Essay about Feminism
Feminism has been in our lives for a long time. On the other side, it is different if someone looks at the beginning of the relationship between International relations and Feminism.‘Feminist theories entered the discipline of IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s’. In the history of international relations, theorists have tried to reformulate improve women’s positions. By this struggle, theorists aimed to understand and to show how important women’s experiences. And the effects of our understandings of gender is also important for theorists.
Feminism is defending that to understand the impacts of the state system and the global economy over women and also men, it is a must to analyze gender. The acceptance process of Feminist scholarship means that feminism and the ideas it defends are going to accept or discuss by theorists and policy-makers. According to Feminist scholars, thanks to the Feminism the visibility of women in the social, economic and also political arena is going to be more. In this essay, the challenges of Feminism with conventional IR theory is going to be answered.
First of all, to understand what Feminist scholarship brought, and also to understand its challenges with conventional IR theory it is better to see what is conventional IR theory was defending. ‘Conventional IR scholars, notably realists, define security primarily in terms of the security of the state’(Tickner and Sjoberg: 2013,212). And to explain this, they were saying that ‘A secure state is one that can protect its physical and moral boundaries against an ‘anarchic’ international system’(Tickner and Sjoberg:2013,212). On the other side, Neorealists were defending that the anarchic structure of the international system where there is no sovereign to regulate state behavior’. They describe states as a unitary actor that wants to survive. And to survive, these states are not seeking internal processes and structures. They try to survive in an anarchic world and in this anarchic world, they do increase their military capabilities.
However, after the second world war, the theorists started to explain security in other ways. Because after the war they saw that the reasons for most of these wars founding by nationalist and ethnic. ‘Most of the world’s poorest states have active military conflicts within their boundaries’(Tickner and Sjoberg:2013,213). And this conflict causing structural violence. After all, the masses cannot reach what they need, civilians cannot do what they can in their ordinary(normal) lives. ‘Critical security scholars, as they are called, began to define security in terms of threats to human well-being and survival—security of the individual and their environment, as well as that of the state’(Tickner and Sjoberg:2013,213).
The Feminists are defining security as mentioned in the last definition. ‘According to IR feminists, security threats include domestic violence, rape, poverty, gender subordination, and ecological destruction as well as war'(Tickner and Sjoberg:2013,213). Feminism is also defending the idea that security that they defend as a term coming from the bottom and it continues with the community or the individual rather than with the state or the international system. And they seek the impacts of the politics over the security of the individuals.
After these important points, it is obvious that Feminism is promoting the rights of all individuals and by defending their rights, it is a different kind of security model in the international relations arena. With this definition, feminists are supporting the rights of people who are the disadvantageous group. Especially during or after wars the situation that women in showing that how women are facing the hardest conditions.
