Linking global political economy and global security
Feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship has made a substantial contribution to the study of global security in recent decades. Yet, despite early feminist IR incorporating both economic and political analyses of “the international,” we have increasingly seen the subfields of feminist security studies and feminist political economy drift apart, the former privileging violence, peacebuilding, and militarisation, the latter focusing on labour markets, social reproduction, migration movements, and development.
Premised on the idea that gendered economic structures, institutions, and processes are determining of international security politics and vice versa, this blog series problematises the constructed and violently sustained boundaries between political and economic, public and private, domestic and international, global North and South, through an examination of contemporary problems of gendered insecurities and exploitation.
This blog series is a reflection of a growing group of feminists who share our commitments. We are intellectually thankful for the contributions in Juanita Elias’s (2015) special forum in Politics and Gender and Amanda Chisholm and Saskia Stachowitsch’s forthcoming special forum Continuing the Conversation in the same journal. We are also indebted to the various contributions from presenters at the workshop “Building Bridges and Challenging Foreclosures” convened by Anna M. Agathangelou, Amanda Chisholm and Saskia Stachowitsch, hosted at Newcastle University 23-24 June, 2016 and the contributions from participants at the BISA sponsored workshop “Feminist Global Secureconomies: Making the Link Between Global Political Economy and Global Security” convened by Amanda Chisholm, Sara Meger and Saskia Stachowitsch, hosted at BISA’s Annual Conference in Brighton 13 June, 2017.
At the European International Studies Conference (EISA) in Barcelona in September 2017, a roundtable discussed the interconnections between economy and society in International Political Economy, taking up questions of Security Studies. Remarkably, questions of security discussed in this [...]
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War is a profitable business—for some—and this post ponders how terrorism is also a profitable business. Even before the 12 August Guardian article showed, in a damaging light, that the Thatcher government exploited Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait in order to sell arms (then [...]
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Those who position themselves as feminist International Relations (IR) scholars usually realise early on that they need to be experts in international relations AND feminist theory—both the mainstream and critical perspectives of their particular subfield. But as one of the key takeaways [...]
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There was only once, in the final year of my PhD, that my supervisor and I butted heads. I had just submitted my fourth chapter for her review and, because I was living in another city at the time, she sent me an email saying we needed to speak on the phone urgently. A radical feminist, she [...]
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Feminist ethics can help us with the study of violence and war because of two reasons. First, by drawing attention to everyday activities that has an impact on conflict. This will help connect the dots between private experiences of violence and the public sphere of war. Second, by [...]
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International workforces underpin contemporary security operations—many of these forces originating from the global South. Similarly, miltarised households supporting these operations have also gone global. But what can military households tell us about global military operations and global [...]
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Addressing the question of the divide – or the proper relationship – between Feminist Security Studies and Feminist Global Political Economy immediately raises an age-old dilemma: how can we study an undifferentiated social world in which everything is in fact connected to everything else? [...]
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Feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship has rapidly developed in recent decades into a distinct and recognised body of scholarship encompassing a terrain of debates about what “the international” is and how we might study it. While feminist IR’s development and institutionalisation [...]
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