Laura J. Shepherd

A comprehensive textbook for advanced undergraduates studying feminism international relations, gender and global politics and similar courses. It provides students with an accessible but in-depth account of the most significant theories, methodologies, debates and issues.

A Feminist Introduction to International Relations

Gender Matters in Global Politics

This book examines the intersection of gender and violence in popular culture. Drawing on the latest thinking in critical international relations, media and cultural studies and gender studies, it focuses in particular on a number of popular TV shows including Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Generation Kill, The Corner and The West Wing. The book makes a unique theoretical contribution to the ‘narrative turn’ in International Relations by illustrating the ways in which popular culture and global politics are intertwined and how we make sense of our worlds through these two frames. Methodologically, the book enhances discourse-theoretical analysis in IR through its incorporation of methods from narratology and film studies. The book proposes an aesthetic ethicopolitical approach to global politics which challenges us to interrogate how it becomes possible that we think what we think, it challenges the truths that we hold to be self-evident and that which we take to be common sense. It demands that we think carefully, critically, uncomfortably, about our world(s) – even when we’re ‘only’ watching television.

Telling Stories

Gender, Violence and Popular Culture

Focusing on critical approaches to security, this new textbook offers readers both an overview of the key theoretical perspectives and a variety of methodological techniques. With a careful explication of core concepts in each chapter and an introduction that traces the development of critical approaches to security, this textbook will encourage all those who engage with it to develop a curiosity about the study and practices of security politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted – these are among the ways in which such a curiosity works. Through its attention to the fact that, and the ways in which, security matters in global politics, this work will both pioneer new ways of studying security and acknowledge the noteworthy scholarship without which it could not have been thought. This textbook will be essential reading to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of critical security studies, and highly recommended to students of traditional security studies, International Relations and Politics.

An Introduction to Theories and Methods

Critical Approaches to Security

"This history of UNSCR 1325, and its articulation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda that grew from its adoption, are as familiar to anyone working on the agenda as the alphabet, the rules of grammar and syntax, or the spelling of their own name. In this book, I encounter Women, Peace and Security as a policy agenda that emerges in and through the stories that are told about it, focussing on the world of WPS work at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (noting, of course, that many other equally rich and important stories could be told about the agenda in other contexts). Part of how the WPS agenda is formed as (and simultaneously forming) a knowable reality, is through the narration of its beginnings, its ongoing unfolding, and its plural futures. These stories account for the inception of the agenda, outline its priorities and delimit its possibilities, through the arrangement of discourse into narrative formations that communicate and constitute the agenda's triumphs and disasters. This is a book about the stories of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, and the worlds they contain"--

Logics of Global Governance

Narrating the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Caitlin Hamilton

The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously – or conventionally assumed to be – disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media. Interactive websites allow users to follow election results in real-time from the other side of the world, and online mapping means that the world ‘out there’ is now available on your mobile phone. Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age engages these themes in contemporary world politics, to better understand how digital communication through new media technologies changes our encounters with the world. Whether the focus is digital media, social networking or user-generated content, these sites of political activity and the artefacts they produce have much to tell us about how we engage world politics in the contemporary age. This volume represents the starting point of a dialogue about how digital technologies are beginning to impact the research and practice of scholars and practitioners in the field of International Relations, with the collection of cutting-edge essays dealing specifically with the intertextuality of world politics and digital popular culture. This book will be of use to International Relations research academics (and critically engaged publics) interested in the core themes of global politics – subjectivity, militarism, humanitarianism, civil society organisation, and governance. The book also employs theories and techniques closely associated with other social science disciplines, including political theory, sociology, cultural studies and media studies.

Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age

Gender Matters in Global Politics is a comprehensive textbook for advanced undergraduates studying feminism & international relations, gender and global politics and similar courses. It provides students with an accessible but in-depth account of the most significant theories, methodologies, debates and issues. This textbook is written by an international line-up of established and emerging scholars from a range of theoretical perspectives, providing students with provocative and cutting-edge insights into the study and practices of (how) gender matters in global politics. Key features and benefits of the book: Introduces students to the wide variety of feminist and gender theory and explains the relevance to contemporary global politics. Explains the insights of feminist theory for a range of other disciplines including international relations, international political economy and security studies. Addresses a large number of key contemporary issues such as human rights, trafficking, rape as a tool of war, peacekeeping and state-building, terrorism and environmental politics. Features extensive pedagogy to facilitate learning – seminar exercises, text boxes, photographs, suggestions for further reading, web resources and a glossary of key terms. In this innovative and groundbreaking textbook gender is represented as a noun, a verb and a logic, allowing both students and lecturers to develop a sophisticated understanding of the crucial role that gender plays in the theories, policies and practices of global politics.

The United Nations Peacebuilding Commission (UNPBC) was established in December 2005 to develop outlines of best practice in post-conflict reconstruction, and to secure the political and material resources necessary to assist states in transition from conflict to peacetime. Currently, the organization is involved in reconstruction and peacebuilding activities in six countries. Yet, a 2010 review by permanent representatives to the United Nations found that the hopes of the UN peacebuilding architecture "despite committed and dedicated efforts...ha[d] yet to be realized." Two of these hopes relate to gender and power, specifically that peacebuilding efforts integrate a "gender perspective" and that the Commission consult with civil society, NGOs, and women's organizations. This book is the first to offer an extensive and dedicated analysis of the activities of the UN Peacebuilding Commission with regard to both gender politics, broadly conceived, and the gendered dynamics of civil society participation in peacebuilding activities. Laura J. Shepherd draws upon original fieldwork that she conducted at the UN to argue that the gendered and spatial politics of peacebuilding not only feminizes civil society organizations, but also perpetuates hierarchies that privilege the international over the domestic realms. The book argues that the dominant representations of women, gender, and civil society in UN peacebuilding discourse produce spatial hierarchies that paradoxically undermine the contemporary emphasis on "bottom-up" governance of peacebuilding activities.

Locating Legitimacy

Gender, UN Peacebuilding, and the Politics of Space

Fully revised and updated, this second edition of Gender Matters in Global Politics is a comprehensive textbook for advanced undergraduates studying feminism & international relations, gender and global politics and similar courses. It provides students with an accessible but in-depth account of the most significant theories, methodologies, debates and issues. This textbook is written by an international line-up of established and emerging scholars from a range of theoretical perspectives, and brings together cutting-edge feminist scholarship in a variety of issue areas. Key features and benefits of the book: Introduces students to the wide variety of feminist and gender theory and explains the relevance to contemporary global politics Explains the insights of feminist theory for a range of other disciplines including international relations, international political economy and security studies Addresses a large number of key contemporary issues such as human rights, trafficking, rape as a tool of war, peacekeeping and state-building, terrorism and environmental politics Features detailed pedagogical tools and resources – seminar exercises, text boxes, photographs, suggestions for further reading, web resources and a glossary of key terms New chapters on - Environmental politics and ecology; War; Terrorism and political violence; Land, food and water; International legal institutions; Peacebuilding institutions and post-conflict reconstruction; Citizenship; Art, aesthetics and emotionality; and New social media and global resistance. This text enables students to develop a sophisticated understanding of the work that gender does in policies and practices of global politics.

Anuradha Mundkur

This book proposes that work on the Women, Peace and Security agenda undertaken by civil society actors can be interpreted as a form of care labour that nourishes and sustains the agenda – without which the agenda could not, in fact, succeed. The care labour of civil society is thus a condition of the Women, Peace and Security agenda’s success. United Nations Security Council resolution 1325 is the foundation of a diverse and pluralising policy framework known as the Women, Peace and Security agenda. Over the 20 years since the adoption of the foundational resolution, despite sustained resistance from some quarters and a general lack of adequate resourcing and political will, the agenda has continued to see many successes, and to achieve elements of political transformation large and small. This book explores how the supporting constituency of the agenda has ‘made 1325 work’. Based on new interviews with representatives of diverse civil society organisations working on WPS, the book offers a novel intervention into WPS scholarship, which has thus far paid relatively little attention to the labours of civil society actors working on WPS, particularly on an individual level. The authors consider the motivations, pressures and frustrations experienced by WPS civil society actors, as well as the goals and challenges. This book is based on original research and will be of interest to scholars, policymakers and practitioners working on WPS specifically, and those working in Political Science, International Relations, Development Studies, and on the global governance of peace and security. It will also be relevant for students in WPS-focused programs and of peace and security studies more broadly.

Making 1325 Work

Civil Society, Care Labour, and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Containing contributions from leading experts in the field, this Handbook explores the many ways gender and violence interact across different contexts and offers a range of disciplinary perspectives. This comprehensive volume connects micro-level interpersonal violence to macro-level structural forms of violence across three discrete but interrelated sections: concepts, representations, and contexts.

Handbook on Gender and Violence

Lucy B. Hall

Anna L. Weissman

In global politics, women's bodies are policed, objectified, surveilled, and feared, with particular attention paid to both their met or unmet procreative potential. While the significance of motherhood varies across cultures, it is, as this book argues, connected not just to gender and sexuality, but also to religion and nationality. Reproduction is central to the flourishing of any nation or culture, and therefore motherhood is a major signifier of women's relationship to the state. This is so much the case that states enact laws about which women can bear children and have supported sterilization efforts in cases where women are not deemed appropriate bearers of the nation. States also legislate reproductive technologies, adoption, and government support for parenting. By considering representations and narratives of maternity, this volume shows how practices of global politics shape and are shaped by the gendered norms and institutions that underpin motherhood. Motherhood matters in global politics. Yet, the diverse ways in which performances and practices of motherhood are constituted by and are constitutive of other dimensions of political life are frequently obscured, or assumed to be of little interest to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. Featuring innovative and diverse chapters on the politics of motherhood as an institution, this collection shows that maternality is troubled, complicated, and heterogeneous in global politics. Thus, performances and practices of motherhood warrant closer and more sustained scrutiny. This book builds on work by feminist international relations scholars, extending into disruptive spaces of queer theory, literary critique, and post-colonial studies. The chapters in this book consider the meaning of motherhood, particularly during times of war versus peace; the connections between motherhood and nationhood (and reproduction of the state); and care work and maternal labor, particularly as performed by transnational workers. Ultimately, this book demonstrates the complex interconnections between the individual, the state, and the global through the lens of maternality.

Maternality in Global Politics

Troubling Motherhood

Laura Sjoberg

Caron E. Gentry

This handbook provides a comprehensive look at the study of gender and security in global politics. The volume is based on the core argument that gender is conceptually necessary to thinking about central questions of security; analytically important for thinking about cause and effect in security; and politically important for considering possibilities of making the world better in the future. Contributions to the volume look at various aspects of studying gender and security through diverse lenses that engage diverse feminisms, with diverse policy concerns, and working with diverse theoretical contributions from scholars of security more broadly. It is grouped into four thematic sections: Gendered approaches to security (including theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches); Gendered insecurities in global politics (including the ways insecurity in global politics is distributed and read on the basis of gender); Gendered practices of security (including how policy practice and theory work together, or do not); Gendered security institutions (across a wide variety of spaces and places in global politics). This handbook will be of great interest to students of gender studies, security studies and IR in general.

Laura J. Shepherd

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