Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives

by Sjoberg; Laura

• ISBN13: 9780415475792
• ISBN10: 0415475791
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2009-11-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective. Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women's presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general. Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)

Author Biography

Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a PhD in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California, and a JD from Boston College Law School. She is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007).

Table of Contents

Notes on contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiv
Introduction	p. 1
Gendered lenses envision security	p. 15
Theses on the military, security, war and women	p. 17
War, sense, and security	p. 24
Gendering the state: performativity and protection in international security	p. 38
Gendered security theories	p. 59
Gendering the cult of the offensive	p. 61
Gendering power transition theory	p. 83
The genders of environmental security	p. 103
Gendered security actors	p. 127
Loyalist women paramilitaries in Northern Ireland: beginning a feminist conversation about conflict resolution	p. 129
Securitization and de-securitization: female soldiers and the reconstruction of women in post-conflict Sierra Leone	p. 151
Women, militancy, and security: the South Asian conundrum	p. 168
Gendered security problematiques	p. 189
Feminist theory and arms control	p. 191
Beyond border security: feminist approaches to human trafficking	p. 214
When are states hypermasculine?	p. 235
Peace building through a gender lens and the challenges of implementation in Rwanda and Côte d' Ivoire	p. 56
Index	p. 280
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