Gendering Power Transition Theory

Feminist work has argued that research programs that fail to consider gender as a causal variable and a constitutive element lack explanatory power and empirical validity. Specifically, the omission of gender from PTT gives it a partial conceptual and empirical view of international security. The chapter begins with an introduction to the central tenets of PTT. A second section uses feminists’ insights to ask how PTT contains, reproduces, and reflects gender relations, gender stereotypes, and gender subordination. This section critiques PTT’s concept of power, its choice of actors, and the omission of gender-based variables. The third section presents a feminist analysis of the core hypotheses of the power transition research program. The chapter concludes with a brief feminist (re)evaluation of the major empirical prediction of PTT: that China is likely to overtake the US as the dominant state in global politics.