This book, which originates in a conference held at the University of Southern California Center for International Studies celebrating 20 years of Feminist International Relations scholarship in the United States, looks to construct conversations about the history, present state of, and future of Feminist International Relations as a field across subfields, continents, and generations of scholars. In the past 20 years, much work has been done on and substantial progress has been made concerning the question of how gender matters in global politics, global economics, and global culture. The progress has been noted both in the academic field of international relations and, increasingly, in the policy world. 

With the increased visibility of feminist IR has come a number of questions, tensions, and new puzzles to work out.  Where do violent women fit? How does feminism accommodate differences in culture, race, and religion? What would looking at global politics writ large through gendered lenses really look like? How do feminist theoretical and policy analyses fit together?

This book looks to make a statement about the state of the field, and put forth proposals for the future directions of the field, in a unique format: a series of intellectual conversations, starting with papers of cutting-edge research in the field, including provocative comments from scholars whose perspective on the issue area is unique, either from their own research, or from their location, culture, or position related to the subject matter. The book opens with an introduction by the conference organizers, and closes with a narrated discussion between the book’s sixteen authors about what it means to “gender” IR in the 21st century.  It is our goal that this book at once introduces feminist IR to non-specialist audiences and provokes thoughtful reactions from scholars who have made their career in the field.

In the last decade, it has become impossible to ignore that women participate in terrorism. While women’s participation in terrorism occurred throughout the 20th century, it was rare and often ignored by both media and scholarly outlets.  In the last decade, women have been participants in acts of terrorism, including suicide bombing, airplane hijacking, and hostage-taking, in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, and Chechnya, among other places in the world.  Women’s participation in terrorism has been the subject of a substantial amount of media and scholarly attention, but, to this point, the analysis of women, gender, and suicide terrorism has been sparse and riddled with entrenchment of traditional, stereotypical ideas about women’s capabilities and motivations.

This book aims to make two contributions to the study of 21st century terrorism: first, to provide information about women’s participation in and relationship with terrorism in unprecedented depth and breadth; and second, to analyze that information with a keen eye towards the political, gender, race, and culture dynamics of the 21st century world.

Women, Gender, and 21st Century Terrorism is an edited volume divided into four parts. Part I, “Introducing Women and 21st Century Terrorism,” includes the volume’s introduction, a chapter providing an overview of women’s participations in and relationships with contemporary terrorism, and a historical chapter tracing women warriors’ involvement in the politics and conflicts of Islamic societies.  Part II, “Women, Terrorism, and Contemporary Conflicts” notes that, while women’s participation in the various terrorist causes associated with Al Qaeda has been widely documented in the media, women are militants, terrorists, and revolutionaries in a number of conflicts around the world.  This Part includes empirical and theoretical analysis of women’s role in terrorism in Chechnya, Kashmir, Palestine, and Sri Lanka.  Part III, “Women, Gender, and Al Qaeda,” then turns to women’s involvement in Al Qaeda, as terrorists, as suicide bombers, and as family of male terrorists and suicide bombers.  The chapters in this part both present information about the women in and around Al Qaeda and provide critical interrogations of the gendered media and scholarly presentations of those women.  The book concludes with Part IV, “The Study of Women, Gender, and Terrorism,” serves as a theoretical conclusion to the volume

Contents and acknowledgments for Women, Gender, and 21st Century Terrorism

Gender, War, and Militarism argues that militarism relies on gender-biased understandings of citizenship, the state, and the international security arena; and that it has gendered impacts. Building on previous work in several disciplines, the contributors explore how militarism requires and produces gender inequality; how militarism generates gendered roles, ideologies, and expectations in times of war and conflict, despite differences among national and cultural contexts; specific gendered impacts of militarism and war on women as combatants and civilians; the ways media outlets deploy gender in reporting and generating support war; gendered elements of post-conflict reconstruction, and gender considerations in teaching about war, especially during and after conflict.

Twenty chapters in six sections focus on varying “hot spots” of recent or current conflict: Bosnia, East Timor, El Salvador, Iraq, Israel, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and the United States. These analyses reveal that, although it takes different forms, gendering is a constant feature of twenty-first century. militarism

Gender, War, and Militarism acknowledgments

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective.

Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist Security Studies and Security Studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of Security Studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women's presence in or the gendering of world politics.

Gender and International Security acknowledgments

The essays in the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) section of the compendium are organized into the introduction; essays on the meaning-making, theory, and practice of feminist research and pedagogy in International Relations (IR); essays addressing questions of how gender relates to aspects of war, conflict, and peace; essays addressing gender and governance, democracy, and human rights; and essays in feminist International Political Economy. These essays have significant overlapping bibliography even though they take up substantively different topics. The shared bibliography creates a foundation for present and future conversations across substantive areas of inquiry in Feminist IR. 

Rethinking the Twenty-First Century brings much needed context and perspective to the security problems we face today.

In recent years, the 'Bush Doctrine' - that the security threats we now face are entirely unprecedented - has echoed around the world. Global security and stability is now challenged not only by states and nuclear war, but by insurgency, disease, environmental degradation and military privatisation.

Yet this creates a deep sense of disconnect in the way we perceive politics, and can be dangerously stark and ahistorical.

The chapters here show that, far from being a clean break, the 'new' problems faced today might actually have 'old' solutions. What can Locke tell us about terrorists? What does Bentham have to say about sanctions? What are the ethics of outsourcing war to private companies? By looking back to decades and even centuries of ethical analysis and political theory, this book provides fascinating insight into all these questions.

Rethinking the 21st Century acknowledgments