Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security.

• Author: McNamara, Kathleen R.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of bipolarity have brought into sharper relief the need for a broadening of the theoretical debate in international relations as well as a reassessment of the foreign policies it informs. Adding to the challenge offered by world events is the fact that international relations scholarship has remained virtually unaffected by the contemporary critiques of traditional methods of scholarship that have swept across the other social sciences. J. Ann Tickner's Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security admirably contributes to the task of opening the debate in intemational relations; she raises questions about why international politics has largely been the purview of men and how this has affected both the development of the field and the prescriptions it offers for achieving security. While the format and brevity of the book only allow for a first analysis of much larger and deeper issues, Tickner provides a clear argument for the importance of considering the role of gender in international relations. The far-reaching implications of her thesis and her persuasive questioning of the widely held belief that gender is irrelevant to the subject matter of international politics make her book required reading for all students of international relations, even though her argument will be disputed by many.

The strength of Tickner's account is that she succeeds in initiating a lively discourse between two literatures, feminism and international relations, that have previously been quite separate.(1) Her analysis is built on a survey of the development of the discipline of international relations and its dominant approaches, centering on the rise of realist and neorealist theories in the post-1945 era and on alternatives to realism such as liberal interdependence and Marxist approaches. In subsequent chapters, she reviews these approaches as they are applied to national security, the international political economy and the environment. Drawing on feminist theory, Tickner argues that these approaches are not gender-neutral, as is largely assumed in political science. She contends that the dominant theories tend to represent men's experiences of the world; they are based on a series of assumptions that give primacy to characteristics and values historically considered to be masculine, devaluing those associated with femininity. She argues that the theories risk replicating and reinforcing gender inequalities in international politics and security. The policy consequence of this male bias is the inability to achieve a multidimensional and multilevel security for the entire population - including children, women and men - because the underlying theories offer only a partial view of reality.

For example, Tickner asserts that characteristics stereotyped by society as male - such as toughness, courage, power, independence and the readiness to use force - are images frequently found...