Until relatively recently, the field of International Relations studied
the causes of war and conflict and the global expansion of trade and
commerce with no particular reference to people. Indeed the use of
abstract categories such as ‘the state’, ‘the system’, strategic security discourses
such as nuclear deterrence and positivist research approaches
effectively removed people as agents embedded in social and historical
contexts from theories of international relations. This is ironic since the
scholarly field emerged, following the end of the First World War, to
democratize foreign policy making and empower people as citizen-subjects
rather than mere objects of elite statecraft (Hill 1999). So where does the
study of people called ‘women’ and ‘men’ or the social construction of
masculine and feminine genders fit within International Relations? How
is the international system and the International Relations field gendered?
To what extent do feminist perspectives help us to explain, understand