Relevance between Feminist Theories and International Relations

Today, many international scholars consider that the topics over the relevance between feminist theories and international relations are one of the most heated topics during the course of discovering new ideas and strategy proposals when challenges emerge. In her book, Feminist Theory and International Relations in postmodern era, Christine Sylvester gives examples such as the evidence draw from case studies base on “realist versus idealist” “scientific versus traditional”, “modernist versus postmodernist”, to elaborated the problematic situations many scholars face when they suffered from a significant amount of female figures being missing from the picture. This work, which was published in 1994, displays a distinct narrative on feminist theories’ relation with international political studies. Sylvester aim to help the reader understand what an important role that feminism perspectives has had in international politics’ development, for which not only it is becoming the strength but also indirectly reflects the crucial environment in which we are living.

Unlike most people who immediately associate international relations with realism theory, for Christine Sylvester, however, she argues that the absences of feminism perspectives is the most notable setback for the development of international relations studies. She points out that, for many feminist scholars, they are rather “homeless” in the field of international relations. (pg.139) The knowledge of gender bias presents itself to many female scholars and feminist theories via the form of exclusion. Sylvester senses this negative feature as an inevitable obstacle for one to gradually conduct her studies; she points out that the “discipline of international relations is sorely ...

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... rooted behind all these incidents. It all boiled down to the questions of what define power and security, to whom and from whom? New theories need to be introduced and take into consideration since the world is constantly changing, and so as our understandings. One should not ignore the great benefit that feminism theories can bring to the studies of international politics should. Having said that, in terms of how far the feminism advocates can go to push the international relations scholars and let their voice to be heard and be prioritized, only the time will tell.

“Throughout the discussions to come, we will remember that recognition is a hard fought batter when one is among the excluded and that debates and dialogues about emancipation can leave many people out of competent communication, scientific explanation and recurrent patterns of law and logic” (pg.226)