This plethora of theories (especially compared to the previous six decades) spawned an abundance of articles, books, workshops, conferences and new teaching programmes notably in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Indeed, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the emergence of the post-cold war period, there was something of an explosion of theoretical approaches in IR, a list of these would include critical theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, and constructivism (Brecher&Harvey 2005). It was not until the 1980s that other theoretical approaches began to garner some traction. Theoretically, the discipline has been dominated for many decades by the triad realism, pluralism and structuralism, though it is realism – a form of ‘realpolitik’ – which remained the overwhelmingly dominant theoretical approach (Smith 1994). Traditionally this has involved attention to the more obvious political sites of states, government, politicians and globally significant wars, with conceptual and empirical attention consistently revolving around security, anarchy and violence. Emerging as an academic discipline in 1919 subsequent to the horrors of the Second World War, IR’s theorizing, methodological approaches and political attention have since been focussed on producing effective knowledge about the international realm (Brecher&Harvey 2005). The discipline of International Relations (IR) is integrally linked to the rhythms of the global political landscape.
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Introduction: Feminist Scholarship and International Relations I hope to seize reader’s attention in this important volume right from the start the stakes are far too high to not take the destabilizing work of feminism seriously. I open with this somewhat provocative statement as the serious intention and work of feminism can so readily evaporate. Furthermore, the claim of feminist scholarship is that it has much greater potential than the discipline of International Relations to bring about this kind of change. My claim is that this branch of feminist scholarship has a exceedingly far-reaching aim, and indeed very similar to the one that the discipline of international politics itself was founded upon (and has manifestly failed to achieve), namely to impose a significant halt to the egregious and relentless violence that continues to blight the contemporary global political landscape. An accompanying assumption is that this inclusion is merely in the service of supporting the theoretical and political agendas of conventional international politics. It might be considered that this scholarly aim of feminist work sounds provocative and overly ambitious, not least given the consistently assumed goal of feminism is typically understood to be simply about including women into the varied realms of high politics. Undeniably, a primary aim of this corpus of feminist scholarship is to create a body of theory and practice with enough agency and traction to make significant structural, epistemological, conceptual and political changes both to the ways international politics is studied, as well as fundamentally alter the violent ways in which much of global politics continues to manifest itself.
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This remains the case even if destabilisation seems politically and educationally unpalatable. As such, I start with the statement that the work of feminist scholarship on global politics is largely intended to be powerfully destabilising. But this opening statement or ‘pause for thought’, is less about the commonplace challenge of academic distillation and review, but rather specifically connected to the relentless consistency of problematic assumptions made about this provocative body of thought which can rob it of its primary worth. It is quite an undertaking to discuss the range of feminist approaches in relation to international politics over a 30-year period, not least given the vast amount of feminist scholarship that has been done over that time. All these theories yet the bodies keep piling up (Zalewski 1996).