Introduction

This book was assembled with the goal of improving 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, feminists argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. As such, accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics.

In this introduction, I provide a brief discussion of what it means to approach IR from a feminist perspective, giving a brief summary of some of the accomplishments of and common themes in feminist Security Studies to this point. I then introduce chapters in this book as analyses of the concept of security, traditional security theories, women as actors in international security, and security problematiques through gendered lenses.