Feminist Perspectives on International Politics: Challenging Traditional Views

For decades, the study of international politics revolved around a familiar set of concerns: states competing for power, military strategy, the balance of terror between nuclear rivals, and the cold calculations of national interest. Notice who is missing from this picture. Feminist scholars argue that the entire framework of traditional international relations is “gender blind”-it claims to describe a neutral, universal world, but it actually reflects a narrow, masculine experience. This blog explores how thinkers like Cynthia Enloe and J. Ann Tickner exposed these blind spots and reimagined what global politics could look like when women and gender are taken seriously.

The gender blindness of traditional international politics 🔗

Mainstream theories of international relations, especially Realism, have historically treated the field as ungendered. They focus on the “high politics” of war, diplomacy, and security between sovereign states. Feminists point out that this is not an accidental omission but a structural one. Because mainstream IR theorists were not traditionally concerned with gender, the lived experiences of half the world’s population were rendered invisible in academic accounts of how the world works.

The core argument is that international politics is not gender neutral. It is shaped by gender dynamics that consistently privilege masculinity. Concepts we treat as objective-power, security, rationality, the state-are loaded with traits culturally coded as masculine: autonomy, competition, toughness, and control. Traits coded as feminine, such as cooperation, care, and interdependence, are pushed to the margins and treated as irrelevant to “serious” politics. The result is a discipline that claims universality while speaking from a specifically male vantage point.

Why this matters beyond the classroom 🔗

This is not merely an academic complaint. If our theories cannot see women, our policies will not account for them either. When governments plan for “security,” they tend to mean military defence and territorial integrity. They rarely mean freedom from domestic violence, economic survival, or safety from displacement-concerns that disproportionately affect women. A theory that ignores gender produces a politics that ignores gender.

Cynthia Enloe: the personal is international 🔗

Cynthia Enloe is one of the most influential voices in feminist international relations. Her famous question-“Where are the women?”-reframed the entire discipline. In her landmark book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Enloe argued that the personal is international and the international is personal. In other words, the grand structures of world politics are sustained by the everyday lives and labour of ordinary women.

Enloe demonstrated that the international system does not run on diplomacy and armies alone. It depends on women in roles that are usually overlooked. Her work focused on women as plantation workers, consumers, the wives of diplomats and soldiers, and the women working near military bases. Each of these roles quietly props up the global economy and the state system.

Making the invisible visible 🔗

Consider a few of Enloe’s examples. The global economy of cheap agricultural exports relies on the underpaid labour of women on plantations. Diplomacy itself depends on the unpaid hospitality and emotional labour of diplomats’ wives, who maintain the social networks of foreign service. Military bases generate entire local economies, including the women whose lives are organised around servicing those bases. By making these connections visible, Enloe showed that global politics is not just about what happens in the halls of power but about the structures of inequality that sustain it. Her central question is provocative: in what ways do these gendered hierarchies actually hold the international system together?

J. Ann Tickner’s critique of Realism 🔗

If Enloe asked where the women were, J. Ann Tickner asked why the dominant theory of international relations could not see them. Tickner is a feminist standpoint theorist, and her most cited intervention is her 1988 essay published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, titled “Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation.” There she dismantled the foundational text of classical Realism.

Tickner’s argument is precise. She does not say Realism is wrong; she says it is incomplete. As she puts it, realism offers not an inaccurate portrayal of the international system but an incomplete and partial picture of reality. By choosing to examine Hans Morgenthau’s six principles of political realism, she targeted the very core of the discipline to show that its supposedly objective worldview exhibits a masculine bias.

Reformulating the six principles 🔗

Tickner went through Morgenthau’s assumptions and reworked each one from a feminist standpoint. Several of her key disagreements stand out.

On human nature. Morgenthau built his theory on a pessimistic, self-interested view of human nature. Tickner countered that this description is culturally defined and one-sided. Human nature contains elements of both domination and social reproduction-it is both masculine and feminine. She pointedly noted that Hobbes’s “state of nature” ignores that someone had to be involved in reproduction and childrearing for life to continue beyond a single generation.

On national interest. Realism defines national interest narrowly in terms of power. Tickner argued for a multidimensional view that recognises cooperation as much as conflict. States do not only compete; they also build institutions, trade, and collaborate to survive.

On power itself. This is perhaps her most important reformulation. Where Realism equates power with domination and control over others, Tickner offered a broader definition that includes power as mutual enablement. Drawing on thinkers like Hannah Arendt, she described power as a collective capacity-energy, potential, and the ability to act together rather than the ability to coerce.

Rethinking security: from the state to human well-being 🔗

The most consequential feminist contribution to international politics may be the redefinition of security itself. Traditional Realism defines security as the protection of the state and its territory from external military threats. Feminists argue this is dangerously narrow. For Tickner, instead of territorial security, primacy should be given to human security.

This shift moves the focus from the state to the individual human being. A country can be militarily secure-armed, sovereign, and stable on a map-while millions of its people remain insecure in their daily lives. Hunger, poverty, environmental destruction, sexual violence, and economic exploitation are all genuine threats to security, even though they never appear in a Realist balance-of-power analysis.

A comprehensive understanding of threats 🔗

Feminist scholars therefore advocate a broader, multidimensional conception of security that encompasses physical, economic, and ecological dimensions. Tickner explicitly connected gender hierarchies to global problems like nuclear weapons and ecological insecurity, arguing that the same mindset that prizes domination and competition over cooperation is precisely what makes issues like nuclear war and environmental degradation so difficult to solve. Addressing these shared, planet-wide dangers requires cooperation, not the zero-sum logic of competing states.

Challenging the myths of war: warriors and victims 🔗

Feminists have also dismantled one of the most powerful stories that war tells about itself: the idea that men fight and women are protected. The political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain analysed this through two complementary figures. There is the “Just Warrior,” the man entrusted with protecting civilians and defending just causes, and the “Beautiful Soul,” the peaceful woman in need of protection on the home front.

Elshtain showed how these myths function to recreate and secure women’s social position as noncombatants and men’s identity as warriors. The two images depend on each other. The warrior needs someone to protect; the beautiful soul needs someone to be protected by. This neat division then becomes a justification for war itself-conflicts are framed as men fighting to defend vulnerable women, a “myth of protection” that strips women of agency.

The reality is far messier 🔗

The problem is that these myths simply do not match reality. The assumption that in conflict all men are combatants and all women are victims ignores the actual experiences of people in war. Women have always participated in conflict-as fighters, revolutionaries, intelligence agents, and supporters of armed movements. Indeed, because dominant stereotypes paint women as inherently peaceful, the presence of female combatants can powerfully reshape how the public perceives a conflict.

At the same time, the “protection” narrative obscures the fact that wars expose women to specific harms, from displacement to sexual violence, often committed by the very forces claiming to protect them. By treating women only as passive victims to be defended, traditional accounts deny them both their agency and the full complexity of their wartime experiences. This is why the international community now formally recognises this gap through the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda, which insists that women must be active participants in peacebuilding rather than mere objects of protection.

What feminist perspectives add to the discipline 🔗

Taken together, these thinkers do not simply add women to existing theories. They transform the questions we ask. Feminist IR scholars seek to locate women in international politics, investigate how they are affected by the international system, and reconstruct IR theory in a more gender-aware way. This produces a “bottom-up” view of world politics that starts with real people’s lives rather than with abstract states.

The lasting insight is that gender is not a niche topic within international relations; it is a lens that reveals how the entire system operates. Once you can see the gendered assumptions built into “power,” “security,” and “the state,” you cannot unsee them. Global politics, in this view, is not only about competition and survival. It is also about human well-being, cooperation, and justice-and any theory that forgets this is offering only half the picture.

What do you think? If security were redefined to mean human well-being rather than military strength, how differently would governments set their budgets and priorities? And which other “common-sense” assumptions in international politics might be hiding a gender bias that we have simply stopped noticing?

References

1. https://www.e-ir.info/2013/03/17/how-significant-is-the-contribution-of-feminism-to-ir/
2. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636410902900129
3. https://www.academia.edu/10425014/The_Personal_is_International_Cynthia_Enloe_and_Feminist_Perspectives_of_International_Relations
4. https://academic.oup.com/book/5482/chapter/148381054
5. https://www.ipl.org/essay/Hans-Morthaus-International-Relations-Theory-FCYKECK5G
6. https://politicsforindia.com/5-2-realist-approach-to-international-relations-psir/
7. https://uberbau.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/summary-of-tickners-hans-morgenthaus-principles-of-political-realism-a-feminist-reformulation/
8. https://books.google.com/books/about/Gender_in_International_Relations.html?id=8LtKx_vm6IUC
9. https://books.google.com/books/about/Women_and_War.html?id=HkMHDr3d52oC
10. https://addi.ehu.es/bitstream/handle/10810/71139/zirion%20landaluze,%20iker%20-%20A%20critique%20to%20%E2%80%9Cthe%20myth%20of%20protection%E2%80%9D%20of%20Women%20in%20International%20Law-1.pdf?sequence=6&isAllowed=y
11. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231964590_Women_fighters_and_the_'beautiful_soul'_narrative
12. https://www.un.org/en/our-work/maintain-international-peace-and-security