Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives / Edition 1

by Laura Sjoberg

Overview

This book explores 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 show 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 ethicalscholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women's presence in or the gendering of world politics.

Gender and International Security will be of interest to all students of critical Security Studies, gender studies and International Relations in general.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2900415475791
Publication date:	10/08/2009
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.25(h) x 9.00(d)

About the Author

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 ix

Acknowledgments xiv

Introduction Laura Sjoberg 1

Part I Gendered lenses envision security 15

1 Theses on the military, security, war and women Judith Hicks Stiehm 17

2 War, sense, and security Christine Sylvester 24

3 Gendering the state: performativity and protection in international security Jonathan D. Wadley 38

Part II Gendered security theories 59

4 Gendering the cult of the offensive Lauren Wilcox 61

5 Gendering power transition theory Laura Sjoberg 83

6 The genders of environmental security Nicole A. Detraz 103

Part III Gendered security actors 127

7 Loyalist women paramilitaries in Northern Ireland: beginning a feminist conversation about conflict resolution Sandra Mcevoy 129

8 Securitization and de-securitization: female soldiers and the reconstruction of women in post-conflict Sierra Leone Megan Mackenzie 151

9 Women, militancy, and security: the South Asian conundrum Swati Parashar 168

Part IV Gendered security problematiques 189

10 Feminist theory and arms control Susan Wright 191

11 Beyond border security: feminist approaches to human trafficking Jennifer K. Lobasz 214

12 When are states hypermasculine? Jennifer Heeg Maruska 235

13 Peace building through a gender lens and the challenges of implementation in Rwanda and Côte d' Ivoire Heidi Hudson 56

Index 280