Gendering Security: Connecting Theory and Practice

Over the past 30 years, feminist approaches to International Relations have become an integral part of the discipline, recognising the subject and the objects of international relations as deeply gendered. Feminist IR scholars have made particularly important contributions to critical security studies, encouraging not only analytical attention to “non-traditional” security threats but also advocating deep reflection on how gendered hierarchies between masculinities and femininities are constructed parts of war, peace, and violence. The development of the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda at the United Nations Security Council since 2000 and its diffusion across regional and national institutions has been a particular, empirical focus of feminist scholarship. This introduction briefly summarises core intellectual tenets of feminist IR in its relation to security studies, thereby providing the intellectual backdrop to the seven contributions of this special issue. These contributions critically unpack the framing of the WPS agenda, the extent to which its diffusion leads to diverging understandings in regional and national contexts, and broader questions related to the detrimental workings of gender constructions in post-conflict scenarios.