“The Feminist approach to international politics is biased.” Comment. (2014, 10 Marks)
Feminist IR, built from the late 1980s by Cynthia Enloe, J. Ann Tickner and V. Spike Peterson, argues that the discipline’s core concepts (the state, sovereignty, security, power) are gendered. The charge of bias comes from mainstream scholars and, more sharply, from within feminism. It holds in part, but it mistakes an open standpoint for a hidden prejudice.
The case for the charge
- Exclusivity: critics say the approach studies only women and reduces world politics to one variable, though the discipline concerns states and peoples, and human values are wider than female values.
- Lack of objectivity: Robert O. Keohane (1989) urged feminists to produce testable, falsifiable propositions; without them, theory built from a gendered standpoint looks partisan.
- Prescription posing as explanation: it can read as a normative programme rather than an account of how states behave.
- Essentialism: claims that women are naturally peaceful invited Francis Fukuyama’s biological argument in Foreign Affairs (1998), and history offers Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir as war leaders.
- Western bias from within: Chandra Talpade Mohanty argued that Western feminism constructs a monolithic “Third World woman”, universalising white, middle-class experience.
The feminist reply
- Gender is not “women”: it is a relation of power, so the field studies masculinities too; Carol Cohn showed how nuclear strategists’ language makes mass killing discussable.
- Every theory has a standpoint: Robert W. Cox (1981) held that theory is always for someone and for some purpose. Tickner’s “feminist reformulation” (1988) of Hans J. Morgenthau’s six principles showed that realism’s “objective laws” and autonomous political sphere encode masculine traits as universal and keep the household and the body out of view.
- Keohane’s test begs the question: it judges feminism by the positivist epistemology it disputes, which Tickner’s reply (1997) made explicit. Most feminists reject essentialism: militarism is gendered, not women innately peaceful. Swati Parashar’s study of women militants in Kashmir and Sri Lanka (2014) treats them as political agents, not victims.
- Results are concrete: rape tried as a war crime at the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, Resolution 1325 (2000), the ICC’s gender-persecution warrants against Taliban leaders (July 2025), and India’s all-female Formed Police Unit in Liberia (2007), credited with drawing more Liberian women into policing.
Conclusion
Feminist IR is perspectival, not biased in the pejorative sense: it states its standpoint where mainstream theory leaves its own unstated. The charge holds only where strands slide into essentialism or Northern universalism, and postcolonial feminists are correcting that from inside.