However, it would be a mistake to think that feminist IR was solely a matter of identifying how many groups of women are positioned in the international political system.
The end of the Cold War and the re-evaluation of traditional IR theory during the 1990s opened up a space for gendering International Relations.
[2] In order to do so, Enloe urges International Relations scholars to look at issues with a ‘feminist consciousness’, which will ultimately include a perspective sensitive to masculinities and femininities.
[2] For instance, Enloe explains Carol Cohn's experience using a feminist consciousness while participating in the drafting of a document that outlines the actions taken in negotiating ceasefires, peace agreements, and new constitutions.
[3] These track the masculine identities throughout history, where manliness is measured in militarism and citizenship, ownership and authority of the fathers, and finally, competitive individualism and reason.
[5] Feminist scholarship has also critiqued mainstream IR theories and the field of international relations for failing to study war in depth.
This is a stance within Feminist International Relations that opposes weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear weaponry, and holds gender accountable in part for the propagation of militarism.
[7] Gender becomes embedded in relations of power as that which is seen to be stronger is assigned a masculinized identity, while concepts such as emotion are seen as indicators of weakness and become associated with femininity.
[9] These are some of the concepts that Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick explored in their article “Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” (2003) which laid out the meaning behind what they referred to as “anti-war feminism”.
[7] They explain that it opposes the use of weapons of mass destruction whether for military, political, or deterring purposes, yet that it differs from pacifism in that it does not outright reject all forms of warfare.
[7] Such opposition stems partly from the questionability of how effective warfare/militarism is, and whether the costs, (albeit monetary, environmental, and especially human) that are inevitably incurred yet not always accounted, for are worth it.
In line with Cohn and Ruddick's (2003) aforementioned article, part of what feminist anti-militarism critiques is the framework in which weapons of mass destruction are “discussed”.
[7] Such discourse assumedly would have large influence in the outcome, as investigated by Cohn in one of her earlier articles, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals.
[8] The authors borrow Cohn's rendition of the relationship between gender and nuclear weapons to examine the way in which discourses are shaped by underlying dichotomous views of masculinity and femininity.
[8] This perspective is then applied to the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons, a plan which Duncanson and Eschl argue is enabled by the UK government's use of masculinized language that seems to be constructed into the state's identity.
[8] The UK Trident Program was the cause of another expression of feminist anti-militarism, beginning a few decades earlier in the form of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp.
The 1979 decision by NATO to base ground cruise missiles at Greenham Common initiated a response from women largely associated with various feminist and anti-nuclear groups.
Discursive politics refers to the ways in which institutionalized norms, policy procedures, organizational identities, and material structures shape the language and meaning of gender equality and/or difference therein.
[29] This way of thinking can be attributed to the ‘essentialist’ account of gender and plays into the deeply held belief by many in our society that both men and women inherently hold true to their ‘essence’ of either being feminine or masculine.
[29] Thus, the media has demonstrated its ability to deem candidates either capable or ill-suited for political office, simply through the dialogue in which they use, that perpetuates systems of disqualification for women.
Through a feminist lens of international relations however, we may understand the systemic nature of these perceptions of the relationships between bodies and identities in order to discount popular dialogue, and find places for women within high-politics.
Robert Keohane has suggested that feminists formulate verifiable problems, collect data, and proceed only scientifically when attempting to solve issues.
In a 2015 article in International Organization, she writes, "Feminists often relegate quantitative work to the realm of male influence and experi- ence, even considering it false consciousness in succumbing to male methods of power, thereby surrendering powerful methods and models that could be leveraged to further substantiate the arguments made by feminist analysis regarding inequities in outcome by sex.
[36] This type of foreign policy focuses on women's empowerment to tackle issues such as poverty and human rights abuses in global south countries.
[37] It also does not include gender non-conforming people, who also face many of the same issues as women in conflict such as sexualized violence as well as their own unique challenges and discrimination that is not being addressed in these policies.
The first major landmark international legislation that included gender mainstreaming was the United Nations Resolution 1325 that was passed in the year 2000.
[40] The goal in promoting the empowerment of women is to give them confidence to challenge social norms that may be harmful to their community as well as to change gendered power relations.