Constructivist, Feminist, Postmodern and Postcolonial Approaches to International Relations

Constructivist, Feminist, Postmodern and Post-colonial Approaches to International Relations

Realism and liberalism disagree about almost everything except one thing: that there is a world out there, that it has a structure, and that theory’s job is to describe it accurately. The four approaches gathered here refuse that shared assumption. Each argues, from a different direction, that the mainstream mistakes the socially constructed for the natural — that anarchy, sovereignty, the state, security and the national interest are not facts the theorist discovers but arrangements human beings have made, sustained by belief and practice, and therefore changeable.

• This is the reflectivist turn, and it is what makes these four a family rather than four unrelated critiques.
  • Constructivism says the international system is made of shared ideas, and asks what those ideas are and where they came from.
  • Feminism says the discipline’s categories are gendered, and that a field which cannot see women cannot see half of what produces war and peace.
  • Postmodernism says the discipline’s truths are effects of power, and sets out to expose the exclusions on which they rest.
  • Post-colonialism says the discipline’s universals are provincial European experience mistaken for the human condition.
• The common target is naturalisation — the move by which a contingent arrangement comes to look like a permanent feature of the world.

The Fourth Debate: Rationalism Against Reflectivism

The label comes from Robert Keohane’s 1988 presidential address to the International Studies Association, which divided the field into rationalist and reflectivist approaches. Rationalists — neorealists and neoliberals alike — treat states as utility-maximising actors with given interests, and treat institutions as solutions to collective-action problems. Reflectivists deny that interests can be taken as given at all, because they are produced by the very social processes the rationalist brackets out.

• The same divide is often restated as positivism against post-positivism, and that version names the epistemological commitments precisely.
  • Naturalism — the social world can be studied by the methods that work on the natural world.
  • The fact–value distinction — empirical description can be separated from normative judgement.
  • The subject–object distinction — the observer stands outside what is observed and does not affect it.
  • Regularity and explanation — the point of theory is to find patterns that support causal claims and, ideally, prediction.
• Reflectivists reject all four, and the rejection is what unites approaches that otherwise share very little.
  • Facts do not come pre-labelled — calling an act terrorism or resistance is already a judgement, not a description.
  • The observer is inside what is observed, and theorising about international politics is itself a practice within international politics.
  • There are no natural laws of society, because the social world is a world of consciousness — of ideas, languages, discourses, signs and mutual understandings — meaningful only to those who make it and live in it.
• The distinction that carries most of this weight is between causal and constitutive theory.
  • A causal question asks what made X happen — why did the state go to war?
  • A constitutive question asks what makes X the kind of thing it is — what has to be believed and practised for something to count as a sovereign state, or a war, or a threat?
  • Rationalism has only the first question. Reflectivism insists the second is prior, because you cannot count causes until you know what you are counting.

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” — Jean-François Lyotard

• Where the four diverge is on how far the scepticism runs, and this matters more than their shared starting point.
  • Constructivism keeps a foot in social science. It abandons materialism but not the search for causes, and much of it still looks for evidence, mechanisms and generalisation.
  • Postmodernism refuses that ground entirely. If all knowledge is an effect of power, a “better-evidenced” theory is simply a better-positioned one.
  • Feminism and post-colonialism have both wings — a conventional wing that gathers data, tests propositions and lobbies institutions, and a critical wing that treats the demand for data as itself the problem.
• Critical theory in the Frankfurt sense is the family’s fifth member and shares the reflectivist premise, but its account of who benefits from the naturalised order is Marxist and belongs with the political economy of the discipline.

Approach	What it says is constructed	What it wants known	What it wants changed
Constructivism	Anarchy, identity, interest, the meaning of material capability	How shared ideas produce state behaviour, and how norms spread	Nothing necessarily — it is an analytical wager before it is a politics
Feminism	Gender, and through it security, the state, the household, war	Where women are, and how gendered assumptions structure the field	The masculinist ordering of world politics and its costs to everyone
Postmodernism	Truth itself, including the discipline’s	How dominant discourses silence alternatives	The authority of any settled account; opening space for the excluded
Post-colonialism	The universality of European experience and categories	Whose history the discipline actually generalises from	The Eurocentric organisation of knowledge and its material effects

The Via Media and Its Neighbours

• Constructivism is usually placed as the middle ground of the fourth debate — reflectivist in ontology, frequently positivist in method — which is why it is the one reflectivist approach the mainstream has absorbed.
• The English School occupies a parallel middle position in an older argument, accepting the absence of world government while insisting that states form a society bound by shared rules and institutions.
  • Its concept of an anarchical society is the closest thing the pre-reflectivist discipline had to the claim that the meaning of anarchy is socially produced, which is why constructivists often read it as an ancestor.
• Ken Booth’s emancipatory turn pushes in the opposite direction from Wendt’s, arguing that the “security game” of threats, counter-threats, alliances and counter-alliances is obsolete because insecurity is now lodged inside disorganised and failed states rather than between them.
  • Security, on this account, is simultaneously cosmopolitan and local — a problem of individual human beings and of a global community, not of sovereign units.
  • Emancipation, not power or order, produces true security — the sharpest one-line statement of what reflectivism wants from the concept.

The mainstream asks what states do under anarchy. The reflectivist asks who decided that anarchy was the question.

Social Constructivism

Social constructivism is now treated as the discipline’s third major paradigm, alongside realism and liberalism, and it got there in under two decades. Its core proposition is deceptively simple: the international system does not exist on its own the way the solar system does. It exists as an inter-subjective awareness among people: a human invention of a purely intellectual and ideational kind, a set of ideas arranged by particular people at a particular time and place, and it changes when those ideas change.

Why It Arrived When It Did

• The end of the Cold War was constructivism’s founding evidence, because none of the mainstream theories had predicted it, and neorealism in particular could not accommodate it.
  • A bipolar distribution of material capability ended peacefully, from the inside, without defeat in war and without a shift in the underlying balance of forces.
  • If material structure determined outcomes, that could not have happened; something other than capability had changed, and what changed was what Soviet leaders believed about themselves, about Europe and about security.
• The 1990s supplied the confirming cases the theory needed — the sudden salience of identity in the Yugoslav and Rwandan wars, the spread of human rights and humanitarian norms, and European integration deepening rather than unravelling once the Soviet threat that supposedly held it together disappeared.
• The summary claim in the school’s own idiom: everything is in the mind; what has to change is how we think.

The Philosophical Ancestry

• Giambattista Vico supplies the founding intuition: the natural world is made by God, but the social world is made by men, and we can therefore know the social world in a way we cannot know nature — from the inside, because we made it.
• Immanuel Kant contributes the epistemological half: knowledge of the world is filtered through the subject, so there is no access to things as they are independent of the categories we bring.
  • The constructivist gloss is that we never look at the world through naked eyes — we look through the lenses of culture, norms, values and identity.
• Max Weber and the tradition of verstehen establish that social action must be grasped through the meaning actors attach to it, which makes interpretation a method rather than a confession of failure.
• Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Social Construction of Reality, gave the school its name and its mechanism — externalisation, objectivation, internalisation — the process by which human products come to be experienced as an objective order and are then absorbed by the next generation as simply how things are.
• John Searle distinguishes brute facts from social facts. A mountain is a brute fact; money, sovereignty and a border are social facts, real and consequential but existing only because of collective intentionality — because enough people accept that they count as such.

Onuf, Kratochwil and the Founding Texts

• Nicholas Onuf coined the term for international relations in World of Our Making, published in 1989 on the eve of the Cold War’s end.
  • His central claim is that people and societies construct one another through rules; rules turn raw capability into authority, and language is not a report on the world but a way of acting in it.
• Friedrich Kratochwil, in Rules, Norms and Decisions, worked out how norms actually operate in reasoning.
  • Norms do not function like causes pushing behaviour from behind; they function as reasons that actors invoke, contest and justify themselves by.
  • The evidence that a norm exists is not that it is always obeyed but that violations require justification — states lie about breaking norms rather than denying that the norms exist.

Alexander Wendt’s Three Claims

Alexander Wendt developed constructivism into a systematic alternative to structural realism, first in the 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” and then in Social Theory of International Politics in 1999 — a title that deliberately answers Waltz’s Theory of International Politics.

• Structures are constituted by shared ideas rather than by material forces alone. The distribution of capability matters, but only under a distribution of ideas that gives it meaning.
• Identities and interests are constructed by those shared ideas rather than given by nature. A state’s interests follow from how it understands who it is, and that understanding is a product of its relations with others.
• Agents and structures constitute each other. States make the system by acting in it, and the system makes states what they are; neither is prior.

“Self-help and power politics are institutions, not essential features of anarchy.” — Alexander Wendt

• The target is precise. Waltz derives self-help from anarchy as a logical necessity; Wendt argues that self-help is one possible institution that states have built inside anarchy and could build differently.
  • There is nothing inevitable about the security dilemma, because any situation states find themselves in is a situation they have jointly created.

Structuration: Where the Third Claim Comes From

The mutual constitution of agent and structure is borrowed from Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, and it is worth stating properly because it is the piece most often garbled. Giddens was resolving a standing sociological quarrel between accounts that made structures determine behaviour and accounts that made individuals sovereign over their circumstances.

• Structures do not constrain actors mechanically. They are simultaneously the medium and the outcome of the practices they organise.
  • Duality of structure is Giddens’s name for this — structure is not a wall standing outside action but a pattern reproduced through action.
• Applied to international politics, the implication is that states reproduce anarchy’s meaning every time they act on it.
  • There is no requirement to read anarchy as Hobbesian lawlessness; it can equally be read, in the Lockean manner, as compatible with restraint, mutual recognition and assistance.
  • Reading it differently and acting on the different reading is how the structure changes — slowly, and only if enough actors do it, but it is not fixed.

The Illustration That Does the Work

• Five hundred British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than five North Korean ones.
  • On any purely material measure the comparison is absurd — a hundredfold difference in destructive capacity pointing the wrong way.
  • The difference is entirely in the shared understanding of the relationship: Britain is a friend, North Korea is an enemy, and the weapons acquire their meaning from that prior classification.
  • Material capability does not speak for itself. It has to be interpreted, and the interpretation is social.
• The same logic explains why identical geography produces opposite readings — Canada and Cuba both border the United States, and only one of them experiences that as a security problem.

The Three Cultures of Anarchy

Wendt’s most developed structural claim is that anarchy comes in cultures — stable patterns of how states cast one another — and that each culture has its own logic and its own degree of internalisation. This is the direct answer to Waltz: not that anarchy is unimportant, but that anarchy is a variable rather than a constant.

Culture	How the other is cast	Logic of the system	Historical illustration
Hobbesian	Enemy — no recognition of the other’s right to exist	War of all against all; survival by force; violence unlimited	Early modern Europe; the wars of religion; conquest and annihilation as routine
Lockean	Rival — competition within recognised limits	Force used, but sovereignty and the other’s right to exist respected	The post-Westphalian states system; state death becomes rare
Kantian	Friend — disputes settled without force, security treated as shared	Non-violence and mutual aid as expectations, not favours	The transatlantic and West European security community; Nordic relations

• Cultures are internalised at three depths — by coercion, by self-interest, and finally by legitimacy, when a state accepts the norm as its own.
  • Only at the third depth is a culture secure, which is why change is possible but slow and why a culture sustained by force alone collapses quickly.
• The historical claim is that the system has moved from Hobbesian to predominantly Lockean, with Kantian pockets, and that state death by conquest has become rare — a change no material theory predicted or explains.
  • The counterpoint is live: Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are precisely an attempt to reopen conquest as a legitimate instrument, and the international response has been about whether the Lockean norm survives.

Norms: What They Are and How They Spread

• A norm is a shared expectation of appropriate behaviour for an actor with a given identity — not a law, not a preference, but a standard against which conduct is judged.
• Regulative norms govern behaviour that already exists; constitutive norms create the behaviour or the actor in the first place.
• James March and Johan Olsen’s two logics name the choice constructivism forces on rational-choice theory.
  • Logic of consequences — the actor asks what course of action maximises its expected payoff.
  • Logic of appropriateness — the actor asks what someone like it does in a situation like this.
• Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink’s norm life cycle is the school’s best-known mechanism, and it explains diffusion without assuming that good norms automatically win.
  • Stage one, norm emergence. Norm entrepreneurs — activists, small states, international officials — persuade a first group of adopters, working from organisational platforms that give them standing.
  • The tipping point comes when roughly a third of states, or a set of critical states whose adherence is indispensable, have accepted the norm.
  • Stage two, norm cascade. Adoption accelerates through socialisation, emulation and concern for reputation and esteem; states adopt to be seen as a certain kind of state, not because they have been convinced.
  • Stage three, internalisation. The norm becomes taken for granted, disappears from debate, and is enforced by professional training and bureaucratic routine rather than by argument.
• Norm contestation is the field’s current preoccupation, and it is the honest correction to the life cycle’s forward momentum.
  • Norms can be contested, hollowed out or reversed — sovereignty against the Responsibility to Protect, the prohibition of territorial conquest against annexation, the refugee regime against securitised borders.
  • Antipreneurs and norm spoilers defend existing arrangements against entrepreneurs, and the outcome of the contest is not determined in advance.

Katzenstein, Tannenwald and the Empirical Programme

• Peter Katzenstein’s edited volume The Culture of National Security was the collective demonstration that culture, identity and norms explain security policy where material variables do not.
  • Its cases include Japanese and German post-war antimilitarism, which survived decades of changing material circumstance because it was written into domestic political identity.
• Nina Tannenwald’s nuclear taboo is the most fully documented constructivist case study in the discipline.
  • The claim is not that nuclear weapons have gone unused because deterrence worked, but that a normative prohibition grew up around their use which made them politically unusable even where they were militarily usable.
  • The evidence is in the cases where use was available and rejected — Korea, Vietnam, the 1991 Gulf War — and in the shift in how decision-makers talked about the option over time.
  • A taboo is stronger than a norm. It carries a sense of the unthinkable and of moral pollution, so violation would damage the violator’s standing irrespective of the military result.
  • The distinction from deterrence matters: deterrence explains why nuclear states do not attack each other, and cannot explain why nuclear weapons were not used against non-nuclear adversaries.
• The taboo has been tested directly since 2022. Russian nuclear signalling over Ukraine — revised doctrine, exercises, repeated declaratory threats — is the hardest live test the norm has faced.
  • So far it has held: no use, and near-universal condemnation of the threats, including from states otherwise sympathetic to Moscow.
  • The scholarly dispute is over whether holding is the same as surviving. One camp reads the non-use as confirmation; another argues that routinising nuclear threats erodes the taboo even without use, by returning the weapons to the ordinary vocabulary of coercion.
• Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s boomerang model explains how norms travel when the state blocks them.
  • Domestic groups blocked by their own government reach past it to transnational advocacy networks, which lobby sympathetic foreign states and international organisations.
  • Pressure then returns from outside onto the blocking state — the boomerang — which is how human-rights, environmental and indigenous-rights campaigns have worked since the 1970s.

The Copenhagen School and Securitisation

Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan produced the single most portable concept in this literature by asking what “security” does rather than what it is. Their answer is that security is not a condition but a speech act — an issue becomes a security issue because it is successfully claimed to be one. Saying that something is a security threat is not describing a state of affairs; it is performing a political move that lifts the issue out of normal politics.

• Securitisation has a definite structure, and the structure is what makes the concept analytically useful.
  • A securitising actor with standing — a government, an army, sometimes a movement — makes a securitising move, claiming that a referent object faces an existential threat.
  • The audience accepts the claim, and that acceptance authorises extraordinary measures outside ordinary rules and ordinary scrutiny.
• Security is thus self-referential. An issue becomes a security issue because it is successfully presented as one, not because it objectively is one.
• The school widened the referent object beyond the state into five sectors — military, political, economic, societal and environmental — which is how migration, identity, disease and climate entered security studies at all.
• Desecuritisation is the normative preference, and this is the part most often missed.
  • Securitisation is not a good in itself; it is a failure to deal with an issue through normal politics, and it licenses secrecy, emergency powers and the suspension of debate.
  • The optimal outcome is to move issues out of the security frame and back into ordinary political argument.
• Criticism of the concept is substantial and worth carrying.
  • It privileges the speech of elites and the formal political stage, and so misses the slow, bureaucratic, technological securitisation that happens without any dramatic declaration — the Paris School’s point about routines, risk management and professionals of security.
  • Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit argue that the theory’s founding contrast between the normal politics of the liberal West and the exceptional politics of elsewhere carries a civilisational and racialised inheritance, and that the framework treats a settled European political order as the neutral baseline.

Nothing is a threat until someone with standing says so and enough people agree.

Varieties of Constructivism

Strand	Epistemology	Leading figures	Characteristic question
Conventional / modernist	Broadly positivist; causal claims, evidence, comparison	Wendt, Katzenstein, Finnemore, Sikkink	Which norms shape state behaviour, and how do they spread?
Critical / interpretivist	Post-positivist; discourse, genealogy, power	Kratochwil, Onuf, Kubálková, much of the Copenhagen School	How did this identity or this threat come to be produced?
Radical / post-structural constructivism	Rejects the causal question outright	Overlaps with postmodern IR	Whose exclusion made this account of the world possible?

• Wendt is criticised from both flanks, which is the clearest evidence that he occupies a genuine middle.
  • Reflectivists find him too state-centric — he treats states as pre-given, unitary, anthropomorphised actors and brackets the domestic society that produces their identities, which concedes realism’s unit of analysis before the argument starts.
  • They also find him too positivist, retaining scientific realism, causal language and a search for generalisation that his own premises should have ruled out.
  • Rationalists find him too idealist, replacing material determination with ideational determination and leaving no room for the coercive weight of capability.
• Norm-diffusion research answered part of the state-centrism charge by taking non-state actors seriously, but the theoretical core remains a theory of states.

Criticism of Constructivism

• It explains change without predicting it. Constructivism can show, after the fact, how the norm against landmines or the taboo on nuclear use was built; it cannot say which of today’s contested norms will consolidate.
• It says where interests come from but not which ideas will win. There is no theory of why some norm entrepreneurs succeed and most fail, so the account is often reconstructed backwards from the outcome.
• It is an ontology or a method rather than a substantive theory. It tells you what the world is made of and how to study it; it makes no standing prediction of the sort realism and liberalism offer, and different constructivists reach opposite conclusions from the same premises.
• It under-weights material power and coercion. Ideas may give capability its meaning, but the distribution of capability heavily shapes whose ideas circulate — a point pressed hardest by Marxists, who add that the ideas that spread are typically the ideas of the powerful.
• Its statism concedes much of realism’s terrain. If states are the agents and their identities are formed largely in interaction with other states, the theory has changed realism’s explanation while keeping its subject matter.

Feminist Approaches to International Relations

International relations was the last major body of knowledge to be touched by feminist scholarship, which is itself a finding rather than an accident. A discipline organised around states, armies and diplomacy took the near-total absence of women from its subject matter as evidence that gender was irrelevant to it. Feminist IR begins by reversing that inference: the absence is the thing to be explained.

Where Are the Women?

• Cynthia Enloe asked the founding question in Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics — “Where are the women?” — and answered it by looking where the discipline did not.
  • Workers on the banana plantations owned by multinationals, whose cheap and disciplined labour makes the commodity chain profitable.
  • Diplomats’ wives, whose unpaid hospitality is the infrastructure of embassies and whose respectability is part of a state’s presentation of itself.
  • Sex workers around military bases, and the “comfort women” whose organised sexual servitude was treated as a logistical requirement of war.
• Her conclusion is the school’s slogan: the personal is international, and the international is personal.
  • The first half says that private arrangements — marriage, household labour, sexual availability — are what make international structures work.
  • The second half says that international politics reaches into private life: what a woman may wear, whom she may marry and whether she may leave are routinely settled by war, alliance and occupation.
• The absence extends to decision-making. Women are scarce among heads of state, defence ministers, generals and negotiators, and it is those bodies that decide on war and peace — so women experience the consequences of decisions they had no part in.

“The personal is international… the international is personal.” — Cynthia Enloe

Sex, Gender and Why the Distinction Matters

• Sex is biological; gender is a set of socially constructed characteristics attached to sex and ordered hierarchically.
  • The masculine cluster — rationality, autonomy, strength, objectivity, public life — is valued; the feminine cluster — emotion, dependence, care, subjectivity, private life — is devalued.
• Gender is therefore an analytical category, not a synonym for women. Feminist IR studies masculinity as much as femininity — the making of soldiers, the performance of resolve, the coding of restraint as weakness.
• The consequence for theory is direct: a field that prizes objectivity, autonomy and power-as-control has built the masculine half of the binary into its definition of what counts as knowledge and what counts as politics.

J. Ann Tickner’s Reformulation of Morgenthau

J. Ann Tickner’s “Hans Morgenthau’s Principles of Political Realism: A Feminist Reformulation” is the most-used text in feminist IR because it engages realism on its own ground. Her charge is not that Morgenthau is wrong but that he offers a partial description of international politics presented as a complete one, and that the partiality follows from a deeply embedded masculinist bias.

Morgenthau’s principle	Tickner’s reformulation
Politics is governed by objective laws rooted in an unchanging human nature	Objectivity is culturally defined and associated with masculinity; all knowledge is socially constructed and objectivity is therefore always partial
Interest defined as power is the signpost that makes politics an autonomous field	The national interest is multidimensional and contextually contingent; no single set of interests defined by power can capture it, and cooperation is as much a part of it as competition
Interest is a universal category, though its content varies with circumstance	Power as domination and control privileges masculinity; power can also be understood as empowerment — acting with others rather than over them
Universal moral principles cannot be applied to state action; prudence is the supreme political virtue	All political action has moral significance and cannot be quarantined from ethics; the claim of amorality is itself a moral position
The moral aspirations of a nation are not the moral laws that govern the universe	Rather than abandoning moral principles as untranslatable, look for common moral elements across cultures on which agreement can be built
The autonomy of the political sphere — the political must not be subordinated to the economic, legal or moral	Feminists deny the autonomy of the political; drawing a boundary around a narrowly defined political realm is what excludes women’s concerns and contributions from view

• Her positive programme is set out in Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security.
  • The shift is from territorial security to human security — from the integrity of borders to the safety of persons, including from hunger, disease, domestic violence and economic dispossession.
  • A state can be secure while most of its people are not, and a defence budget can rise while human security falls; the conventional definition cannot register this.
• On power, she observes that when women write about power they stress energy, capacity and potential rather than control — a conception closer to Hannah Arendt’s than to Morgenthau’s.
• On rationality, she argues that the abstract, decontextualised reasoning realism prizes is a particular and gendered style of thought, and that contextual reasoning is not its inferior.

Cohn, Elshtain and the Language of War

• Carol Cohn’s “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals” is an ethnography of the nuclear strategy community she spent a year inside.
  • She found a technostrategic language in which mass death is unsayable: “clean bombs”, “collateral damage”, “surgical strikes”, “counterforce exchanges”, weapons that are “vulnerable” and cities that are “taken out”.
  • The vocabulary is saturated with domesticated and sexualised imagery — birth, paternity, penetration, “the shopping list” of weapons — which makes catastrophic destruction familiar and even comfortable to discuss.
• Jean Bethke Elshtain’sWomen and War dismantles the two archetypes through which war is narrated.
  • The just warrior — the man who fights reluctantly, protects the weak and bears the moral burden of violence.
  • The beautiful soul — the woman who is peaceful, morally pure, in need of protection and located outside the fighting.
  • Both are false as description: women have fought, incited, supported and profited from war, and men have refused it.
  • Both are powerful as legitimation: the protection of women justifies wars, and the archetypes conscript women into supporting the violence done in their name.
  • The purpose of the feminist perspective, on her account, is to create sensitivity to how masculinist discourses distort the world-view of everyone inside them.

The Wider Field

• Christine Sylvester, in Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era, brought post-structural scepticism into feminist IR and developed empathetic cooperation — a method of listening across difference rather than arguing to a settled position.
• V. Spike Peterson rewrote international political economy as a gendered order, showing that the reproductive, productive and virtual economies are one system and that unpaid care work subsidises the whole of it.
• Sandra Whitworth studied gender inside institutions — the International Labour Organization, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and later UN peacekeeping, where she showed that the training of soldiers in aggressive masculinity sits awkwardly with the tasks peacekeeping asks them to perform.
• Laura Sjoberg, with Caron Gentry in Mothers, Monsters, Whores, examined women’s political violence — female suicide bombers, women in genocidal movements, Abu Ghraib — and showed that the narratives available for explaining it deny women agency by casting them as deranged, manipulated or sexually deviant.

Strand	Core claim	Programme
Liberal feminism	Women are excluded from institutions and decisions; the categories are sound, the practice is not	Count women, remove barriers, secure representation and equal rights
Critical / Marxist and socialist feminism	Gender oppression is bound to the global division of labour and to capitalism	Expose the reproductive and care work that subsidises the world economy
Constructivist feminism	Gender is an intersubjective structure that constitutes states, soldiers and interests	Trace how gendered ideas shape norms, security policy and institutions
Post-structural feminism	The masculine–feminine binary organises the discipline’s whole vocabulary	Deconstruct the binaries — protector and protected, rational and emotional
Post-colonial feminism	Western feminism universalises a Western woman’s experience	Recover the specificity of women differently placed by race, class and empire

Feminist Foreign Policy and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

• Sweden adopted the first explicitly feminist foreign policy in 2014 under foreign minister Margot Wallström, and it was the first state to do so.
  • Wallström’s four elements: conventional security is too narrow; the actual experience of real persons in conflict must be the starting point; women’s rights are the greatest human-rights challenge, in peace as much as in war; and women are agents of change, not only victims.
• The label has since been contested and in places reversed. The incoming Swedish government abandoned it in October 2022, arguing that labels obscure policy.
  • Roughly a dozen states adopted versions after Sweden, among them Canada, France, Mexico, Spain, Luxembourg, Germany, Chile, the Netherlands, Colombia, Liberia and Slovenia.
  • Argentina dropped it under Milei, and Germany and the Netherlands stepped back from the framing after changes of government; Chile, Spain, Mexico, Colombia, France, Canada, Liberia and Slovenia have continued with it.
• The Hillary Doctrine is the American variant — the proposition that “human rights are women’s rights” should organise foreign policy, and that the treatment of women in a state is a predictor of its behaviour abroad.
• UN Security Council Resolution 1325, adopted in 2000, created the Women, Peace and Security agenda and is the single most cited institutional achievement of feminist IR.
  • Its four pillars are participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery.
  • Successor resolutions addressed conflict-related sexual violence, and rape was classified as a war crime and as a form of torture by the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda — a legal change feminist scholars and lawyers drove directly.
• The implementation record is the argument against complacency. At the agenda’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025, women were still around a quarter of the world’s ambassadors, under a quarter of cabinet ministers, roughly a tenth of uniformed peacekeeping personnel and a small minority of negotiators and signatories in formal peace processes.
  • Feminist scholars call this “add women and stir” — numerical inclusion without any change to what security means or who defines it.
• Development institutions absorbed the agenda too: the World Bank, the IMF and the UN system treat women’s empowerment as central to development, and both the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals carry it as a dedicated goal.

Criticism and Reply

• Robert Keohane’s challenge was that feminist IR should produce testable theory — propositions with observable implications that could be evaluated against evidence.
  • Tickner’s reply is that the demand smuggles in the epistemology under dispute: to require positivist testing is to insist that feminism succeed on the terms feminism is questioning.
  • Her diagnosis of the Tickner–Keohane exchange identified three misunderstandings behind the field’s deafness to feminist work.
    • The meaning of gender — taken to mean women, rather than a structure of power that organises the discipline itself.
    • Different ontologies — feminists study people and social relations, not states as unitary units.
    • Different epistemologies — interpretive and post-positivist, not causal and law-seeking.
• Francis Fukuyama argued that a world run by women would be more peaceful because of evolved differences in male and female aggression.
  • Feminists reject the essentialism as firmly as realists do. If peacefulness is biologically female, gender ceases to be a social structure and becomes destiny; and the empirical record — Thatcher, Gandhi, Meir — does not support it.
  • The feminist claim is about gendered structures, not about the dispositions of individual women.
• Post-colonial feminists supply the internal critique.Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” argues that Western feminist scholarship constructs a singular “third world woman” — poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, victimised — against whom the Western woman appears modern and free.
  • The construction is a form of discursive colonisation, and it produces the “saving brown women” justification that has attached itself to interventions from colonial-era reform to Afghanistan.
• Marginality persists. Despite thirty-five years of scholarship, feminist work remains at the periphery of a field whose practitioners find it difficult to think past power and national interest — which is, in feminist terms, exactly what the theory predicts.
• What it has nonetheless achieved is measurable: rape recognised as a war crime, gender written into peacekeeping mandates and development policy, sexual persecution accepted as a ground for asylum in several states, and human security established as a rival to the territorial definition.

A discipline that cannot see the women in its own subject matter is not being objective; it is being selective and calling it objectivity.

Postmodern and Post-structural International Relations

Postmodernism is the most radical member of the family because it withdraws the ground everyone else is standing on. Where constructivism says the world is made of ideas and then asks which ideas, postmodernism asks who gets to decide which account of the world counts as knowledge — and answers that the decision is always an exercise of power, including when the theorist makes it.

The Philosophical Sources

• Jean-François Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as incredulity toward metanarratives — the loss of belief in the grand stories (progress, reason, emancipation, science) that legitimised modern knowledge.
• Michel Foucault supplies the working tools.
  • Power/knowledge — power and knowledge are not opposites but produce each other; regimes of truth decide what may be said and by whom.
  • Discourse — a structured field of statements that makes certain objects, subjects and policies thinkable and others unthinkable.
  • Genealogy — the history of how a concept came to seem natural, written to denaturalise it rather than to establish its pedigree.
• Jacques Derrida supplies the method.
  • Deconstruction — reading a text to show that its meaning is unstable and depends on what it excludes.
  • Binary oppositions — Western thought is built on pairs in which the first term is privileged and defined by not being the second, and the hierarchy can be exposed and reversed.
  • Double reading — first reconstruct the dominant account on its own terms, then read it again for the silences, contradictions and exclusions that hold it together.

The Method Applied

• International relations is treated as a text, and like any text it admits multiple readings; there is no single authorised interpretation.
• No knowledge is free of power. Theories do not merely describe international politics; they organise it, and they benefit whoever the organisation suits.
• Realism is a discourse, not a discovery. It appears true because it became the dominant narrative — taught, funded, institutionalised, spoken by practitioners — and not because it was ever verified.
• The binaries of IR are the target, and each conceals a hierarchy.
  • Inside / outside — order, law and progress belong within the state; anarchy, danger and repetition belong outside.
  • Sovereign / anarchic, self / other, civilised / barbarian, developed / underdeveloped, domestic / foreign.
  • Each pair produces the identity of the first term by projecting everything unwanted onto the second, which is why the outside is indispensable to the inside.

Richard Ashley and the Anarchy Problematique

• Richard Ashley turned deconstruction on structural realism, and the anarchy problematique is the result: the realist account of anarchy is one interpretation among several, presented as a fact about the world.
• Anarchy does not entail the security dilemma. It is realism’s specific reading of anarchy that generates the dilemma, and the reading is a choice.
• The reading rests on objectionable exclusions. Cooperation, community, law and the historical variety of political forms are defined out of the frame before analysis begins, so the analysis cannot find them.
• The self-fulfilling loop is Ashley’s sharpest point, and it is a claim about practice, not only about texts.
  • Interpreting anarchy as a security dilemma compels states to acquire power.
  • Armed states produce arms races and, eventually, war.
  • War is then offered as proof of the theory’s scientific standing — and the theory that helped cause the outcome is credited with predicting it.
• In “Untying the Sovereign State” he applies double reading to neorealism itself, showing that the sovereign state functions as an unexamined “heroic practice” on which the whole structure of the theory depends and which the theory never justifies.

Der Derian, Walker, Campbell

• James Der Derian read diplomacy as mediated estrangement — the institution exists to manage the alienation of separated political communities, and its rituals produce the very estrangement they mediate.
• His later work names the military–industrial–media–entertainment network: the fusion of armed forces, defence contractors, news organisations and the games and film industries into a single apparatus that manufactures how war is seen.
  • “Virtuous war” is his term for the resulting form of violence — projected at a distance, presented as surgical, humanitarian and casualty-free for those who wage it, and experienced by them through screens.
  • Technology makes violence morally frictionless. Drone operations, remote targeting and increasingly algorithmic target selection are the live cases: the more the killing is mediated, the less it registers as killing.
• R. B. J. Walker’sInside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory argues that sovereignty is the boundary that makes political theory possible.
  • Inside the state, questions of justice, community, progress and the good life can be asked; outside, only survival and recurrence.
  • International relations theory is therefore not a theory about the world but the record of what political theory had to exclude in order to work.
• David Campbell’sWriting Security treats foreign policy as an identity-producing practice.
  • Danger is written, not found. Of the many things that could kill Americans, only some are constituted as threats, and the selection reveals what the identity requires.
  • Post-Cold War threat construction — rogue states, narcotics, migration, terror — is his demonstration that the discourse survived the disappearance of its object and found new content.

The Postmodernist Critique of Realism, Assembled

• Realism is a discourse that produced its own evidence. Its status rests on institutional dominance rather than verification, and its predictions are partly self-fulfilling.
• Its central concept is an interpretation dressed as a fact. Anarchy is empty; the security dilemma is what realists put into it, and the alternative readings were excluded rather than refuted.
• Its objectivity is a position, not a view from nowhere. Realism was formulated by scholars advising great powers in a particular period, and its “timeless wisdom” is the codified experience of the powerful.
• Its binaries do political work. The inside/outside distinction licenses the state’s monopoly on legitimate community and consigns everything beyond the border to a realm where ethics does not apply.
• Its foundational narratives are constructed. Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes were recruited retrospectively into a lineage that flattens their differences and confers the authority of antiquity on a mid-twentieth-century American theory.
• Its subject is performed. The unitary, rational, sovereign state is not observed; it is written, rehearsed and thereby made real.

Criticism of Postmodernism

• Relativism and the performative contradiction. If no account can be privileged, the claim that no account can be privileged cannot be privileged either — and the postmodernist writes as though it should be.
• No positive programme. It supplies no theory of what to do, and its practitioners generally refuse to supply one on principle, which leaves it parasitic on the theories it deconstructs.
• The moral objection: deconstructing the discourse of security does nothing for people under bombardment, and critics ask whether a scholarship of endless suspicion is an adequate response to atrocity.

Realism did not merely describe a world of armed suspicion; it taught states to expect one, and then pointed at the result.

Post-colonial Approaches

Post-colonial scholarship sets out to decolonise the discipline. Its charge is that the mainstream theories are Eurocentric — built out of European history, generalised into laws of world politics, and then applied to societies whose experience of the international system was conquest rather than sovereign equality. The theories are, on this account, neither descriptively accurate for most of the world nor prescriptively useful to it.

The Evidence for the Charge

• Stanley Hoffmann described international relations as “an American social science” — a field whose questions, methods, funding and prestige were concentrated in one country at one moment of its power.
• Morgenthau dismissed Africa as politically empty — a space to be divided rather than a set of political communities with their own international relations.
• Kenneth Waltz held that it would be ridiculous to construct a theory of international politics on the foreign policies of Malaysia or Costa Rica, since a theory of international politics must be built from the great powers.
  • The remark is candid rather than careless: it states openly that the theory is about a handful of states and is uninterested in the experience of the majority.

“It would be as ridiculous to construct a theory of international politics based on Malaysia and Costa Rica as it would be to construct an economic theory of oligopolistic competition based on the minor firms in a sector of an economy.” — Kenneth Waltz

• The empirical test has been run. A large study of journal publication and of the discipline’s practitioners across many countries found the field still hierarchical and insular.
  • American scholarship dominates the leading journals, and American scholars cite non-American work far less than the reverse.
  • The “global” discipline looks closer to a centre with peripheries than to a genuinely plural conversation.
  • The finding matters because it converts a polemical claim into a measurable one, and it largely sustains it.

The Theoretical Sources

• Edward Said’sOrientalism is the founding text: the Orient was produced as an object of Western knowledge — sensual, despotic, irrational, static — and the production was inseparable from the administration of empire.
  • Knowledge of the colonised was not innocent scholarship that empire happened to use; it was part of the apparatus of rule, and the categories survive in contemporary area studies and threat assessment.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asks whether the subaltern can speak, and answers that the subaltern’s speech is systematically unhearable because the institutions of representation — colonial, national and academic — speak for her instead.
  • Her “white men saving brown women from brown men” formula names the structure by which intervention is justified through the rescue of women whose own voices are not consulted.
• Homi Bhabha develops hybridity and mimicry: colonial identities are never pure, and the colonised subject who imitates the coloniser is “almost the same, but not quite” — a resemblance that is also a menace, because it exposes the arbitrariness of the original.
• Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, analyses colonialism as a psychological as well as material order that installs inferiority in the colonised, and argues that decolonisation is necessarily a violent break because the order was violent throughout.
• Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe asks that European history be treated as one provincial history among others rather than as the universal narrative against which other societies are measured and found late.

The Post-colonial State and the Insecurity Dilemma

• Mohammed Ayoob’s subaltern realism is the bridge between this literature and security studies.
  • Post-colonial states are threatened less by external attack than by the incompleteness of their own state-making — contested legitimacy, weak institutions, plural nations inside single borders.
  • The result is an insecurity dilemma rather than a security dilemma: the regime’s main threats are internal, so security policy is directed inward, and strengthening the state can itself generate insurgency.
  • Europe passed through the same violent state-making over centuries; post-colonial states are asked to complete it in decades, under scrutiny, and with borders they did not draw.

The Missing History of Race

• The discipline’s founding story is wrong. The conventional account has international relations beginning in 1919 out of a revulsion against the First World War, with the study of peace as its purpose.
• Robert Vitalis’sWhite World Order, Black Power Politics documents what that story omits: the field’s early decades in the United States were substantially concerned with race relations and imperial administration, and its first journal was founded as a journal of race development.
  • The alternative tradition — the Black scholars of the Howard School, working on empire, race and international order and largely written out of the discipline’s memory — is recovered in the same work.
• Race was not incidental to IR’s formation; it was one of its organising subjects, and forgetting this is what allows the field to present its categories as neutral.

Global IR and the Live Debate

• Amitav Acharya’s Global IR agenda, launched from the presidency of the International Studies Association, is the constructive programme built on this critique.
  • It asks for a discipline grounded in world history rather than Greco-Roman and European history, pluralistic about theory, integrating regional worlds instead of treating them as data for Western models, and attentive to agency from the Global South.
• With Barry Buzan, he asked “Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory?” and offered several answers.
  • The head start and continuing dominance of Western scholarship, and the local hegemony of Western concepts inside non-Western universities.
  • Non-Western thought is classified as area studies, history or philosophy rather than as theory.
  • Hidden theory may already exist and simply go unrecognised because it does not take the expected form.
• Norm localisation and norm subsidiarity are his own concepts: non-Western actors reshape global norms to fit local beliefs, and generate rules of their own rather than merely receiving them.
• His multiplex world order — many crosscutting orders, no single hegemon, an analogy with the multiplex cinema — is the framework’s best-known export, and it is now itself contested.
  • Sasikumar Sundaram and Inderjeet Parmar argue in International Affairs that multiplexity describes elite co-optation rather than democratisation: from the New International Economic Order negotiations of the 1970s to the BRICS and G20 today, new actors are absorbed into existing hierarchies, producing “neoliberalism with southern characteristics” rather than a transformed order.
  • Their critical multiplexity would centre popular struggle, material need and contestation rather than the enlargement of the table at which elites sit.
  • A parallel proposal, multiplexity 2.0, keeps the framework but adds the non-linear complexity of interaction among the multiplying actors.
  • The exchange is the clearest sign that Global IR has moved from a demand for inclusion to an argument about whose inclusion, and on whose terms.

Criticism of Post-colonial IR

• It critiques more than it constructs. It is powerful at exposing the parochialism of existing theory and thin on an alternative theory of international politics.
• Its own theorists are largely located in Western universities, publishing in Western journals in English, which reproduces the hierarchy the critique attacks.
• Post-colonial states are the most vigorous defenders of Westphalian sovereignty and non-intervention — the very European categories the critique provincialises — because those norms protect them against the strong.
• Textualism at the expense of political economy. A literature built on discourse and representation can lose sight of the material relations of extraction that colonialism was for.
  • This is where the boundary sits: the economic critique — imperialism, dependency, unequal exchange, neo-colonialism — is a political-economy argument in its own right, while post-colonialism as treated here is the epistemological critique of how the discipline knows.
• Essentialism in reverse is the internal worry: an insistence on non-Western difference can harden into the same fixed civilisational categories that Orientalism invented.

Green Theory and the Planetary Boundary

• Green theory adds a fifth reflectivist claim: every other approach, including the critical ones, is anthropocentric, treating nature as a resource, a backdrop or a security externality rather than as a subject.
• The unit of the problem does not match the unit of the discipline. Emissions, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification are planetary and non-territorial; sovereignty is territorial and exclusive, so the institution designed to solve collective problems is the one generating the collective-action failure.
• Climate justice connects it to post-colonialism: those least responsible for accumulated emissions are most exposed to their consequences, which makes the environment a question of historical responsibility, not only of collective risk.

India Read Through the Reflectivist Lens

India is unusually well placed in this literature — as a case, as a critic and as a source of theory. A realist reading of Indian foreign policy sees continuous hedging; a constructivist reading sees identity continuity, and the two produce different expectations about what India will do when hedging stops paying.

• Non-alignment, strategic autonomy and multi-alignment are one identity in three vocabularies.
  • Each formulation asserts the same self-understanding — a civilisational state that will not be anyone’s junior partner and whose standing rests on independence of judgement.
  • The constructivist point is that the pattern survives every change in the material environment — bipolarity, unipolarity, and now competition between the United States and China — which is what an identity does and a strategy generally does not.
• India as norm entrepreneur.Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world is one family — framed the G20 presidency and its “One Earth, One Family, One Future” theme, and the presidency was used to institutionalise the African Union’s membership.
  • Vishwaguru and Vishwamitra — teacher and friend of the world — are claims to a particular kind of standing rather than to capability, and they are exactly the sort of status-seeking constructivism predicts and materialism cannot price.
• The 1998 nuclear tests are a recognition case as much as a deterrence case. The security rationale was real, but the tests also answered a nuclear order India read as discriminatory.
  • The objective was status and acknowledgement as a responsible power, which is why the 2008 civil nuclear agreement — recognition without treaty membership — was treated as the decisive outcome.
• Climate norm-building is India’s clearest sustained entrepreneurship: common but differentiated responsibilities wrote historical responsibility into the climate regime, and the International Solar Alliance and the “climate justice” and lifestyle-based framings extend it.
• Securitisation is visible domestically. Migration and citizenship, the border, and speech classified as “anti-national” have each been moved from ordinary politics into an existential register that authorises extraordinary measures — a textbook use of the concept on Indian material.
  • The Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance since 2025 is the reverse case: a functional-cooperation instrument resecuritised after decades of insulation from the political dispute.
• Gender and Indian security. Litigation rather than legislation drove the change — the Supreme Court’s 2020 judgment in the Babita Puniya case ordered permanent commission for women officers in the Army and rejected the “physiological limitations” and “troop acceptance” arguments as stereotype, and women were subsequently admitted to the National Defence Academy.
  • Indian feminist scholarship on Kashmir, the North-East and Partition has documented conflict-related sexual violence, widowhood and displacement that the strategic literature does not register.
• India as a source of post-colonial theory.Subaltern Studies — Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Spivak’s engagement with it — supplied the method of reading elite archives against the grain for the agency of those they were written to manage.
  • The standing complaint about Indian IR is that it has been more concerned with practice than with theory — rich in area expertise and policy commentary, thin in concept-building — and that this is itself an instance of what Global IR is objecting to, since the theory is expected to arrive from elsewhere.

The Argument, Restated

The four approaches disagree about method, about politics and about whether social science is possible at all. What holds them together is the single move made at the start: the categories the mainstream treats as given are made, and the making can be traced. Anarchy is a reading, security is a claim, gender is a structure, and the universal is somebody’s particular.

• Constructivism made the argument respectable by showing that shared ideas produce outcomes materialism cannot explain, and paid for the respectability by keeping much of the mainstream’s apparatus.
• Feminism made it concrete by naming who is missing and what their absence costs, and by showing that the discipline’s virtues — objectivity, autonomy, rationality — are one half of a gendered pair.
• Postmodernism made it radical by refusing to exempt itself, at the price of having nothing to put in the place of what it dismantles.
• Post-colonialism made it global by showing whose history the universal was drawn from, and now argues internally about whether inclusion in the existing order is a remedy or a co-optation.
• The measure of their success is that the mainstream has absorbed their vocabulary. Identity, norms, discourse, human security, securitisation and Eurocentrism are now ordinary terms in a field that had none of them forty years ago — which is, on their own account, exactly how a norm cascade ends.