofman 2004). Reflecting assumptions in political science more broadly, migration scholars seemed to regard the family as an apolitical, "natural" given. Likewise, the admission of foreign family members was seen as a "self-evident" phenomenon that did not command political scientific analysis. This changed in the 2000s, spurred by the intense political salience of family migration in the 2000s in many North-Western European countries. Pioneering scholars like Sarah van Walsum, Betty de Hart, Helena Wray, and Eleonore Kofman worked in the Netherlands and the UK, where the "restrictive turn" in family migration politics was early and sharp.

Scholars from other countries in Northern, Western, and Southern Europe soon followed their example in seeking to understand how the heightened political focus on family migration was related to the resurgence of assimilationism and ethno-racial nationalism in European politics, and critiqued the exclusionary effects of increasingly restrictive family migration policies (Grillo 2008; van Walsum 2008). Scholars show how national identities in Europe today are construed in opposition to the perceived culture and identity of migrants, epitomized by the "migrant"—especially "Muslim"—family. Whereas the "Western" family is imagined as modern, emancipated, and egalitarian, the migrant family is associated with tradition, patriarchy, oppression, and even violence (Grillo 2008). This political representation of the "migrant family" as problematic is highly gendered and racialized. Migrant women are represented as victims of patriarchal oppression and violence (Bonjour and de Hart 2013), whereas migrant men are represented as violent oppressors of their wives and children (Charsley and Wray 2015). Such representations have served to justify restrictive reform of family reunification policies: if migrant men are so violent, so the reasoning goes, then migrant women are better off remaining separate from them (Van Walsum 2008). Inspired by feminist insight that "the personal is political," scholars of family migration politics have resisted the conception of family as apolitical, emphasizing that what counts as family and who gets to have family are crucially contested questions at the very heart of migration politics (Bonjour and Cleton 2021).

In sum, we hold that feminist work in migration studies on intimacy and belonging is important for a feminist IR focus on migration. Feminist IR scholars working on sovereignty and security, for example, can benefit from insights into the importance of nation and empire for the management of migration to theorize how states and the international order get reproduced along the intersections of gender, race, class, and migratory status (e.g. Turner 2020).

# Global Relations of Labor and Care

While there is a long-standing feminist IR interest in labor relations, issues pertaining to the specificities of migrant labor and care work can be further explored by Europe-based scholars (Prügl and Tickner 2018, see Robinson 2006; Elias 2010; Kunz 2011 for notable exceptions). In the context of today's globalized economy that is characterized by sharp inequalities, it is vital to investigate how not only gender, race, and class intersect to regulate transnational value chains, but also how it specifically disciplines precarious migrant laborers in systems of multilevel governance. Feminist IR scholars can thereby build upon a long-standing tradition of feminist migration studies produced in Europe and North America. One of the classic works on gender and migrant labor was published in 1984 by Paris-based sociologist Mirjana Morokvásic. Referring to Michael Piore's 1979 book on migrant labor entitled *Birds of Passage*, Morokvásic entitled her seminal 1984 article "Birds of Passage are also Women." She argued that migrant women's labor market position tends to be doubly precarious, as a result of their status as migrants and their status as women. Migrant women tend to be restricted to low-paid work in insecure conditions, for instance in textile industries or in the care sector. Often this work is done within the home—either within a family business, or in employers' homes in the case of domestic work—and thus rendered invisible to the state and the public eye.

More recently, scholars have argued that women's unpaid care work within the family may also contribute to families' economic productivity, for instance when grandmothers' care for children allows mothers to engage in paid work (Bonizzoni 2018). Furthermore, scholars have explored how gendered labor market structures affect the experiences and opportunities of labor migrants (Brettel 2016). Some labor market niches are strongly gendered, for instance, which results in women forming the majority of migrants engaged in domestic work and the sex industry, whereas male labor migrants dominate in construction (Charsley and Wray 2015). Feminized labor market niches are more likely to be characterized by informality and lack of state regulation and oversight, partly because state institutions fail to recognize "women's work," such as domestic work, as "real work," and partly because state institutions are reticent to intervene in the domestic sphere, where feminized work is often done. Migrant men might also experience downward social mobility that challenges their status as men and breadwinners, for example if they find themselves doing "women's work" in feminized labor market niches such as cleaning (Sinatti 2014).

Domestic and care work, ranging from cleaning and cooking to raising children and caring for sick and elderly people, has emerged as one of the most important legal avenues for migrant women today, occurring in almost all regions of the world. Cynthia Enloe was among the first feminist IR scholars to put the politics of domestic work central stage in her analysis. In her seminal work *Bananas, Beaches & Bases* (1990), Enloe interrogates women's labor in agriculture, textiles, and domestic service and asks how our understanding of international politics would change if we center their experiences. She shows that the international economy is dependent on women's work, but that women are often treated as less than 'serious workers' by men in trade unions and by the regulatory frameworks of home and host governments. From the 1990s onward, migration scholars in North America and in Europe have applied feminist political economy approaches to the study of migrant domestic work. They mobilized the concept of "reproductive labor" to emphasize that care—be it paid or unpaid—is work. In her influential book *Doing the Dirty Work* (2000), UK-based sociologist Bridget Anderson theorizes the increase in migrant domestic labor as a solution for white middle-class women in the Global North, enabling them to enter the labor market without having to negotiate with their husbands to share the unpaid work at home more equally. Anderson's argument echoes the analysis of North American scholar Rhacel Parreñas (2000), who conceptualized migrant domestic labor as an "international division of reproductive labor" which reflects geopolitical, economic, and gendered power relations. Arlie Hochschild famously coined the concept of "global care chains" (2000), where women migrate to do care work, leaving their own children in the care of an elder sibling or grandparent. These scholars have critiqued the poor working conditions and risk of exploitation and abuse to which migrant domestic workers are exposed, as well as the emotional and material difficulties that domestic workers and their families may experience if migrant parents must leave their own children behind to care for the children of others.

# Conclusion

This chapter suggests that there is a substantial literature on the gendered nature of international migration and migration politics, but that it has rarely been profiled as being core to the discipline of international relations. Europe-based, feminist IR scholars who work on migration often do so in relation to two classic IR themes: security and conflict and displacement. They thereby shift the traditional macro-level IR frame from the global to the local and foreground the discourses on and embodied experience of individuals on the move. In taking stock of the literature discussed in this chapter, as well as related work that has not been explicitly mentioned here, we are struck by two core insights on the state of research on migration in feminist IR.

First, it strikes us that almost all of the scholars cited in this chapter are working in institutions in North-Western Europe, notably the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Scandinavian countries, as well as North America and Australia. Surely, this is at least in part the result of our own location in Dutch and English language academic environments in the Netherlands and Flanders. However, perhaps it also reflects the strong embeddedness of feminist approaches in the social sciences in those parts of the world. As more and more migration scholars strive to overcome the Eurocentrism that characterizes their field, new partnerships are being created, such as the "South-South Migration, Inequality and Development Hub," to address inequalities in knowledge production on migration. These discussions also extend to the funding relations between migration researchers and policy-making institutions. While we are witnessing the EU's border regime becoming increasingly repressive and violent, a collective of over 360 critical migration scholars across Europe voiced their discontent with the EU's extensive funding of projects on migration governance, while at the same time disregarding its outcomes that have the potential to improve safe border crossing and to better the treatment of people on the move.<sup>4</sup>

Second, we hold that there is ample room for feminist IR scholars in Europe to further address migration governance in relation to the politics of intimacy and belonging and global relations of labor and care. While we have given our thoughts on possible ways of doing this in the chapter itself, we want to conclude here by emphasizing the striking commonality in epistemological and ontological approaches of feminist IR scholars and scholars in other disciplines, which should facilitate such cross-fertilization. Feminists, as critical scholars, draw on a variety of philosophical traditions, social and political theory, and literature outside their core discipline to help them understand the issues with which they are concerned (Tickner 1997). At the same time, feminist migration scholars across the social sciences do not always find the opportunity to meet in shared spaces to exchange ideas. The fact that migration is not profiled as 'core' to the IR discipline (Pettman and Hall 2015) makes feminist IR scholars predominantly work on the topic as part of a broader IR-research agenda. We reckon that this leads them to participate in IR conferences—like those hosted by the International Studies Association (ISA)—rather than interdisciplinary migration conferences (IMISCOE) where other feminist migration scholars meet.<sup>5</sup> Considering the similarities in feminist work in IR and other disciplines discussed in this chapter,

<sup>4</sup> See Barak Kalir and Céline Cantat in "Fund but disregard: the EU's relationship to academic research on mobility" in Crisis Magazine here: https://crisismag.net/2020/05/ 09/fund-but-disregard-the-eus-relationship-to-academic-research-on-mobility/.

<sup>5</sup> See, for example, the 'Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research' Standing Committee: https://www.imiscoe.org/research/standing-committees/932-gender-andsexuality-in-migration-research.

we do see ample room for further interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration on migration and its politics between feminist scholars across the world.

# References


*Justice. Perspectives on Human Insecurity* (pp. 215–226). Den Haag: Springer Open.

Spijkerboer, T. (2000). *Gender and Refugee Status*. London: Ashgate.


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# Feminist International Political Economy in Europe

*Özlem Altan-Olcay*

**Abstract** This chapter reviews the contributions feminist scholars situated in Europe have made to international political economy. It discusses three main areas of influence in the form of critique of capitalism and neoliberalism; debates on international development discourses, governance, and programming; and the conceptual connections established between macroeconomic decision-making and gendered everyday experiences. It also highlights the limits of the scholarship in the form of the hegemony of English language production, the limits brought by the unique positionality of being situated in the European continent, and the restrictions in the dialogue with the broader IPE field.

**Keywords** Neoliberalism · Development · International governance · Care labor · Social reproductive work

Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey

e-mail: OZALTAN@ku.edu.tr

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_6

95

Ö. Altan-Olcay (B)

# Introduction

Feminist international political economy (IPE) is an interdisciplinary field, whose central premise is that political economic structures and discourses constitute, reproduce, and/or change gender norms, relations, and inequalities in a multilayered manner (Bedford and Rai 2010). Feminist IPE unearths gender dynamics and gender inequalities that other IPE scholarship has largely neglected, in the infrastructure of markets and economies and the organization of labor and development practices. Particularly, feminist IPE forcefully connects these macro-structures to gendered everyday experiences. This critical scholarship shows to us that there is absolutely no opting out of a gender analysis if one wants to understand the institutions and lived experiences of international political economy.

This chapter maps the contributions feminist scholars in Europe have made to IPE scholarship, focusing on three distinct themes in the recent decades. I first discuss critical interventions in debates on capitalism and neoliberalism. I show that European feminist IPE has made a significant contribution in connecting the use of gendered discourses, which naturalize women's roles in the economy and the household, to neoliberal policy-making and institutional transformations. Second, I focus on international development. I show that feminist scholarship identifies the ways in which development discourses and programs can contribute to the problems of gender inequality they are purportedly designed to alleviate. In both sections, I also explore the connections built between macroeconomic decision-making processes and everyday experiences. Feminist scholars in Europe are distinctly important in interrogating everyday social reproductive labor and centralizing it in conceptualizing the economy. Third, I explore the contributions feminist IPE scholars have made to understanding the encounters between feminist scholars, gender experts, and political economic governance. I show that feminist IPE has had crucial policy impact, shaping the very institutions and practices they study.

In this chapter, I draw on the work of scholars located in continental Europe, the larger Eurozone and the UK. I do not limit the discussion to scholars in political science and international relations programs but draw out the field's empirical and theoretical richness by canvassing scholars in a variety of disciplines. It has to be emphasized that this chapter embodies a tension between the idea of Europe as a location from where a scholar is writing and a theorized site with distinct patterns of scholarly production. While it is difficult to resolve this tension here, I propose to use it to reflect on positionalities within global power relations surrounding academic knowledge production.

For this reason, first, a note is necessary on how I attempted to map this diverse and vast scholarship. Starting from the main discussions I knew, I then branched out from them using three interrelated techniques: tracing the citations in these debates, canvassing journals and publishing houses central to feminist IPE, and researching the websites of a number of institutional settings to identify clusters. The chapter, however, is confined to discussions primarily taking place in English. This reflects both my own linguistic skills and the hegemony of the English language in feminist IPE. Second, this limitation suggests possible new research, among other directions, those that are more attuned to theorizations emerging in non-English speaking settings. Furthermore, a truly transnational feminist political economy, I propose, can consider more boldly the various connections between neoliberalism and neoconservatism. This way, debates of cultural diversity can move beyond a simple acknowledging of the "non-West" and interrogate the ways in which harsh political economic policies and practices reproducing and deepening gender inequality can be naturalized under the cloak of cultural difference in any context.

# Capitalism and Neoliberalism: Connecting Discourses, Policies, and Everyday Implications

One area of strength for feminist IPE in Europe is the links scholars unearth between gendered discourses and massive neoliberal restructuring of economic systems in finance, trade, and labor markets.

In finance, Young (2018) has identified the masculinist biases inherent in monetary policy-making, a process hidden through a technocratic language. Roberts (2015a, 2016) has conceptualized "transnational business feminism" as the use of the feminist lexicon by transnational corporations and international financial institutions while actually bending their meaning in ways that entrench gender inequality. She has examined how this discourse limits the definition of empowerment to access to finance and traces the hypervisibility of a restricted group of women in corporate management while intersectional inequalities fueled by capitalist market economies are erased (Roberts 2015b).

Relevantly, scholars have identified how gendered discourses that have sprung up since the 2007–2008 financial crisis, explain away the causes solely in terms of the absence of women from decision-making positions in finance. Prügl (2012) has written on the myth-making power of the idea of "Lehman Sisters" and the associated argument that the finance giant that would not have gone bankrupt had there been enough women in management. Elias (2012) has written on discourses of "Davos woman," saving men and capitalism from themselves. Scholars have argued that these discourses produce essentialist notions of femininity and masculinity, naturalizing the unequal organization of social life. Van Staveren (2014) has shown how this binary and essentialist understanding of economic behavior is empirically wrong. Similarly, even though trade specialists assert that trade is gender neutral and purely a technical matter, this discourse itself erases gender inequalities and disguises the impact of trade policies on existing gender inequalities (van Staveren 2003; Barrientos 2019). This group of studies exposes the gendered assumptions and tacit gendered content of macroeconomic policy-making (Elson and Ça˘gatay 2000).

Feminist economists have identified a comparable problem in mainstream discourses on women's labor force participation. The expansion of the reach of multinational companies since the 1980s increased opportunities for paid jobs outside of home, allowing some women to open spaces of empowerment. However, as Elson argued early on, most jobs most women could access were low-paid and informalized (Elson 1998). Several important names have noted the feminization of global employment patterns and exploitative and precarious jobs for women and men in global factories, the service sector and global care labor (Chant 1998; Morini 2007). Focusing on women's employment in global factories, Elson and Pearson (1981a, b) argued that multinational corporations turned to women because they were expected to be more docile. Various case studies have revealed that this docility is not a cultural given or an essential feature of femininity, but rather a set of norms and behaviors produced and enforced through state, corporate, and factory regimes as well as labor market conditions (Elias 2004, 2005; Kılınçarslan and Altan-Olcay 2019; McDowell 2009; Ruwanpura and Hughes 2016). In fact, very early on Sylvia Chant's work clearly showed the diversity of women's agencies in the Third World (Chant and Brydon 1993; Chant 1997).

Connecting these discursive productions to everyday implications, feminist scholars in Europe have asserted that women's increased labor force participation has not meant a fairer redistribution of social provisioning and reproduction. In fact, under the austerity conditions created by the Washington Consensus, women have been stuck with a double burden and time poverty (Elson 1998; Hoskyns and Rai 2007; ˙ Ilkkaracan 2012a; Moser 1992). Some of the most forceful contributions of feminist IPE interrogate the relationship between welfare state structures and gender norms, household compositions, and gendered employment patterns across Europe (Bu˘gra 2018, 2020; Daly 2012a, 2013, 2015; Daly and Ferragina 2018; Daly and Lewis 2000; Karamessini 2008, 2009; Lewis 1992, 2001; Lewis and Giullari 2005; Sainsbury 1996). Caroline Moser's work early on revealed that, when government expenditure on social provisioning shrinks, household consumption patterns are maintained largely due to the overburdening of women in both unpaid care labor and paid labor outside the home (Moser 1989, 1993). Mary Daly has shown how welfare structures can play enormous roles in naturalizing, invisibilizing, or changing the gendered distribution of care labor (2011, 2012b). Ay¸se Bu˘gra has drawn attention to how state social policies can draw women into a flexibilized labor market while also consolidating 'state familialism,' whereby women are expected to undertake care labor at home (Bu˘gra 2018, 2020). Maria Karamessini has identified a distinct southern European welfare state (2008). Scholars have empirically explored the role the state plays in achieving or barring gender equality in formal employment (Alnıaçık et al. 2017; Bu˘gra and Yakut-Çakar 2010; ˙ Ilkkaracan 2012b; Molyneux 2002, 2006; Perrons 1995; Rubery 2002, Rubery et al. 2005). Moving beyond the boundedness of the nation-state, Nicola Yeates has underscored the need to understand the state's role in organizing the distribution of care at the national *and* transnational levels (Yeates 2004). To that end, several case studies connect the gendered, racialized, and ethnicized experiences of migration and care labor to both national governance logics and transnationalization of social reproductive labor (Elias 2010; Kofman and Raghuram 2015; Kunz 2010; McDowell 2013; Sainsbury 2012; Toksöz 2020).

This body of work drives home the point that market economies do not involve automatic transmission mechanisms but rather the myriad, gendered work, and survival strategies undertaken in the everyday make markets survive (Elias and Roberts 2016; Rai et al. 2014). Feminist scholarship argues that this everyday work of social reproduction and community survival should be central to our definitions of economy, work, and productivity (Harcourt 2014; ˙ Ilkkaracan 2017; Perrons 2005). Thus, a second important contribution of feminist scholars in Europe is their interrogation of everyday social reproductive labor and its stark invisibilization in both policy-making *and* mainstream and even non-feminist critical IPE (Bedford and Rai 2010; Rai et al. 2014; Steans and Tepe 2010).

Elias and Rai (2019) have recently proposed a broad paradigm shift: the need to discuss capitalism in terms of the structuration of spaces, temporalities, and violences in everyday experience, broadly, and social reproduction, specifically. Social reproductive labor is a site of struggle that can reproduce or challenge how economies are organized, priorities are identified, and policies are shaped (Elson 1998; Elias and Rai 2019). Analytically, by centralizing social reproduction in their studies, scholars make visible the gendered impacts of economic crises; conceptualize and problematize a very real crisis of depletion; and ultimately tie exercises of agency and/or resistance to macro-level political economic arrangements (Elias and Roberts; Kantola and Lombardo 2017; Karamessini and Rubery 2014; Rai et al. 2014; Ruwanpura 2013).

# Analyzing International Development Discourses and Organizations

Discourses, policies, and practices governing economic processes travel across borders. They become transnationally recognizable while also fracturing along the way (Lombardo et al. 2009). International development and the myriad turns that its logic has taken over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have therefore been another fruitful area of engagement for feminist IPE scholars in Europe.

It was Boserup's pathbreaking *Women's Role in Economic Development* that initially drew attention to the fallacy of assuming that modernization and development benefit men and women in the same way (Boserup 1970). Her work inspired the Women-in-Development (WID) paradigm, highlighting how international development programs often ended up deepening gender inequality in access to economic resources. While WID became an important venue of feminist intervention in the development literature as well as policy-making, its limitations also found voice in the work of feminist IPE scholars in Europe. Naila Kabeer criticized WID's individualist approach for ignoring unequal structural circumstances (1994). She proposed a conceptualization of empowerment that emphasizes the process through which women's ability to make choices increases as they acquire economic, social, and political resources *and* the policies shaping the structural constraints women face (Kabeer 1999, 2011). Andrea Cornwall (2016) has documented the diverse and unequal paths that women individually and collectively travel to that end. Maria Mies (1988) contested the logic of international development altogether, arguing that capitalism in the Global North depended on the continuous exploitation of the South and the Third World women. Elson (1995) drew attention to the patriarchal structures of international development organizations and the logics they produced. This attention to structure was also present in the works of Molyneux (1985) and Moser (1993), who distinguished between immediate and longer-term transformations needed to achieve gender equality. These feminist IPE giants from Europe were instrumental in the shift from WID to gender and development (GAD), which emphasizes the entanglement of the social construction of gender roles, relations and norms, and the development paradigm.

While GAD is now part of the lexicon of international governance, feminist scholarship continues to debate what GAD has come to mean. They have criticized the essentialization of women's social reproductive roles within heterosexual families (Rai 2002; Molyneux 2006). Much has been written on the World Bank's invention of "smart economics," the logic that investing in women is a smart choice because it can reduce household poverty, improve family well-being, and achieve macroeconomic growth. European feminist scholars have shown that this instrumentalist approach tasks women for achieving macroeconomic growth and poverty reduction, instead of treating the issue of gender equality as a goal in and of itself (Bedford 2009a; Calkin 2012; Chant and Sweetman 2012; Eyben and Napier-Moore 2009; Razavi 2012; Roberts and Soederberg 2012). Feminist scholarship shows that these instrumentalist discourses and essentialist logics invisibilize the unequal distribution of social reproductive labor and obfuscate analysis of structural problems of capitalism and neoliberalism (Bedford 2009a, b; Calkin 2015; Chant 2012; Cornwall and Brock 2005; Cornwall et al. 2007a; Elson 2010, 2012; Ferguson 2010a, b; Kunz 2008, 2012, 2018; Prügl 2009; Razavi 2012).

Feminist scholars have also connected these discourses to their operationalization on the ground. Accordingly, the programs designed with these logics both assume and constitute neoliberal subjectivities, with women expected to be rational, market savvy while still practicing prudence and care (Altan-Olcay 2014; Madhok and Rai 2013; Rai and Waylen 2008). They also show how programs, targeting women's empowerment in this manner, actually end up naturalizing gendered divisions of social reproduction and notions of heterosexual families and households (Bedford 2009a; Ferguson 2010b). Studies have also paid attention to contradictions between the reality of everyday program work and what the reports say is achieved (Altan-Olcay 2016; Bedford 2009a; Ferguson 2010a). These empirical studies show that neither neoliberalism nor international development discourses are homogenized. They illustrate the cracks, alternatives, and resistances that are born in the everyday (Eschle and Maiguashca 2018; Gregoratti 2016).

# Reflexive Exercises on the Governance of Neoliberalism and Development and Feminists

Interestingly, these important feminist scholarly interventions have built up to a point of recognition in that there are changes in the way gender equality is conceptualized and care labor is made visible in the UN as well as Bretton Woods institutions (Bedford 2009a; Ferguson and Harman 2015). These can also be attributed to the history of feminist involvement with international institutions since the 1990s.

Reflexive feminist writing has long discussed the implications of feminist advocates joining state bureaucracies and international organizations (Rai 2004). Scholars in Europe have also been central in these debates given their experiences with the European Union and the abundance of international governance institutions across Europe. Recent work has challenged the binary discussion of co-optation versus resistance mechanisms (Cornwall et al. 2007b; Rai and Waylen 2008; Ça˘glar et al. 2013; Chappell and MacKay 2021). These studies underline the need to study the unstable boundaries between institutions and movements (Calkin 2015; de Jong 2016; Eschle and Maiguashca 2007; Sandler and Rao 2012; de Jong and Kimm 2017). They call for listening to the experiences of gender experts and unearthing micropolitical encounters (Altan-Olcay 2020; De Jong 2017; Eschle and Maiguashca 2007; Prügl 2012). Scholars who have worked with international institutions are an integral part of this shift, discussing their own experiences within international governance (Eyben 2010, 2012; Ferguson 2015; Harcourt 2006, 2009; Moser 2005; Miller and Razavi 1998; Razavi 2017).

These accounts open a fascinating venue for exploring the everyday contradictions in institutional life. They shed light on the connections between institutional decision-making, governance of economies, and possibilities for change and resistance (Eyben 2012; Ferguson 2015; Waylen 2017). This scholarship, mostly produced in Europe, thus contributes to an important multilayered analysis that reconceptualizes feminism *and* neoliberalism's multiple and ambiguous trajectories by paying attention to what happens inside the institutions (Eschle and Maiguashca 2018).

# Institutional Locations, Positionalities, and New Directions

When the history of feminist IPE in Europe is interrogated, the impact of scholars from a few institutional locations in the UK becomes noticeable. These locations, such as the University of Manchester, London School of Economics, SOAS of London University, and Institute of Development Studies in Sussex and Warwick, have become meeting grounds for feminist IPE, with scholars spread across a variety of disciplines. Although such clusters are rarer, the same interdisciplinary pattern can be found in continental Europe. Feminist IPE scholars work in departments as diverse as political science, economics, anthropology, geography, and sociology and centers specializing in development studies, gender studies, social policy, and so on. The physical proximity of these universities means that many of these scholars circulate and meet in annual conferences like EISA and ECPG and collaborate in research and writing. It is likely that these exchanges play a role in the coherence of contributions in critical analyses of neoliberal discourses, the complexity of governance structures, and their two-way implications for everyday life and social reproduction.

It is also important to consider this situatedness when thinking briefly about how and in which areas feminist IPE in Europe can make more forceful contributions. Amidst all these connections and interdisciplinary exchanges I have attempted to map, there is a hegemonic position of the English language as the medium of writing. In fact, the coverage of this very chapter suffers from this limitation. The barriers that those who don't write in English face in reaching and becoming part of these seemingly transnational, but in fact linguistically limited discussions should be a point in reflexive thinking about how to expand feminist IPE research.

From a relevant vantage point, we can consider the distinct positionalities of writing from Europe. Feminist IPE in Europe problematizes the dominance of gender logics emanating from the Global North and the West. This reflexivity is important and welcome. However, there is also an occasional silence that results from this reflexivity when discussing agencies and norms in the so-called non-West. This silence often stems from assumptions that occasionally equate neoliberalism with liberalism and then shun liberalism as a Western ideology. Such a generalization can create the analytical and political problem of labeling those actors outside of Europe and North America, who seek the rights associated with liberal democratic states, as compradors and/or not authentic representatives of Eastern agencies (Altan-Olcay 2015, 2021). Furthermore, this approach leaves less room for discussing how neoliberal state policies coupled with conservative ideologies threaten the hard-won achievements of women's rights and gender equality around the world. While it is undoubtedly important to problematize the limits of law and/or homogenizing notions of agency on which they may be based, their loss, reversibility, and/or absence also need to be documented. When discussing diverse agencies in everyday life, I believe that the interdisciplinary nature of feminist IPE has much to contribute, not stopping at binaries, such as "the West" and the rest, "Western norms" and norms elsewhere. One forceful example comes to mind, to this end: Ay¸se Bu˘gra discusses how neoliberalism and hegemonizing conservative discourses can mutually support one another, increasingly based on arguments of cultural difference in the case of Turkey (Bu˘gra, 2014). When hegemonic definitions of cultural difference are taken for granted, policy solutions also end up reproducing the problem of gender inequality (Bu˘gra 2014, 2020, Bu˘gra and Yakut-Çakar 2010).

A final area to think about is the inroads feminist IPE can make in political economy scholarship broadly. While the issues raised by feminist IPE remain more crucial than ever, feminist scholarship continues to remain tangential to mainstream and other critical political economy scholarship (Bedford and Rai 2010; Elias 2011; Elias and Roberts 2016). This is a question that concerns feminist scholarship in general. However, the interdisciplinary nature of political economy and the European context, where disciplinary boundaries are more fluid and critical social sciences approaches are more common in university departments than in North America, makes this specific field a fertile place to start these discussions. This would be an exercise in strategizing, one that leads to breaking down intra-disciplinary boundaries.

## Bibliography


#### 114 Ö. ALTAN-OLCAY

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# Feminist Foreign Policy Studies in Europe

# *Jennifer Thomson*

**Abstract** This chapter addresses feminist IR scholarship in Europe on gender and foreign policy. Foreign policy has received comparatively little consideration from feminist scholars and, until recently, the field has been largely gender blind. The chapter discusses feminist scholarship in four key sections, on gender and the idea of 'normative power' Europe; the process of EU enlargement and expansion; the securitization/militarization of foreign policy; and, finally, the emerging literature on 'feminist' foreign policy. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what has been overlooked in the literature so far and what directions research might pursue in the future.

**Keywords** Foreign policy · Feminist foreign policy · Policy-making · Policy implementation · EEAS

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_7

J. Thomson (B)

Comparative Politics, University of Bath, Bath, UK e-mail: j.thomson@bath.ac.uk

# Introduction

Foreign policy analysis is largely taken to be a "gender-blind field" (Hudson, 2005). As a result, there has been relatively little academic interest in either the descriptive makeup of those making foreign policy decisions or the gendered nature of foreign policy (Smith, 2020). As the previous chapters illustrate, while much feminist academic attention in Europe has been paid to security and defense policy, the gendered nature of the military, international political economy, and international development, the language of foreign policy has received little sustained attention from feminist academia (Debusscher and Manners, 2020, 543; Smith, 2020; Aggestam and True, 2020, 4).

The literature that has been produced in this field has worked to challenge the presumed gender-neutrality of foreign policy (studies), by highlighting the male-dominance of the field; by illustrating gendered differences in public opinion related to foreign policy; and through an exploration of the gendered nature of the policy content of both state and EU foreign policy. As such, literature in the field of gender and foreign policy studies has made key interventions, urging mainstream IR to consider the role of women in foreign policy-making and, more broadly, the gendered ideas which underpin and sustain much of the fundamental work of foreign affairs. Despite this, the gender blindness of much foreign policy analysis (FPA) means that the work on gender and foreign policy has largely grown up in parallel to it, rather than in engagement with it (Smith, 2020). As a result, mainstream IR has yet to take much sustained interest in the ideas explored in this chapter.

This chapter explores what literature has been produced within the European context on gender and foreign policy, beginning with a brief overview of the nature of this work so far. Following this, it then looks at three key areas from the literature on gender and foreign policy—gender and state foreign policy; EU foreign policy; and then finally, the securitization/militarization of foreign policy. It does so largely through a conceptualization of three stages of the policy process—policy-making; policy content; and policy implementation, showing that feminist IR in Europe thus far has largely been focused on the *content* of foreign policy. It concludes with a discussion of what has been overlooked in the literature on gender and foreign policy so far, what directions research might pursue in the future, and how this focus on one stage of the policy process at the expense of the others might be overcome in subsequent literature.

## Overview

Research on gender and 'foreign policy' faces difficulties due to the expansive nature of what foreign policy covers. Although in more recent years a body of work is emerging around gender and foreign policy in Europe (particularly with reference to the EU institutions and mechanisms), it remains undertheorized (Debusscher and Manners, 2020, 543; Mos, 2013; Muehlenhoff, 2017, 163). For example, a key edited collection such as *Gendering the European Union* (Abels and Mushaben (eds), 2012) does not contain an specific chapter about foreign policy.1 Although there has been a wealth of work on the EU and gender, the vast majority focuses on the internal policy dynamics of the Union and the influence that membership has on individual state's equality policies. As the below illustrates, much of the work that does exist on gender and foreign policy centers around the EU's external relations and the normative positioning that the EU presents of its actions.

The work which has been produced on gender and foreign policy comes from a broad range of scholars working across IR, but also within political science and sociology, and often intersects with related work from security studies, development studies, and regional/area studies. The relative absence of literature on gender and foreign policy can perhaps be related to much of feminist IR's critical perspective in Europe and its relative reticence to engage with political institutions (Holmes et al., 2018; Thomson, 2019a). Reflecting this disciplinary eclecticism, the literature on gender and foreign policy works from a variety of methodological positions, although it is in the most part qualitatively focused. Some research works explicitly or implicitly through the lens of feminist institutionalism, exploring the relationship between the state and EU architecture and gendered policy-making (Deiana and McDonagh, 2018b; Guerrina and Wright, 2016; Novotná, 2015). Much research also works from a discourse analysis of policy documents produced (David and Guerrina, 2013; Kronsell, 2016a; Kunz and Maisenbacher, 2016); single case-study analysis (Bretherton, 2001); and a body of work develops from deconstructive/poststructural frameworks of analysis (Kronsell, 2016a, b). A

<sup>1</sup> Equally, a key book such as *Foreign policies of EU member states: continuity and Europeanisation* (2017), edited by some of the key figures in European studies, contains a variety of thematic chapters on European foreign policy but no specific chapter is given over to gender.

wide range of work addresses gendered differences in attitudes to foreign policy, mostly via social surveys (including Bjarnegård and Melander, 2017; de Boer, 1985; Kentmen, 2010; Togeby, 1994). Although most work adopts gender largely as it applies to the male/female binary, there is a growing interest in masculinity specifically (Kronsell, 2016a, b; Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff, 2019), as well as in the intersection between gender and race in foreign policy and external affairs (Achilleos-Sarll, 2018; Stern, 2011).

The literature discussed in this chapter was searched for via the main scholarly databases (Scopus, etc.) and my institutional library online catalog. This was followed up with a more detailed search on specific authors who had written on this topic, including looking at their institutional webpages and Google Scholar in order to clarify the extent of their research. Although these methods identified some literature in other languages, as detailed below the majority of literature discussed here is in English due to my language limitations and the Anglophone bent of the field. Indeed, most of this subfield has been produced in Western Europe. This is particularly notable in the burgeoning literature on gender and EU external relations, which has predominantly emerged from academics working within the UK and the Netherlands (Beier and Ça˘glar, 2020; Guerrina and Wright, 2016; Haastrup et al., 2019; Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff, 2019; Muehlenhoff et al., 2020; Slootmaeckers, 2019; Wright and Guerrina, 2020). Equally, developing work on feminist foreign policy has had a strong Swedish bent,2 reflecting its origins as a policy agenda (Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond, 2016, 2019; Aggestam et al 2019; Bergman-Rosamond, 2020). However, there is also interest from the UK (Haastrup, 2020; Thomson, 2019b), and strong research connections between European and Australian academics (Aggestam and True, 2020). The implications of this dominance of Anglophone work and its location primarily in Western Europe are considered further in the final section.

<sup>2</sup> Ongoing work on FFP is also strongly influenced by Swedish academia including projects at Lund University (Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond; Sundström and Zhukova) and the University of Gothenburg (Jezierska and Towns). There is, however, developing work on FFP outside of the Swedish context including projects and work by, amongst others, Thomson (UK), Haastrup (UK), Faerber (UK), True (Australia), Cheung (Germany) and a wide variety of Canadian authors (see *International Journal*, 2020, 75: 3).

# Gender and State Foreign Policy

There has been some limited work within European scholarship on gender and states' foreign policy, often focusing on specific events such as Brexit (Haastrup et al., 2019) or overlapping with international development scholarship (see Chapter 6). Selected literature has addressed the gender gap in public opinion on foreign policy within selected European states, including some comparative work (Bjarnegård and Melander, 2017; de Boer, 1985; Kentmen, 2010; Togeby, 1994). Within broader work on foreign policy and FPA, however, there is little sustained engagement with gender. Indeed, a recent article such as Smith's (2020) undertakes the first steps at a comprehensive overview of the literature on women and foreign policy-making. She shows how under-developed the field is, pointing out that only four articles in the history of the leading journal *Foreign Policy Analysis* have addressed gender directly (132).<sup>3</sup> The important, but fundamental, nature of this article shows how far work on gender and foreign policy has to go.

Much of the contemporary work on gender and foreign policy has instead developed outside of mainstream FPA literature (Smith, 2020), including growing work which addresses the recent advent of feminist foreign policy (FFP). As such, this work has emerged in parallel to existing mainstream work (responding largely to the feminist moniker), rather than in direct conversation with the concepts and ideas of dominant FPA. So far, it has focused primarily on the contents of the newly developed FFPs seen throughout Europe and beyond, with less consideration given to the political processes of their introduction or their implementation.

FFP originated in Sweden in 2014. It represented a new direction for Swedish foreign policy in its choice of the 'f-word' (Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond, 2016, 323) but in many ways was a continuation of the state's existing international commitments to women's rights (Ibid; Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond, 2019; Bergman-Rosamond, 2020; Thomson, 2019b, 2022). Following the Swedish adoption, Canada followed suit with a feminist international assistance policy in 2017. Mexico, France and Spain have also adopted FFP, and Libya and Germany have indicated they will follow. What precisely the feminist descriptor means is debated (Thomson, 2019b, 2022) but, particularly in the

<sup>3</sup> This article was published prior to Aggestam and True's Special Issue of *Foreign Policy Analysis* on Feminist Foreign Policy (2020).

Swedish case, there is a focus on commitment to liberal international norms and institutions.

FFP is therefore not coming from within the institutions of the EU but rather states. As a result, the focus of study within Europe on gender and foreign policy is shifting from a previous strong interest in the EU architecture (as shown below) to individual nation-states. Much academic literature has focused on the original Swedish case. In their work on Swedish FFP, Karin Aggestam and Annika Bergman-Rosamond (2016) argue that the use of the 'f-word' "elevates" foreign policy in a way that "explicitly seek[s] to renegotiate and challenge power hierarchies and gendered institutions that hitherto defined global institutions and foreign and security policies" (323). Although acknowledging the political problems which may lie in the path of a full implementation of such policy, they argue that FFP stands to make a key contribution to thinking about the ethical nature of foreign policy more broadly, in that it provides "a more rigorous ethical yardstick than is currently available against which to evaluate the normative and feminist contents of states' international orientations, identities, and concrete policies" (332). In this article, and in their future work on Swedish FFP (2018; 2019; Aggestam et al., 2019; Bergman-Rosamond, 2020), they are interested thus to develop a theoretical framework through which feminist IR and feminist ethics of care might be used to analyze attempts at foreign policy-making.

Aggestam and True (2020) propose a framework for conducting a gendered analysis of foreign policy which allows for comparative research between states' polices. Work within Europe which looks to foreign policy elsewhere argues that it runs the risk of seeing gender only as the sex binary of man/woman (Haastrup, 2020) and that, echoing the discussion of enlargement above, there is a disjoint between the language on gender in foreign policy versus the reality of the domestic situation (Ibid; Thomson, 2019b, 2022). In a more theoretical vein, Achilleos-Sarll (2018) argues for a necessary conversation between postcolonialism and feminism in order to invigorate foreign policy analysis and highlight the way that foreign policy "should be re-conceptualised *as* gendered, sexualised and racialised" (45) in all contexts.

# EU Foreign Policy

Work on EU foreign policy represents the largest area within feminist IR scholarship in Europe on gender and foreign policy to date. It can be broadly thought of in three categories—policy-making, analysis of policy contents, and finally, policy implementation. As with the work on state's foreign policy described above, the majority of work on gender and EU foreign policy falls into the second category.

In its analysis of policy content, much feminist scholarship in Europe on EU foreign relations takes Ian Manners' understanding of 'normative power Europe' (2002) as its starting point, asking about the place of gender in how the EU presents itself and interacts with the world. There is a broad appreciation in the literature that this normative basis to foreign relations is the way that the EU presents itself (Manners, 2002, 252) and that it is keen to be seen to be adopting the role of a 'benevolent teacher' (Van der Vleuten, 2013, 308) when it comes to gender equality and LGBT rights. However, much literature argues that while "equality should be a perfect platform for normative power Europe … gender issues remain largely invisible" in the EU's external policy (Guerrina and Wright, 2016, 295; Woodward and Van der Vleuten, 2014). A wide range of scholars argue that the EU's claim to be an innovator in gender equality issues, particularly in the area of gender mainstreaming, is largely a projection rather than a reality (David and Guerrina, 2013, Guerrina and Wright, 2016; Mos, 2013; Van der Vleuten, 2013; Woodward and Van der Vleuten, 2014). The literature argues further that the EU consciously adopts the language of gender equality to further its own aims, adopting it instrumentally rather than based around an understanding of rights. Indeed, in their work on the European External Action Service (EEAS), Chappell and Guerrina argue that the EEAS "strategically co-opts gender narratives to promote the interests of the organisation" (2020, 21).

The literature further stresses that the EU has competing goals in its gender equality work. Although the EU appears eager to use the rhetoric of gender equality, this masks the fact that its principal guiding force is that of a market logic. The literature shows that the EU has focused on gender equality in employment over other issues (Peto and Manners, 2006; David and Guerrina, 2013; Chappell and Guerrina 2020; Haastrup, Wright and Guerrina, 2019; Woodward and Van der Vleuten, 2014; Van der Vleuten, 2013, 317: also in terms of LGBT rights—Muhlhenhoff, 2017). In a trade-off between market forces and gender equality, scholars argue that the original operating basis of the EU—as a common market—always takes precedence in its external relations.

Woodward and Van der Vleuten argue that the EU "sees itself as an exporter of gender equality norms in two activities": enlargement negotiations and external relations (2014, 77). Reflecting this, much of the literature on gender and the EU's foreign relations focuses on enlargement and neighborhood policies. A growing body of literature stresses the colonial and racial hierarchy which is implicitly embedded in much of this policy-making and its interest in establishing and reinforcing the boundaries of the EU. It argues that depictions of the 'outside' in EU neighborhood relations policy reify colonial ideas and that "through gendered and racialised codings, the EU neighbourhood is constituted as a backward Other in the official NENP discourse" (Kunz and Maisenbacher, 2016).

As in the above discussion of the EU as a gendered normative power, there is again a strong argument from the literature on enlargement that gender equality has not been fully mainstreamed in the process of enlargement and integration. Bretherton argues that in the process of integration in the 1990s there was an argument made by central figures that "social policy areas such as gender equality and safety at work, should be set aside to facilitate accession" (2001, 69). Similarly, Kristofferson et al (2016, 63) also argue that the inclusion of LGBT rights into the process of expansion was relatively late. David and Guerrina argue that there is a high/low politics distinction (2013, 61) in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy in which gender is seen as expendable. Again, echoing the above, this piecemeal approach to gender in EU enlargement is reinforced through its instrumentalization and a focus on an economic understanding of gender equality (David and Guerrina, 2013, 60; Debusscher, 2012; Kunz and Maisenbacher, 2016).

Compared to the analysis of policy content, there is much less consideration of policy implementation and policy-making. There is some limited work on the descriptive nature of the policy-making institutions, which argues that gender mainstreaming has achieved little in a policy sense within the EEAS (reduced to a "tick-box exercise" (Chappell and Guerrina, 2020, 276)), nor in the makeup of the institution (Chappell and Guerrina, 2020; Guerrina and Wright, 2016; Novotná, 2015). Despite several high-profile female leaders, women are severely underrepresented in the EEAS (Novotná, 2015; see also Guerrina and Wright, 2016, 302), suggesting that the institution is struggling with the arguably more basic task of recruiting and retaining female staff, let alone adopting a gendered lens to policy-making.

When the literature turns to consider implementation, there is a strong concern about what the absence or low prioritization of gender in EU enlargement will mean internally (David and Guerrina, 2013; Debusscher and Manners, 2020; Guerrina et al., 2018; Mos, 2013). The literature also highlights the hypocrisy of the EU using rhetoric around gender equality in its enlargement policies when internal measures are failing to deliver (in terms of women's representation within the EEAS, Novotná, 2015 and in relation to LGBT rights, Mos, 2013; see also Woodward and Van der Vleuten, 2014).

# Securitization/Militarization of Foreign Policy

Recently, the literature has argued that the gendered normative power of the EU and its external relations are increasingly militarized (Haastrup, Wright and Guerrina, 2019; Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff, 2019; Muehlenhoff, 2017). Again, the literature levels accusations that gender equality is "tolerated" (Deiana and McDonagh, 2018b, 48) so long as it fits into already existing security goals, and is used largely in an instrumental fashion, one in which "gender equality is only a means to an end, not an end in itself" (Muehlenhoff, 2017, 163; see also Guerrina and Wright, 2016, 309; Guerrina, Chappell and Wright, 2018). Haastrup et al. note that although "the EUGS [EU Global Strategy, published in 2016] makes a call for greater gender inclusivity," it does so in order to "further defence cooperation and militarism" (2019, 68).

An understanding of gender beyond the male/female binary (particularly in relation to ideas around masculinity) is being given greater consideration in the literature on gender and militarism in the EU, due largely to the overlap and influence of feminist critical security studies. Hoijtink and Muehlenhoff argue that the "current crisis narrative" (2019, 3) around migration, the failure of international liberal governance, and the rise of authoritarian rulers allow for "further advancement of militarism and the militarised masculinities associated with it" (Ibid, 12) within the EU's CSDP. Similarly, Kronsell (2016a, b) argues that an 'EU protector masculinity' emerges in the EU's CSDP. Despite the growing literature, Muehlenhoff (2017) points out that although indeed the EU often "conceptualizes gender as a social construct" (163) in its security policies, this is generally reduced to a discussion of men/women.

Again, reflecting links to feminist critical security studies, there has been an increasing focus on the WPS agenda within literature on EU foreign affairs (Chappell and Guerrina, 2020; Deiana and McDonagh, 2018a, b; Guerrina and Wright, 2016; Guerrina, Chappell and Wright, 2018; Muehlenhoff, 2017). The EEAS appointed a Principal Advisor on Gender in 2015, whose job title also includes reference to WPS (although the role is arguably limited and lacking seniority; Guerrina and Wright, 2016, 310–311). WPS appears to be one of the key ways in which the EU understands the gendering of foreign policy, reflecting the agenda's dominance in the work of nation-states and transnational actors around the globe. However, and echoing the above, despite the fact that the agenda should meld easily with stated EU norms and values, the EU has been slow to implement it (Guerrina and Weight, 2016). Haastrup et al. note that the EU was largely "absent" (2019, 66) from 2000 to 2016, a period in which many European countries worked through multiple National Action Plans. Much literature finds the EU's policy commitments wanting with regard to WPS (Deiana and McDonagh, 2018a, b; Guerrina and Wright, 2016; Guerrina, Chappell and Wright, 2018; Muehlenhoff, 2017) and focused outward with less emphasis on tackling EU organizations and practice (Deiana and McDonagh, 2018a).

# What's Been Overlooked in European Feminist IR Scholarship on Foreign Policy and EU External Relations?

Although the literature is more limited than other areas, European feminist IR scholarship has still had substantial interest in gender and foreign policy, with particular attention paid to EU policy and mechanisms. However, several key oversights remain. Silences on the colonial past of EU states are particularly prescient in this literature (although Manners and Debusscher, 2020 propose a framework to challenge this). Claims on the part of the EU or individual states (particularly Sweden's FFP positioning) to be a normative power need to be more strongly interrogated in the context of the European colonial history. There has also been relatively little work thinking about the interactions of gender and race in these policies (although with some notable exceptions Achilleos-Sarll, 2018; Debusscher and Manners, 2020). Similarly, intersectionality is adopted in a piecemeal fashion in FFP. There has been little literature exploring what its adoption as an analytical framework might give to our understanding of foreign policy (see Achilleos-Sarll, 2018).

Furthermore, work on foreign policy might engage more with work on migration to explore where the 'foreign' and the 'domestic' begin in the continent. Where are the boundaries of Europe? What are the power dynamics at play in foreign policy? How does discussion of gender aid in the construction of the 'inside' and 'outside' in relation to Europe? Indeed, as Manners and Debusscher (2020, 547) argue, there is a need to think about these policies from the perspective of those who are on the receiving end. This oversight reflects the geographic origins of much of this work which, as previously shown, is largely emerging in Anglophone literature written in Western Europe with stronger links to other Anglophone regions as opposed to Central or Eastern Europe. Greater consideration within the literature might be given to the issue of who foreign policy is *for*, and how these voices and perspectives might be captured within academic work.

There is also much to be considered with regard to foreign policy in the context of the resurgence of right-wing populism, nativist politics, and Euroscepticism across the continent. There is a well-developed body of literature on the gendered nature of populism, racism, and xenophobia (Farris, 2017; Towns et al., 2014), but less consideration of how this might shape foreign policy. The context in which this edited collection is written is one of a post-Brexit Europe; an ongoing 'crisis' around migration; the lack of an integrated EU response to the COVID-19 pandemic; and right-wing backlash against gender equality across the continent. Foreign policy in the aftermath of these events will be particularly important (and gendered) and scholarly attention must be paid to it.

Furthermore, the majority of work explored above largely works from an understanding of gender as a sex binary. There has been some interest in masculinity (Kronsell, 2016a, b; Muehlenhoff, 2017; Stern, 2011), but the idea of femininity has been given less consideration. There is much more to be pursued here—particularly ideas about the masculine, 'protective' nature of the EU and intersections with colonial tropes. Although there is a very well-developed body of work on LGBT rights and EU enlargement (Ayoub and Paternotte, 2014; Bilic, 2016; Slootmaeckers, Touquet and Vermeersch, 2016; Slootmaeckers, 2019), there has been less discussion of LGBT issues in relation to foreign policy or development work. Future work might therefore explore what space is given to LGBT rights in foreign policy or in the work of the EEAS.

Finally, many long-established ideas in feminist political science which attempt to explain and understand the gendered natures of government and institutions might be fruitfully employed in foreign policy analysis (Smith, 2020, develops a framework for this). An exploration of critical actors; the importance of descriptive representation; the role that women in executive positions have—these might all be used to explore foreign policy. There has been, for example, little consideration of the feminized leadership of the EEAS and the influence that the leadership of Catherine Ashton and Federica Mogherini has had (although see Hartlapp and Blome, 2021; Novotná, 2015). Similarly, the role and influence of Margot Wallström and the development of feminist foreign policy in Sweden might be explored. This absence is especially prominent given the developing work on gender and foreign policy leaders in the US context (Bashevkin, 2019; Hudson and Leidl, 2015).

This blindness to thinking about the descriptive makeup of the policy formation stage reflects the narrow focus that much feminist IR literature has had on foreign policy *content*. As illustrated in this chapter, feminist IR work on gender and foreign policy in Europe has had less interest in the earlier stages of the policy process, nor the implementation of said policy. Work on gender and foreign policy has been more reactive to specific policy changes (such as FFP and the WPS agenda) rather than proactively and consistently engaging with FPA as a sub-discipline. This also reflects the disciplinary breakdown of the policy process into separate sub-disciplines, with political science taking more interest in the first stage and international development the final. There is therefore an opportunity for more cross-disciplinary work in this area. If the gendered implications of foreign policy are to be more fully understood, there needs to be a desire on the part of scholars to engage with work from different disciplinary, methodological, and epistemological backgrounds.

# Conclusion

Although the literature on gender and foreign policy within and concerning Europe is limited in comparison with the attention given to other areas of feminist IR, it advances certain key arguments. Firstly, the EU has been slow to include gendered concerns in all aspects of foreign policy and its external relations, ranging from women's rights to the WPS agenda to LGBT rights. Secondly, the literature argues that when gender is included, it is generally in a narrow or instrumental fashion, with a focus on access to employment or bending gendered concerns to already existent interests. Most recent literature argues that there is a creeping militarization in the EU's discussion of gender in its foreign policy, in part a response to a world which is growing more uncertain and in which the type of liberal institutionalism that the EU builds from is coming under stress. At the same time, the advent of FFP, originating within Europe and being especially championed by Sweden, appears to act as a rejoinder to this.

Underpinning this though are key silences, particularly in relation to Europe's colonial legacies, the resurgence of right-wing populism across the continent and gender beyond the male–female binary. The growing critical nature of much of the literature on gender and foreign policy suggests that not only will it continue as an area of interest for feminist IR in Europe but that it will become more interested in such questions. Perhaps more dispiritingly, the existing literature appears to have made little inroads into mainstream FPA work and has largely emerged in parallel to it, rather than in conversation. Moving forward, scholars in this area therefore also carry the burden of trying to encourage the majority of European IR to engage more fruitfully with the ideas and work represented here.

# Bibliography


Slootmaeckers, H. Touquet, and P. Vermeersch. 2016. *The EU Enlargement and Gay Politics: The Impact of Eastern Enlargement on Rights, Activism and Prejudice*. London: Palgrave Macmillan.


*The European Union's Evolving External Engagement: Towards New Sectoral Diplomacies?*. London: Routledge.


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# Feminist Knowledge Production in Europe on Diplomacy and International Negotiation

# *Tonka Kostadinova*

**Abstract** This chapter traces the development of feminist scholarship in Europe on diplomacy and international negotiation. Sensitive to variations between different national contexts, this chapter suggests that the state frames the broader socio-political environment, which incentivizes or discourages the creation of feminist knowledge. This chapter also provides important insights on prevailing silences and limitations of existing research. By outlining both the thematic and the geographical discrepancies in feminist knowledge production on diplomacy across Europe, this chapter calls attention to the systematic disregard of gender as a category of analysis in many European countries and offers useful avenues for further research.

**Keywords** Gender · Diplomacy · International negotiation · The state · Feminist knowledge production

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_8

T. Kostadinova (B)

University of Burgas, Burgas, Bulgaria

# Introduction

Over the last two decades, feminist studies in Europe on diplomacy and international negotiation have evolved into a dynamic inter-disciplinary research field, offering an inspiring vision of gender history, women's representation, and the shifting empowerment of men and women in international affairs across time. A significant number of scholars in Europe have contributed to rethinking and re-conceptualizing diplomacy as a gendered practice and study, joining the global feminist international relations (IR) debates, which sought to unveil the gendered character of international politics and of the key concepts employed in the field.

The growing scholarly interest in the gendered dynamics in diplomacy has been incentivized by the profound transformations in the field, related to the twentieth-century historical opening up of the diplomatic service for women and the enhanced recognition of their role in international politics. The latter in turn has been part of a broad and coherent shift in the political culture of European societies, headed toward greater women's participation in political life and in higher level decision-making. Not every European society, though, has experienced these processes in the same way. A society's values and religious beliefs, its institutions and leaders, and the structure of the state all have impacted the process of women's political empowerment, including in the area of diplomacy, and have shaped the wider context, which stimulates or discourages feminist knowledge production in the field.

Informed by the understanding that gender discourses and feminist knowledge take shape within particular political and socio-economic environments, which has the potential to model scholarly interest, methods, approaches, and production, this chapter sets out to explore whether and how different national contexts of Europe may influence scholarly efforts to integrate gender into foreign policy and diplomacy research. It will do so by exploring the relationship between the creation of feminist knowledge and the location of this endeavor. Accordingly, this chapter presents an unique data-base of Europe-based scholars on gender and diplomacy and provides the first of its kind geographical mapping of existing European scholarship in the field.

This chapter considers a rich body of literature from a number of disciplines—political science, international relations, policy studies, history, and sociology, but does not aim to explore the full extent of the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological diversity of feminist scholarship on diplomacy and international negotiation in Europe. It rather charts broader patterns in Europe by discussing the key thinkers who have contributed to establishing gender as a relevant category of analysis in diplomacy and by analyzing the prevailing theoretical and methodological approaches in their research.

A dialogue across the main realms of feminist scholarship in Europe on diplomacy and international negotiation provides important insights on prevailing silences and limitations of existing research in the field. By outlining both the thematic and the geographical discrepancies in feminist knowledge production on diplomacy across Europe, this paper calls attention to the systematic disregard of gender as a category of analysis in many European countries and offers useful avenues for further research.

# Mapping Feminist Scholarship on Diplomacy and International Negotiation Across Europe

#### *Mapping Across States*

Over the last decade and a half, feminist scholarship in Europe on diplomacy and international negotiation has taken on a multifaced direction, contributing to positioning Europe as a key scientific "player" in the field. The dynamics of feminist knowledge production, though, seem to vary quite radically between the European countries. This variation is associated with the different political, economic, and social contexts in which feminist knowledge is created, articulated, and disseminated. This chapter provides a unique mapping of scholars in Europe who have developed and integrated gender perspectives and approaches in their research on diplomacy and international negotiation, identifying their current place of work. Altogether, 52 scholars were examined across 13 European states. Most of the scholars have explicitly identified their work as feminist, others have simply integrated women's perspectives in their wider research on diplomacy, but all of them made manifest the issue of gender, which, until very recently, was invisible in mainstream diplomacy studies. The mapping is limited to feminist scholarship published in English and German. It thus might say more about where scholars are located who publish in English or German than it does about feminist diplomacy scholarship as such.

The mapping illuminates that feminist knowledge on diplomacy in English and German has been created primarily across Western Europe

**Fig. 8.1** Distribution of feminist IR scholars on diplomacy among European states (*n* = 52)

and the Scandinavian states and is particularly pronounced in the UK and Sweden, which can be viewed as "pioneers" in developing the field within Europe. The review of the literature shows that UK-based and Swedenbased scholars have produced the largest number of publications, offering a rich strand of theoretical and empirical research on gender in diplomacy.

UK universities and research centers host 15 (29%) out of the 52 scholars in the mapping. Equal number of the scholars surveyed are based in Sweden (29%). Other European countries, most notably Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Norway, and Finland, are also on the map of feminist studies on diplomacy and international negotiation in Europe, as shown in Fig. 8.1. At the same time, entire European regions, such as Eastern and Southern Europe, are missing from the chart.1

The mapping elucidates the key role of the national context not only in terms of institutional frameworks and funding to feminist research projects, but also in securing the wider socio-political context for the legitimization and appropriation of feminist knowledge. Feminist approaches to diplomacy and international negotiation seem to find a suitable home mostly in countries, which advance pro-gender norms and strategies in foreign affairs or have invested resources in constructing their image as women-friendly states. The pursuit of women's rights or gender mainstreaming in foreign policy, as in the UK and Sweden, might serve as an important push factor, which shapes scholarly interest,

<sup>1</sup> Important exceptions here are the Czech Republic and Turkey, where we have evidences of local scholars who have made efforts to integrate gender perspective in their research on diplomacy, and more broadly—on foreign policy and IR.

methods, approaches, networking, and collaborations, and incentivizes feminist research in the field.

The concentration of studies within Western Europe and the Scandinavian states suggests that feminist scholarship produced in Europe is focused predominantly on the history and experiences of women in liberal democracies and in Western European diplomacy. With very few exceptions, the gendered diplomatic practices in non-democratic regimes, such as those in post-WWII Portugal, Spain, or in communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), remain silenced. A more sophisticated engagement of feminist scholars with the Southern and Eastern region might provide new theoretical perspectives on the relationship between gender, diplomacy, and the legacy of contrasting political regimes—democracy, authoritarianism, and state socialism.

As a general trend, feminist knowledge production on diplomacy and international negotiation has remained marginalized in countries lacking rights-oriented and women-friendly politics. Across CEE, feminism remains a matter of political and intellectual courage and the costs of asserting a feminist position in academia range from continuous public humiliation and uncensored slander to crude censorship and the loss of academic status (Bucur 2008: 1381). Moreover, attacks on feminism and gender equality have become a steady aspect of recent de-democratization trends in the region and have impacted both feminist knowledge production and the transmission of feminist knowledge (Krizsan and Roggeband 2019**)**. Against the context of limited funding resources and the lack of institutional and public support, feminist knowledge production in the region is almost fully dependent on the personal commitment of local scholars. The need to articulate and defend feminist ideas, methods, and approaches within a gender-hostile academic and socio-political environment discourages many efforts toward the creation of feminist knowledge, especially in the traditionally andro-centric fields of political science and international relations.

#### *Mapping Across Institutional Sites*

#### *University Sites*

The most active channel for the distribution of funds to feminist research projects and hence an important institutional factor for the development of the field are European institutions of higher education with expertise

**Fig. 8.2** Distribution of feminist IR scholars on diplomacy among university departments

in basic (as opposed to applied) research in social sciences and the humanities, concentrated in Western and in Northern Europe. As a general European trend, feminist scholarship on diplomacy has rarely developed within departments of gender or women's studies, but rather within departments of history, political science, and IR, as indicated in Fig. 8.2.

### *Non-University Research Centers*

Non-university research centers play a growing role in the construction of feminist knowledge in the area of diplomacy and international negotiation. They prioritize feminist research that has the potential to be highly relevant to policy and provide examples of more applied literature. Scholarly output is usually disseminated in the form of policy papers and policy reports and is based on both quantitative indicators (e.g. gender equality indexes) and qualitative data. Much of the feminist scholarship across non-university research centers in Europe is created by former practitioners in the field and reflects their professional experience and engagement to bridge research to the demands of policy. The fact that many practitioners continue their career as advisers or researchers in the non-university sector partially explains why scholarship on women in international negotiation (as compared to diplomatic history scholarship) is distributed in a more balanced way between universities, research centers, and non-governmental organizations.

#### *Diplomatic Academies and Research Centers Attached to the Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs)*

Considering the conspicuous relationship between feminist research and the demands of policy, it is reasonable to expect that European Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs), through their research infrastructure, take active part in the global debates on the role and status of women in diplomacy. However, with very few exceptions, this has not been the case. The British Foreign Office is one of the few state agencies that has initiated a comprehensive analysis on the diverse ways in which women have influenced the work of the institution throughout its existence (Crowe et al. 2018). In 2020, the German MFA also issued a highly timely report on gender equality in the Federal Foreign Office, aimed at raising the public profile of female diplomats and at demonstrating the importance of equity between men and women in the German Foreign Service.2 These two exceptions notwithstanding, the potential of MFAs and their diplomatic academies to produce gender-oriented research or to integrate gender perspectives in their training programs remains untapped. More active engagement of diplomatic institutions in feminist knowledge production has the potential to not only inspire and infuse feminist perspectives to national foreign policy agendas, but also enrich the global feminist IR debates, by providing unique access to important primary sources and to the relevant institutional and social environment, necessary for diversifying the methods and approaches applied in the field.

# Mapping Key Thinkers on Gender and Diplomacy in Europe

In the last decade and a half, an increasing number of scholars in Europe have become interested in studying the gendered dynamics of diplomacy and have built a solid knowledge base. In the discussion that follows, this chapter discusses scholars in Europe who have been central to the establishment of gender as a relevant category of analysis in the malecentered academic terrain of diplomacy and international negotiation. It is important to emphasize that no single article can do proper justice to the vitality of feminist thought in the area of diplomacy, and the scholars

<sup>2</sup> "Gender equality in German foreign policy and in the Federal Foreign Offce." [online].

discussed further on by no means match the total number of scholars, who, through their inspiring and innovative research, have contributed to the development of the field.

Given the limits of this chapter, I have chosen to select those scholars, whose writings reveal "flaws" in feminist scholarship in Europe on diplomacy. This chapter distinguishes two main streams of thought, along which scholars in Europe and their contributions are grouped and discussed—the study of women through the prism of diplomatic history and the study of the gendered nature of contemporary diplomatic institutions, practices, and norms.

**The field of diplomatic history** evidences a particular wealth of feminist studies and has developed in a number of European countries—most notably, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Ireland, and Austria. The most extensive accounts on the history of women in diplomacy stem from the UK. UK-based scholars are among the first exponents of historical approaches, elucidating the informal roles that women have indirectly played in international activities before gaining formal access to diplomacy. **James Daybell** (University of Plymouth), for example, studies women's political influence in the early modern period, focusing on women's engagement in diplomatic and intelligence activities through informal and family channels (Daybell 2004, 2011, 2016). He approaches women's wide-ranging social activities as political and uses female letterwriting as a relevant source material for the historical reconstruction of women's interest and involvement in areas, traditionally dominated by men (e.g. war, armed rebellions and naval preparations). Daybell's major contribution lies in illuminating the importance of re-conceptualizing the domestic as political, which offers a relevant theoretical framework for the study of the diverse channels of women's involvement in international politics over the centuries.

Much of the work undertaken in the UK traces the process of formal admission of women in different national foreign services across the globe. In her studies, **Helen McCarthy** (University of Cambridge) delivers path-breaking analyses on women's status and role in the British diplomatic service, taking stock of the evolution of women's career paths from the positions of clerical and support staff to experts and career diplomats. Drawing on letters, memoirs, personal interviews, and government records, she constructs the history of twentieth-century British female diplomats at different diplomatic postings around the globe and advances our knowledge on the social dynamics and relationships, surrounding the integration of the first female officers in a world revolving around a masculine model of professionalism for many decades (McCarthy 2009, 2014). Together with James Southern, McCarthy provides a broader historical survey of women, gender, and diplomacy, conceptualizing the notion of female agency in international politics (McCarthy and Southern 2018). The notion of women's agency is developed also by **Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones** (University of Edinburgh) in his study on the histories of women who have shaped American foreign policy through their influence in international politics since World War I (Jeffrey-Jones 1995).

Decisive impulses for the development of feminist diplomatic histories have come from Austria, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Turkey, and Sweden. The major strand of the European literature refers to countryspecific research, with a focus on women's expanding role in the different foreign services across the globe, both as serving officers and as diplomatic spouses (Barrington 2017; Biltekin 2016; Rumelili and Suleymanoglu-Kurum 2018; Erlandsson 2019; Hughes 2010; O'Brien 2019; Neumann 2012). Insightful analyses and detail-rich accounts on the history of women in German, Austrian, and Swiss diplomacy have been published in German (Bastian 2013; Bastian et al. 2014; Motschmann edt. 2018; Müller and Scheidemann 2000; Nolde 2013). Their translation into English would significantly contribute to constructing a more complete cross-national picture on the history of gender in European diplomacy.

These diverse historical recoveries offer a solid framework for exploring the struggle for gender equality in diplomacy across the globe. The high proliferation of case-studies on gender and diplomatic history now calls for more synthesizing approaches, which have the potential to explain broader international patterns of change and continuity in regard to women's empowerment and place in the global diplomatic sphere.

**The second major thematic strand of European feminist scholarship in the field** examines the changing gender character of diplomacy with a focus on the gender norms, practices, relations, and hierarchies at current diplomatic institutions. The most vital contributions within this realm come from **Sweden**. **Ann Towns** (University of Gothenburg) and **Karin Aggestam** (Lund University) are arguably the most influential exponents of this approach. Their collaborative work over the last few years has significantly advanced our understanding on the gendered nature of diplomacy. In 2017, Aggestam and Towns co-edited the first book on the topic of gender and diplomacy in the contemporary era. *Gendering Diplomacy and International Negotiation* brings together leading scholars in the field to discuss fundamental questions about the place, status, and visibility of women and contemporary diplomacy, about the gendered nature of diplomatic infrastructure and institutions, and about the masculinized norms and homosocial environments characterizing the field (Aggestam and Towns 2017a). Aggestam and Towns raise significant issues, previously missing from the agenda of diplomatic scholarship—e.g. how do changes in the homosocial features of diplomacy and the arrival of a more diverse set of actors impact the practice of diplomacy and international negotiation, and which are the gendered hierarchies that remain resistant to change (Aggestam and Towns 2017a: 13). Enriched with novel empirical analyses of case-studies from a broad geographical range (Sweden, Brazil, US, Turkey, Russia, as well as the UN and the EU), the volume provides the first systematic attempt toward revealing broader international trends and patterns on the gendered practices and norms in diplomacy and international negotiation.

In their further collaborative work, Aggestam and Towns offer a pathbreaking research agenda for the advance of gender turn in diplomacy, opening up many new directions for scholarly inquiry and providing an inspiring framework for future work (Aggestam and Towns 2017b; Aggestam and Towns 2019). In collaboration with other scholars, they have built a solid knowledge base, which has illuminated much on women's representation and empowerment in foreign policy and diplomacy (Aggestam and True 2020; Aggestam and Svensson 2018; Towns et al. 2018; Towns and Niklasson 2017).

Another Scandinavian scholar and former Norwegian diplomat, **Iver Neumann** (Fridtjof Nansens Institute, Norway) offers particularly interesting viewpoints on the ways in which masculine values and worldviews have shaped diplomacy. Neumann explores different performances of masculinity and femininity within the Norwegian MFA and analyzes how diplomats' experiences of being female shape their roles, visibilities, and experiences in diplomacy. His major contribution lies in a historically informed ethnographic approach to gender in diplomacy and the application of the fundamental yet under-researched concepts of masculinity and femininity to the study of diplomatic practices, identities, and norms (Neumann 2008; 2012, 2019). Neumann's notion of feminine traits in diplomacy is further developed by **Birgitta Niklasson** (University of Gothenburg) in the first of its kind detailed study on the gendered networking of diplomats (Niklasson 2020).

In **Jennifer Cassidy's** (University of Oxford) edited book "Gender and Diplomacy", a group of distinguished scholars and practitioners present detailed discussions of the role of women in diplomacy in a context which is historical, theoretical, and empirical. Framing the exploration of the historical and present experiences of women in the diplomatic sphere through the concepts of *gender*, *institutional power*, and *leadership roles*, the volume provides a solid empirical and theoretical contribution to the re-conceptualization of diplomacy as a gendered practice and study (Cassidy edt. 2017). The work of several scholars based in the Czech Republic further reflects the growing vitality of the second realm of feminist scholarship in Europe on diplomacy and international negotiation (Devine Mildorf 2019; Devine Mildorf et al. 2020).

Another vibrant body of scholarly work studies explicitly **the role of women in international negotiation**. Several recent contributions suggest a variety of viewpoints on women specifically as international mediators and map their place and status in mediation processes (Aggestam and Svensson 2018; Federer 2016; Paffenholz 2018; Naurin and Naurin 2018; Tryggestad 2018). Equally intriguing and complex, the search for an explanation of gender patterns in international negotiation is concentrated in European states that pursue the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda of the United Nations (most notably—the UK, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, and the Netherlands) and invest efforts in advancing gender equality in foreign affairs, including through enhanced women's participation in negotiation processes.

# Feminist Scholarship in Europe on Diplomacy and International Negotiation---Theoretical Approaches, Methodological Challenges, and Avenues for Future Research

Taken together, most of the feminist work on diplomacy produced in Europe takes departure in women's absence from, or underrepresentation in foreign affairs, and is informed by feminist international relations theory. Embedded within critical IR thought, it seeks to unveil how, traditionally and historically, women and feminine attributes have been excluded from (the study of) international politics. Feminist academic scholarship in Europe is now part of broader feminist IR debates arguing for the relevance of gender in challenging the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the field. Theoretical perspectives on gender and diplomacy from within disciplines beyond IR, such as sociology, anthropology, or cultural studies, are still scarce, however.

Most of the feminist diplomatic history scholarship in Europe is inspired by methods and approaches at the intersection of history, gender studies, and feminist international relations. Informed by the concept of female agency, much scholarship is qualitative in nature and engages with descriptive case-studies of individual women and/or national MFAs. A major commonality of diplomatic history approaches is their broad conceptualization of the diplomatic arena as a field, influenced by a diverse set of actors, beyond formal political and diplomatic elites. Perhaps this is the reason why feminist knowledge production in the area of diplomatic history is so varied in form, including academic writing (books and peerreviewed publications), biographies, auto-biographies, policy papers, and popular writing (novels).

The vitality of feminist diplomatic histories notwithstanding, the need of more qualitative research on the history of women in diplomacy remains. There is still tantalizingly little known about twentieth-century female diplomats and their lives. In most countries around the globe, the process of opening the diplomatic service to women occurred within living memory. The promotion of women to the rank of ambassador is an even more recent trend, and many of the first female ambassadors were until recently acting diplomats. The time is thus ripe for the translation of their memories and lived experiences into conceptual knowledge that will advance the theorization of gender in diplomacy, relying on inside perspectives and offering concrete ways to link everyday life inquires to broader processes and patterns in international politics. The field also remains in demand of historical analyses that are more diverse in geographical scope, analyses which can provide solid foundation for future comparative studies and can theorize change and continuity in the gendered character of diplomacy beyond Western and Northern Europe.

Located mostly within critical IR, scholarship in Europe on the transformation of the gendered character of contemporary diplomacy grounds its credibility in theories and methodologies inspired by a range of critical feminist IR perspectives. Some of the studies approach female diplomats as tokens and analyze women's empowerment in diplomacy both through the prism of human agency and through institution-based approaches (e.g. Niklasson 2020). The majority of the accounts are qualitative in nature, with very few studies providing cross-national quantitative data concerning women's place in contemporary diplomacy (Towns and Niklasson 2017; Schiemichen 2019). More diverse quantitative data is needed to complement qualitative analyses and to contribute to identifying, comparing, and generalizing broader trans-national patterns in the transformation of gender relations in diplomacy and international negotiation both within and beyond Europe.

Maintaining sustained access to diplomatic professional circles and the environment in which they operate is central to such an agenda, yet it remains problematic. Despite the general trend toward public diplomacy, MFAs remain dominated by the rules of secrecy and low transparency and continue to resist the idea of being transformed into research objects by scholars, even in more advanced democracies (Lequesne 2020: 1). Diplomats themselves operate in environment of strict hierarchical rules and different controlling mechanisms (e.g. surveillance by national security agencies) and are traditionally cautious in providing information to external parties, especially when sensitive issues such as gender, race, sexuality, and human security are concerned.

This may partially explain why the field remains ripe for studies that approach gender and diplomacy through sociological, ethnographic, and anthropological perspectives. Logistical problems pose significant limitations for scholars to apply a more diverse set of research approaches and methods, e.g. participant observation or fieldwork among diplomats. Politics of restricted access remain one of the main structural challenges confronting European feminist scholars in the field today, and a significant hindrance to scholarly efforts to theorize gender in diplomacy through perspectives from within disciplines beyond IR.

Another issue of concern is the fact that certain women and men continue to be excluded from the study on gender and diplomacy. Feminist diplomacy scholarship in Europe has not examined the intersection of race, sexuality, and gender. LGBT issues and the contemporary representation of lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons in diplomacy and international negotiation have been object of surprisingly little scientific scrutiny (Crowe et al. 2018; Domeier 2013; Green 2015). While explicit attempts to incorporate a LGBT agenda into academic fare are still controversial and difficult to sustain in some European countries, silences in the field have been recently highlighted and criticized, and hopefully there will be developments toward queer studies in the field.

It is important also to emphasize that questions about gender in diplomacy center predominantly on women, examining gender in diplomacy through the experiences and perspectives of women. What has less frequently been the focus of scholarly discussions is the gendered experiences of male diplomats within a gender order, and in their relation to women.<sup>3</sup> Theorizing the changing gender character of diplomacy requires the consideration of men as well as women and better understanding of the social construction and representations of both femininity and masculinity within a common gender order.

# Conclusions

Over the last decade, feminist knowledge production in Europe on diplomacy and international negotiation has been characterized by a growing vitality and diversity in research scopes, themes, methods, and approaches and has evidenced a significant potential to capture dynamics of continuity and change in the gendered character of diplomatic practices and institutions. Acknowledging the value of much existing critical work, this chapter suggested some areas of weakness such as the importance of looking beyond west-centric gender research and the need to rethink what feminist scholarship involves within the different socio-political contexts of Europe and the world.

The geographical and thematic mapping conducted in this chapter pointed to some key insights in terms of whether and how politics of location might influence the types of feminist knowledge that emerge across the different national contexts of Europe and suggested some important nuances as to which themes are being researched most intensively in which countries. Accordingly, we can identify certain national patterns of research interest in the field—while UK-based, German and Austrian scholars more often engage with historical studies on women's role in diplomacy, scholars based in the Scandinavian states exhibit stronger interest toward contemporary gender patterns, and the gendered norms, identities, and relations at current diplomatic institutions. Also, while diplomatic history scholarship is created by male and female researchers on a proportional basis, scholars engaged with gender in contemporary diplomacy are predominantly women.

<sup>3</sup> For important exception see Neumann (2008, 2012).

A major point of commonality between the two major streams of feminist thought in Europe on diplomacy is the fact that their development has been incentivized by certain social and political circumstances, including the prioritization of women's issues in national foreign policy agendas. The UK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, etc., are states concerned with advancing pro-gender norms in foreign affairs, which provides an enabling context for researchers to produce feminist knowledge and to participate in international feminist debates in the field.

There could not be a better evidence for this trend than the sharp geographical discrepancy between feminist knowledge production on diplomacy in the different parts of Europe. The mapping suggests that feminism—both as a social phenomenon and as a general analytical perspective—is valued differently across the national contexts of Europe. In most of the Eastern, Central, and Southeastern European countries, feminist ideas continue to be met with hostility and distrust, and the very concept of gender remains confronted with negative connotations and is deprived of public and scholarly legitimacy. This alarming tendency is reflected not only in the lack of feminist scholarly production, but also in the practice of silencing international feminist debates in public and academic discourses across these regions.

Feminist scholarship on diplomacy and international negotiation beyond Western and Northern Europe is thus hardly an emerging field. It is still an open question whether and how the academic feminist expertise accumulated in Western Europe and the Scandinavian states could be effectively imported to, and consumed by, the "other" Europe. Perhaps the adoption of a gender mainstreaming agenda in the foreign policy of more European states would stimulate the relevant scientific debates and the creation of feminist knowledge in the field.

Turning to the future, the importance of feminist approaches to the study of diplomacy and international negotiation will continue to grow in importance, not least since both the diplomatic world and diplomatic studies remain male-dominated. Against the background of growing concerns about the future of liberal democracies and an unprecedented bio-political crisis, women's voices in higher level decision-making and international negotiation will play a vital role in overcoming power inequalities in public and private life, and in creating a more sustainable future.

# References


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# Decentering Political Authority and Power: Feminist Global Governance Studies in Europe

# *Gülay Ça˘glar*

**Abstract** This chapter identifies distinctive contributions of feminist IR scholarship in Europe on global governance and international organizations. On the one hand, this scholarship is closely connected to feminist IR worldwide in seeking to analyze transnational feminist networks' mobilization and framing, role in the diffusion of gender equality norms internationally and locally, and strategies for implementing gender equality in international organizations. On the other hand, feminist scholarship in Europe has made an original and essential contribution to feminist IR scholarship in general by applying state theory to the global level and by theorizing knowledge and gender expertise as technologies of power.

G. Ça˘glar (B)

Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: Guelay.Caglar@fu-berlin.de

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3\_9

153

**Keywords** Feminist state theory · Governmentality · Technologies of power · Knowledge · Gender expertise

# Introduction

When the concept of global governance emerged in the 1990s, it met with great enthusiasm from feminist IR scholarship throughout the world. The notion of global governance indicates a shift from statecentered government to network-oriented modes of cooperation "at the global stage" (Neumann and Sending 2010: 1; Rai 2004) to tackle the economic, social, and environmental challenges posed by globalization in the post-Cold War era. This shift in international politics concomitantly promoted conceptual changes in the study of international relations bolstering constructivist claims within IR. This has provided a "fertile ground for feminist research" (Prügl 1996: 15), as many feminist IR scholars, in a constructivist vein, aim at decentering political authority by investigating the important role of non-state actors and the normative underpinnings of agency and, thus, illustrating the permeability and malleability of institutional settings within global governance.

When reviewing this rich body of feminist literature, the question arises, what the specificity about feminist IR scholarship emanating from Europe actually is? This chapter uses a close reading of feminist IR scholarship in Europe to answer this question, identifying conceptual and theoretical commonalities. As a result, this chapter shows, that on the one hand, feminist IR scholarship in Europe is closely connected to feminist IR worldwide as it seeks to analyze transnational feminist networks' mobilization and framing strategies, and their role in the diffusion of gender equality norms both at international and local levels and the strategies for implementing gender equality in international organizations. On the other hand, this chapter argues, feminist scholarship in Europe has made an original and essential contribution to feminist IR scholarship on a conceptual level, namely by applying feminist state theory to the analysis of global governance and by theorizing the role of knowledge and expertise as technologies of power. The argument put forth in this chapter is, in a nutshell: feminist IR scholarship in Europe moves beyond constructivist perspectives by productively linking neo-Marxist and Foucauldian schools of thought. While there are of course a few feminist IR scholars based in other parts of the world that do so, there is a cluster of such scholarship coming out of Europe.

The aim of this chapter is, first, to give an overview of the broader feminist global governance literature, second, to situate feminist writings in Europe within this literature and, third, to depict the ways in which feminist IR scholars in Europe employ feminist materialist and discourse theoretical (re-)conceptualizations of the state for revealing gendered power dynamics in global governance. As this chapters shows, this scholarship evolved specifically from neo-Marxist and Foucauldian traditions of political thought, that is peculiar to some political science departments in both, Germany and Great Britain.

# Overview: Feminist Analyses of Global Governance

Since the end of the 1990s, a burgeoning body of feminist literature has emerged, critically examining the study of global governance and international organizations. This literature can roughly be divided into four areas of investigation (Meyer and Prügl 1999; Rai 2004; Ça˘glar et al. 2013): (1) actor-centered accounts; (2) norms-centered analyses; (3) institutioncentered accounts; and (4) international political economy (IPE)-centered analyses.

First, *actor-centered* accounts focus at women's organizing and coalition building across global and local spaces. This body of literature deals with the engagements of feminist actors both from within and outside of international institutions (e.g. Williams 2013; Schultz 2006; Joachim 2003; Liebowitz 2002). Mostly drawing on social movements theory, these studies identify the characteristic features of transnational organizing and networking among different groups of feminist actors (activists, bureaucrats, and expert) and examine their mobilization and framing strategies and, thereby, assess the extent to which these actors are able to navigate institutional settings that are not necessarily favorable to gender equality policies (as for instance in the context of international and regional trade agreements; see Williams 2013; True 2008; Liebowitz 2002). These studies provide a wealth of insights on how feminist actors have successfully shaped institutional and procedural settings and have changed the policy agenda within global governance structures. But they also reveal constraints, such as low funding and structural dependencies, political obstacles and institutional hurdles, that impede feminist actors' transnational mobilization and advocacy work (e.g. Joachim 2003; Sperling et al. 2001; Lipovskaya 2002). Such kinds of barriers are often traced back either to individuals (such as politicians or bureaucrats within international institutions, and their unwillingness to support the idea of gender equality) or more broadly to patriarchal structures and the dominance of the male gaze in the political sphere. A conceptual critique of the gendered constitution of global governance is principally indicated, yet, not spelled out. Thus, these studies tend to overemphasize the successes or "triumphalism" (Baksh and Harcourt 2015: 12) of feminist interventions in global governance.

Second, *norm-centered* analyses of global governance interrogate the relations, processes and mechanisms through which women's human rights norms or gender equality norms, respectively, diffuse around the globe (e.g. Engberg-Pedersen et al. 2019; Zwingel 2016; Levitt et al. 2013; Towns 2010; Wölte 2008). Some studies point to the important role of the inner dynamics in international organizations for the adoption and institutionalization of gender equality norms (e.g. Fejerskov and Cold-Ravnkilde 2019); others elaborate on what happens when international norms hit the ground of a specific normative context at regional, national, or local level (e.g. Towns 2010; Zwingel 2016; Joachim and Schneiker 2012; Wölte 2008). Most notably, this scholarship fundamentally rejects conceptualizations of international norms as universally given and as essentially good. Employing a context-specific and "situated approach" (Engberg-Pedersen et al. 2019), feminist norm scholars predominantly examine the many distinct ways of norm diffusion and translation at the local level. They markedly illustrate how the meanings of norms are negotiated, (re)interpreted, and fixed (e.g. Levitt et al. 2013; Sabat 2013; Joachim and Schneiker 2012) and which new hierarchies are (re)produced (e.g. Towns 2012: 189).

Third, *institution-centered* accounts of the literature put institutional strategies, such as gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting, and the "establishment of gender expertise" (Kunz et al. 2019: 24) in international and regional organizations at the center (e.g. Arora-Jonsson and Sijapati Basnett 2018; Davids et al. 2014; Ça˘glar 2013a; Moser and Moser 2005; Wöhl 2008). Broadly speaking, this scholarship interrogates "how gender gets written in or not in organizational texts and in what ways" (Arora-Jonsson and Sijapati Basnett 2018: 310). Taking a rather critical stance toward institutional strategies like gender mainstreaming, these scholars question the transformative potential of such strategies (cf. Ça˘glar 2013b). Certainly, all the studies acknowledge the positive impact of gender mainstreaming, at least insofar as international and regional organizations integrated gender equality concerns in a number of issue areas. However, providing theoretical reflections on the notion of change, some scholars "revaluate gender mainstreaming in terms of a slow revolution" (Davids et al. 2014: 397) or incremental change (Ça˘glar 2013a: 256). Interestingly, studies dealing with institutional strategies have brought about debates that urge for theoretical reconsiderations in regard to the structural, normative, and disciplinary underpinnings of global governance. As will be elaborated below, these studies conceptualize institutional strategies as technologies of power that constitute and shape subjectivities across global and local spaces (Mukhopadhyay and Prügl 2019; Bedford 2008).

Finally, feminist *IPE-centered* perspective also contributes to the critical engagements with global governance; dealing with the changing state/market-relations in the global economy, this scholarship investigates the interplay between neoliberal restructuring and global governance (e.g. Rai 2004; Waylen 2004, 2021; Wöhl 2008). Predominantly drawing on neo-Marxist and neo-Gramscian approaches in IPE, these scholars do not entirely discard the role of the state in global governance, but argue that the state's role is still important as "capital needs the regulatory power of the state in order to do business" (Rai 2004: 585). Thus, they do not assume the "demise" (ibid.) but the "internationalization" (ibid.; cf. Sauer and Wöhl 2011) of the (gendered) state in the course of globalization. Feminist scholars of this camp, thus, analyze the gendered power relations within state institutions that constitute global governance.

As we can see, feminist IR scholars in Europe engage in each of the above presented strands of the literature, and it seems to be difficult to figure out the specifically "European" character of these debates. Yet, a close reading of the literature reveals that feminist scholars located in Europe, indeed, make a unique, conceptual contribution to the analysis global governance. Starting from the critique of a rather descriptive understanding of (global) governance in the mainstream literature both in IR and political science, European feminist scholars—particularly in the German-speaking context—aim at adding an analytical dimension to the notion of governance. As Birgit Sauer, a German political theorist, points out, the intention is to develop a "theory of governance [that is] grounded in a state theoretical approach" (Sauer 2011: 456). The state is here not regarded "as an independent actor, as a neutral arbiter, independent from social (power) relations" (ibid.), but rather as a constitutive element of governance. As will be elaborated further below, feminist analyses particularly in the German-speaking context go beyond constructivist feminist engagements with global governance and aim at decentering political authority rather from neo-Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives on the state.

# Reflections

Thinking about a feminist way of theorizing global governance specific to scholars situated in Europe might seem to be at odds with current developments within feminist IR, which increasingly seeks to decolonize knowledge production in IR (Runyan 2018; Medie and Kang 2018). Indeed, the broader trend within the subdiscipline goes into the direction of acknowledging non-Western writings that go beyond Eurocentric conceptualizations of IR (see e.g. Smith and Tickner 2020). Focusing on feminist IR in Europe does reinforce this kind of 'centrism' and draws boundaries of what can be known "marking who asks what questions and how answers are sought" (Peterson 1992: 183). However, as Peterson (ibid.) emphasizes, "boundaries are historical: they are imposed as contingent practices, not discovered as transcend 'givens.' As social constructions, they can be deconstructed, disrupted and transgressed" (ibid.). Accordingly, as this chapter contends, there is no such thing as *one* "European" feminist IR; rather, knowledge production in feminist IR is situated in locally specific traditions of political thought. Accounting for different places, spaces and sites of knowledge production *within* Europe helps, on the one hand, to discern epistemic hierarchies (e.g. in terms of publications practices and citation patterns), and provides, on the other hand, a deeper grasp of why certain topics or theoretical perspectives unfold in specific contexts, but not in others. A close reading of the feminist global governance literature in Europe has revealed that writings from a German-speaking context play a distinctive role, when it comes to explaining the gendered structures and outcomes of global governance.

German-speaking scholars engage in each of the above-mentioned strands of the literature, yet make the most unique contributions particularly in the fields of the IPE-centered and institution-centered literature. A key characteristic of this scholarship is their feminist materialist and discourse theoretical orientation which can be explained by their academic training and the scholarly debates on state theory they were involved in throughout their academic career. Most of these scholars were trained in institutions, that are known for their Marxist tradition and their focus at materialist state theory—e.g. the Faculty of Social Science at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main (e.g. Stefanie Wöhl, Daniela Tepe-Belfrage), and the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin (e.g. Birgit Sauer, Susanne Schultz). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these institutions were center stage of intensive scholarly debates about the form and function of the capitalist state (so-called *Staatsableitungsdebatte*, "state derivation debate") and the role of the state in social reproduction of the capitalist mode of production (see further on the evolution of the debate Jessop 1982; Tepe 2012). Major contentions revolved around the question of whether the state apparatus can be regarded as a manifestation of class relations within a certain capitalist mode of production. Scholars of (feminist) materialist state theory criticize the economic determinism of (strictly) Marxist approaches (see for an extensive discussion Jessop 1982) and warn against regarding the state as a mere "instrument of the ruling class" (Ludwig and Sauer 2010: 177, own translation), without adequately considering gendered power relations, racism, and the complexity of societal struggles. Likewise, scholars drawing on the writings of Nicos Poulantzas also criticized the economic determinism of Marxist approaches and pushed toward conceptualizing the state "as the institutional and material condensation of social forces" (Wöhl 2014: 89). With the notion of social forces, Poulantzas points to the differing interests and struggles that materialize in state institutions; thus, the state is regarded as "an arena" (ibid.) through which these struggles and relations of dominance are mediated and consent in a neo-Gramscian sense—is organized. It is exactly this perspective—a combination of Poulantzian and neo-Gramscian approaches—that opens theoretical links to Foucauldian thought, and the concept of governementality (most prominently developed by the feminist political theorist Gundula Ludwig 2010): The state is not regarded as the center of power of *the* ruling class, but rather as a capillary set of institutional terrains, procedures and practices that shape the "mentalité" of agents through which consent, and thus, hegemony is organized. Interests are universalized by influencing ideas, norms, attitudes and by discipline and (re)producing gendered subjectivities (see Ludwig 2011; Ludwig and Sauer 2010). Of course, this summary does not come close to reflect the depth and breadth of the debate. Yet, the intention here is to indicate that materialist state theory was fruitfully taken further from Foucauldian and feminist perspectives.

This tradition of political thought shaped 'critical' approaches to IPE and had a significant influence on the wider feminist IPE scholarship that critically interrogates the neoliberal character of global governance. It is no coincidence that feminist scholarships from the German-speaking context connects well with feminist writings within the British school of IPE, that also heavily draws on neo-Marxist, neo-Gramscian and, partly, on governmentality studies (e.g. Steans and Tepe 2008; Bedford and Rai 2010; Waylen 2004). Though, some feminist scholars explicitly refer to materialist state theory, whereas others exclusively apply the concept of governmentality in the study of global governance.

# Theorizing the State in Global Governance

As Shirin Rai states, "[f]eminist approaches to global governance institutions have developed largely through analyses of political engagements at the level of the state […]" (2004: 586). She highlights two (interconnected) areas of contention within this debate: One is concerned with the state's capacity in meaningfully promoting gender equality, and the feminist hopes attached to the global level to bring about change; and the other is on the question of whether a shift from state-centered government to governance pushes or limits democratization and women's political participation at local, national, and international levels. Rai takes a rather critical stance arguing, that it is important to "take into account the disciplinary power of dominant social relations within which [state] institutions are embedded" (ibid.: 592). This perspective brings at fore the effects of "disciplinary neoliberalism" (ibid.) in global governance that is, for instance, the hegemonic co-optation of feminist movements. Conceptualizing the internationalized state as a global "field of social relations and power, where social forces fight over, meaning, representation and interests" (Sauer and Wöhl 2011: 111) allows for a more critical analysis of transnational feminist organizing, as civil society actors are not grasped as simply "located opposite (*gegenüber*) the state" (Tepe 2012: 5) and as innocent agents of change, but as an integral part of gendered statehood (ibid.; Wöhl 2014; Schultz 2006).

Susanne Schultz (2006), for instance, probes the ways in which women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) mobilize and strategize in the arena of international population and family planning policies. Her aim is to explain, why an anti-natalist bias was able to unfold during and in the aftermath of the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994), despite of strong transnational feminist advocacy for an emancipatory understanding of reproductive rights. Drawing on a neo-Gramscian approach and on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Schultz develops a nuanced analytics of power in global governance. She analyzes the contradictory dynamics among transnational women's NGOs and detects the discursive mechanisms through which these actors were co-opted. As she shows, one of the reasons was the medicalization discourse, that defined the boundaries (risk technologies) within which agents' subjectivities were shaped and consent to the anti-natalist position was reached.

The feminist IPE-scholars Stefanie Wöhl (2008) and Kate Bedford (2007, 2008) also refer to the concept of governmentality for conceptualizing global governance and the role of both international and supranational organizations. Wöhl focuses on a specific mode of governance at EU level—that is the open method of coordination (OMC)—and interrogates how OMC "steers institutional reforms and policies" (Wöhl 2008: 75) and, thus, "governs at a distance" (Rose 2004: 49). This method is meant to compare member states in terms of their achievements in the field of gender equality and employment policy and to assess the extent to which women's employability has been promoted in the member states. That means, in the words of Wöhl: "OMC is designed to encourage the member states to compete with one another by using political benchmarking" (ibid.: 72). In her study, Wöhl elucidates the disciplinary effects of this mode of governance. She conceptualizes the strategies of open method of coordination and benchmarking as embodied disciplinary techniques and shows how actors' sense of self (both at the national level and the local level) is shaped and how they, as a result, come to accept market-oriented and activating labor market policies (Wöhl 2011: 32). Likewise, Kate Bedford (2007, 2008) probes the ways in which the World Bank "governs intimacy" at a distance. She deciphers the "commonsense nature, or normativity, of discourses" (2008: 85) about sexuality and social reproduction in World Bank projects and shows how these projects shape the subjectivities of agents at household level. She starts with illustrating that the World Bank is a learning institution—insofar as it underwent a "mission-shift" (ibid.: 86) trying to solve the problem of women's double burden from productive and reproductive labor ("social reproduction dilemma"). She delves into the implementation of World Bank projects (e.g. in Ecuador) and uncovers normative heterosexuality and common-sense assumptions about masculinity that underly the idea of a "caring couplehood […] as a solution to the social reproduction dilemma" (ibid.: 94).

# Knowledge and Expertise as Technologies of Power

Another strand of literature in feminist IR in Europe, that predominantly draws on Foucauldian thought, deals with the role of feminist knowledge and expertise in international and supranational organizations. In fact, as Kate Bedford (2008) states, "the deployment of expertise is a key mechanism of governance" (ibid.: 84). As feminist IR scholars elucidate, expert knowledge was throughout the decades an important element of gender equality politics in global governance (Ça˘glar et al. 2013); yet, the need for gender experts and their expert knowledge has become "even more urgent" (Hubert and Stratigaki 2011: 173) with the adoption of gender mainstreaming in 1995. This scholarship is mainly concerned with identifying the different forms of the knowledge that circulate at international level, with qualifying their transformative potential and depicting the interpretative struggles and the politics of meaning making in international organizations.

Most studies concerned with the role of expert knowledge focus at gender mainstreaming in international organizations. In fact, gender mainstreaming is an all-encompassing, complex, and technocratic approach that aims at institutionalizing gender equality in all policies, programs, and activities. The implementation of gender mainstreaming requires specialized gender expertise in different policy areas, such as agriculture (UNFAO), trade (UNCTAD, WTO), or finance (IMF, World Bank). That means, experts need strong disciplinary analytical skills for understanding both policy problems in different policy fields (i.e. high inflation rates in the field of economic and fiscal policy coordination) and the gendered dimension of exactly these policy problems. As Ça˘glar (2010, 2013a) in her study elucidates, gender experts provide knowledge about cause-effect relations—that is about the ways in which gender asymmetries in the division of labor and in the distribution of resources (natural, financial, infrastructural, and educational) affect a specific field of action and vice versa the ways in which policies in a specific field reproduce, deepen, or change these gender asymmetries. Thus, gender experts interpret and translate their knowledge on gender differences and power relations in a way that it makes sense within a specific policy field (see also Elomäki 2020 for the context of the EU).

Moreover, as studies show, experts need to be knowledgeable about institutional structures, rules, and procedures in order to be able to strategically act and meaningfully implement gender mainstreaming (e.g. Carmel 2017; Seibicke 2020). This is not trivial, as the complexity of regulatory and procedural rules of policy-making in global governance requires an insider knowledge—what is coined as procedural knowledge in the feminist literature (Woodward 2004; Seibicke 2020)—that can just be acquired through participation at different levels of international policy-making. This shows that expert knowledge is more than simply having knowledge *about*; it encompasses also the ability to interpret, translate, and strategically utilize that knowledge within policy fields and complex institutional configurations. Thus, expert knowledge is a form of 'knowing' by participating and interacting in an institutional context. As Nico Stehr (2001) contends, "[k]nowing is a historical relation to things and facts, but also to rules, laws and programs. Some sort of participation is therefore constitutive for knowing: knowing things, rules, programs, facts, is 'appropriating' them in some sense, including them into [the] field of orientation and competence" (ibid.: 33). Feminist scholarship has provided a wealth of insights on the successes of feminist actors in 'appropriating' international institutions and infusing their expert knowledge and feminist objectives very strategically into the organizational structures of these institutions. However, these studies also show that feminists' expert knowledge got 'appropriated' by these institutions and their technocracy. As feminist scholarship in IR aptly shows, feminist expert knowledge is subjected to the managerial and technocratic logics of international organizations and horizontal modes of governance (Kunz and Prügl 2019; Beier and Ça˘glar 2020). It is the "measurement imperative" (Liebowitz and Zwingel 2014: 363) and its "inherent logics of simplification and comparability" (ibid.) that decisively determines the kind of evidence that becomes relevant, gets included into the "field of orientation and competence" (Stehr 2001: 33), and guides the creation of gender equality policies in international organizations. Thus, the question arises of what remains "feminist" once feminists' expert knowledge hits the ground of organizations' technocracy.

This question is approached by feminist IR scholars in Europe by drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of power/knowledge-nexus and the notion of technologies of power. Ça˘glar (2010, 2013a), for instance, deals with gender mainstreaming strategies in the field of global economic governance and scrutinizes how the field of action, that is often entitled as "engendering macroeconomic policymaking," was discursively produced (ibid.: 66). She shows that the emergence of gender mainstreaming in global economic governance is closely connected to the field of knowledge in feminist economics. Ça˘glar illustrates that different meanings are attached to the phrase "engendering macroeconomic policymaking," "depending on how gender is situated in relation to social and economic phenomena and depending on how the boundary between social and economic policy problems is drawn" (ibid.: 67).

For the field of agriculture, Mukhopadhyay and Prügl (2019) examine the role of gender expertise and probe "the ways this expertise is deployed through material and social technologies" (ibid.: 704). Combining Foucauldian and new-materialist feminist approaches, they conceptualize gender expertise as a "performative apparatus" (ibid.: 705) that are implicated to construct gender in a dichotomous and heteronormative way. Expertise, drawing on household surveys or gender-disaggregated data, respectively, as an essential source of 'evidence-based' policy-making translates into instruments to measure and guide performance in ways that (re)inscribes stereotypical assumptions about gender and gender relations. The performativity of expertise is also at the center of the study conducted by Kunz et al. (2019). They scrutinize the practices of gender experts in international governance and, thus, discuss "what gender experts are, how they work and what is considered as expert knowledge" (ibid.: 26). They grasp gender expertise as a contested transnational field (in a Bourdieusian sense) and show how gender experts are engaged in practices of boundary drawing by constantly negotiating, firstly, the differences between gender expertise and feminist politics, secondly, the contours of authoritative knowledge and thirdly, the coloniality of international politics and expertise. In contrast to feminist IR scholars, who argue that gender expertise gets depoliticized once hitting the ground of international organizations, Kunz et al. convincingly show, that "gender expertise is not just technical knowledge, but intensely political; and […] that feminisms cannot be reduced to movement activism, but live inside expertise and are part of the contestations within this transnational field" (ibid.: 36).

# Conclusion

To conclude, feminist IR scholars in Europe have made unique contributions to the study of global governance. As shown, this scholarship is dedicated to move beyond a descriptive notion of global governance and to develop a theoretical concept of global governance that helps to explain the gendered "structures and practices of power" (Sauer 2012: 456) in international politics. As the discussion of literature above shows, the specifically neo-Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to the study of global governance reveals an ambivalent picture of gender politics in global governance. These studies go beyond depicting feminist actors and gender equality policies as either being successful or as being impeded by structural factors that are external to them (i.e. patriarchy, capitalism). Rather, they uncover the (literally) embodied disciplinary techniques and show how these actors become part of neoliberal governance.

# Bibliography


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# Index

#### **A**

Actor-centered, 155 Anti-gender, 2, 41, 44 Asymmetries, 35, 37, 68, 162

#### **B**

Border(s), 2, 17, 34, 76, 77, 79–82, 88, 100

#### **C**

Capitalism, 17, 96, 98, 100, 101, 165 Care labor, 98, 99, 102 Cause-effect relations, 162 Centers of Excellence (CoE), 36, 40, 57, 61, 63 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), 34–36, 137 Class, 11, 16, 57, 79, 85, 159 Colonial, 5, 11, 13, 19, 21, 22, 24, 80, 82–84, 122, 124, 125, 127 Colonialism, 79 Coloniality, 11, 22, 63, 164 Combat roles, 16

Conflict, 11, 17, 18, 21, 23, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 57, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 77, 81, 82, 87 Conflict rape, 21 Conflict-related sexual violence, 20–22 Continuum of violence, 20, 44 Co-optation, 102, 160 Counter-insurgency, 18, 19 Critical Military Studies (CMS), 13, 16, 42 Critique, 3, 18, 20, 21, 41, 42, 66, 67, 82, 156, 157

### **D**

Decolonial, 57 Development, 3, 6, 23, 56, 62, 77, 96, 100–103, 116, 119, 126, 137, 140, 141, 145, 158, 161 Diplomacy, 6, 44, 134–147 Diplomatic history, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146 Diplomatic sphere, 141, 143 Displacement, 77, 81–83, 87 Domestic work, 86, 87

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 M. Stern and A. E. Towns (eds.), *Feminist IR in Europe*, Trends in European IR Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91999-3

#### **E**

Economy, 4, 6, 13, 20, 40, 85, 86, 96, 97, 99, 104, 116, 157 Empowerment, 97, 98, 100, 102, 134, 141, 142, 144 Enlargement, 120–123, 125 Equality, 17, 59, 81, 83, 99, 101, 102, 104, 117, 121, 122, 125, 138, 139, 141, 143, 156, 160–162, 165 Eurocentrism, 60, 67, 79, 88 European External Action Service (EEAS), 121–126 Exclusion, 5, 12, 15, 34, 36, 40, 83

### **F**

Femininity, 58, 77, 98, 125, 142, 146 Feminism, 3, 4, 6, 7, 56, 103, 120, 137, 147, 164 Feminist analysis, 56 Feminist approaches, 2, 7, 67, 76, 87, 136, 147, 164 Feminist contributions, 56–58 Feminist foreign policy (FFP), 40, 42, 44, 118, 119, 126 Feminist ideas, 137, 147 Feminist knowledge production, 34, 134, 135, 137, 139, 144, 146, 147 Feminist peace research (FPR), 56–63, 65, 67, 68 Feminist peace scholars, 58, 61 Feminist scholarship, 2, 4, 11, 13–15, 17, 18, 20–22, 24, 43, 44, 59, 77, 82, 96, 99, 101, 104, 121, 134, 135, 137, 138, 143, 146, 147, 160, 163 Feminist security studies (FSS), 13, 34–44, 79 Feminist state theory, 154 Finance, 97, 98, 162

Foreign affairs, 116, 123, 136, 143, 147 Foreign policy, 6, 116–120, 124–127, 134, 136, 139, 142, 147 Foreign policy analysis (FPA), 116, 119, 126, 127 Foucauldian, 154, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 165

## **G**

Gender, 2–4, 6, 13, 16, 21, 23, 24, 37, 40, 43, 58–60, 62, 64, 66, 77–81, 84, 85, 96, 98–104, 116–127, 134–139, 141–147, 154–156, 160–165 Gender and development (GAD), 101 Gender-based violence, 10, 20, 22, 41, 81 Gender character, 141, 146 Gendered hierarchies, 35, 142 Gender equality, 60, 81, 104, 121, 123, 137, 141, 154, 156, 157, 162 Gender equality policies, 155, 163 Gender expertise, 162, 164 Gender related persecution guidelines, 83 Geneva Convention, 82, 83 Global North, 3, 13, 34, 36, 44, 56, 62, 65, 68, 78, 80, 83, 87, 101, 104 Global South, 10, 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 22, 34, 36, 62, 78, 79, 82, 83 Governmentality, 14, 160, 161

### **H**

Hierarchies, 37, 56, 57, 60, 63, 66, 67, 120, 141, 156, 158 Hybridity, 57, 62, 64–66

#### **I**

Inclusion, 5, 7, 13, 14, 17, 36, 60, 63, 65, 122 Inequality, 83, 96, 97, 100, 104 Institution-centered, 155, 156, 158 International development, 100, 101, 119 International governance, 101, 102, 164 International migration, 76–78, 80 International negotiation, 65, 134–139, 141–143, 145–147 International organizations, 6, 102, 154–156, 162–164 International political economy (IPE), 4, 6, 96, 116, 155 Intimacy, 77, 84, 85, 88

#### **K**

Knowledge, 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 22, 24, 34, 36, 37, 40, 44, 57, 63, 68, 77, 134, 135, 137, 139, 142, 154, 156, 162–164 Knowledge production, 6, 12, 22, 34, 35, 37, 44, 57, 60, 63, 67, 79, 88, 97, 134, 135, 137, 158

#### **L**

Liberal democracies, 137, 147

#### **M**

Macroeconomic policy-making, 98 Map, 11, 13, 18, 34, 35, 57, 96, 97, 103, 136, 143 Masculinity, 15–17, 77, 79, 80, 98, 118, 123, 125, 142, 146, 162 Mediation, 44, 62, 64, 65, 143 Migration politics, 84, 85, 87 Militaries, 10, 11, 13, 15–17, 22–24, 44

Militarism, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 23, 25, 40, 58, 59, 123 Militarization, 13, 14, 18, 39, 40, 58, 126 Military masculinities, 13, 15, 40 Military wives, 17, 18 Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs), 139, 142, 144, 145 Mobilization, 82, 154, 155

#### **N**

Neoliberalism, 96, 97, 101–104 Neo-Marxist, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 165 Non-state armed groups, 10, 13, 16, 22 Non-university research centers, 138 Normative power, 121–124 Norm-centered, 156 Northern Europe, 37, 39, 44, 57, 67, 76, 138, 144, 147

#### **P**

Pan-European, 14, 34 Peacebuilding, 11, 40, 60, 62–67 Perpetrators, 21 Policy analysis, 42, 116, 120, 125 Policy implementation, 116, 121, 122 Policy-making, 88, 116, 117, 120, 122, 164 Political discourse, 76 Populism, 125, 127 Positionality(ies), 35, 57, 68, 97, 104 Power, 11, 12, 14, 19, 24, 35, 44, 57, 58, 66, 68, 78, 125, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 162 Power relations, 7, 56, 66, 78, 80, 87, 97, 157, 159, 163 Primary migrants, 78 Productivity, 86, 100 Public-private division, 83

#### **R**

Race, 11, 16, 42, 57, 79, 85, 118, 124, 145 Racialized, 78, 80, 81, 83, 85, 99 Refugee(s), 40, 80–83 Rhetoric, 121, 123

### **S**

Secondary migrants, 78 Securitization, 42 Security, 3, 6, 10, 13, 17, 20, 23, 35, 37, 40, 42–44, 62, 76, 77, 79–81, 84, 85, 123, 145 Security Studies, 11, 20, 37, 42, 56, 62, 77, 87, 117, 123 Semi-periphery, 37 Social reproduction, 99, 100, 102 Social reproductive work, 96, 99–101 South-eastern Europe, 34, 35, 39, 40 Sovereignty, 3, 76, 78, 79, 84, 85 State militaries, 10, 13, 16, 17, 22

#### **T**

Technologies of power, 154, 157, 163 The state, 3, 6, 65, 80, 86, 99, 117, 119, 134, 155, 157–159 The State of Feminist Security Studies:Continuing the Conversation, 36 Trade, 40, 86, 97, 98, 155, 162 Transnational, 4, 34, 37, 41, 44, 59, 76–78, 85, 97, 99, 103, 124, 155, 160, 164

### **U**

Under-representation, 143

#### **V**

Violence, 11, 14–18, 20–22, 39, 58, 65, 66, 81, 100

#### **W**

War, 3, 6, 10–12, 15, 17–20, 22–24, 39, 56, 58, 62, 64, 140 Warfare, 15, 19 Wartime, 20, 21, 40, 81 Weapon of war, 20, 21 Women-in-Development (WID), 100, 101 Women, Peace and Security (WPS), 16, 36, 40–42, 44, 57, 63–67, 82, 123, 124, 126 Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 58 Women's participation, 16, 57, 62 Women's representation, 123, 134 Work, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10–14, 16–18, 22, 23, 35, 36, 42, 56–59, 62, 64, 66, 77, 80, 81, 85–88, 98–100, 102, 103, 116–122, 124–127, 135, 141–143, 146, 155 WPS agenda, 57, 64, 65, 82