Recent and Current Collaborations

(with Lili Chen) Theorizing LGBT Members of Martial Arts and Ritual Arts Groups in Timor-Leste

Lili Chen (Universidad Nasional Timor Lorosa’e, Timor-Leste) and I have been collaborating on a project uncovering and theorizing the ways that LGBT members of martial arts groups and ritual arts groups in Timor-Leste experience their membership in those organizations, how they frame brotherhood, and what that means for those members’ political participation and for the organizations’ roles in Timor-Leste politics more broadly.

The first article resulting from this collaboration, “Actores LGBT, grupos de artes marciales y grupos de artes rituales, y construcción del estado en el Timor Oriental posconflicto,” was published in 2025 by Relaciones Internacionales. This article uses ethnographic and semi-structured interviews with LGBT members of our groups to understand how they are included in their organizations, how they are approached and how they share their background. We discuss these challenges in the context of stereotypical representations of groups such as violence and males, and argue that it is necessary to replant LGBT membership in these groups within a broader context that considers the relationships between agencies, violence and gender, both in East Timor and in global politics. In our dialogue with the participants, we find that we despair of the stereotypical associations of general and that we come to the organizations that participate as construction agents of the state, in a place of extralegal violation. We contextualize the groups of martial arts and rituals in East Timor after discussing the actual interviews and data analysis methods. We present the analysis in three sections: : questions about gender and sexuality in martial arts and ritual groups, the relationship of these organizations to their communities and their propensity (or lack thereof) for violence, and their role in community and state building. We conclude by arguing that an openness to the complexity of gender and sexuality within both groups can also reveal complexities in their activities, including community and state building.

The second article from the collaboration is forthcoming at the International Feminist Journal of Politics. It focuses on gender, agency, and violence. We find that LGBT MAG members express agency through iterative transgression and negotiation of dominant and binary gender categories and identities (men/women; protector/the protected). These LGBT MAG members can perform hypermasculine characteristics selectively and strategically, but we find that those performances are not simply reifications of organizational hypermasculinity. Instead, they are critical strategies for contesting and resisting the current discourses of gendered agency, citizenship, and LGBT belonging. To make this argument, this article surveys the existing literature on gender and MAGs in Timor-Leste, introduces the findings from ten semi-structured ethnographic interviews with LGBT MAG members, and discusses the meanings of those findings. It concludes by discussing the implications of re-thinking LGBT membership in MAGs in Timor-Leste for understanding relationships between gender, agency, and violence, in Timor-Leste and beyond.

(with Seema Shekhawat) The Positioning of Women in the WPS Agenda

Seema Shekhawat (University of North Florida) have been looking at the intersections of her research on gender-based human rights advocacy and my research on significations of women in global politics to think about what a ‘woman’ means in the WPS agenda – a conversation that has inspired several collaborative writings.

The first article from this collaboration was published in India Quarterly in 2025, called “Problematic Positioning in the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda.” It argues that, while gender-sensitive resolutions and texts are essential for achieving sustainable and just peace across the globe, the intent and content of such resolutions must align; their mere existence does not ensure the desired outcomes. The erroneous placement of women in most such documents, including in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, is adequate to argue that the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda somewhat reproduces gender-discriminatory practices. This article argues that the gap between the theory and practice of the WPS agenda is wide. Though it is important to work towards implementing these resolutions and texts in a much more effective manner, it is even more important to look within these resolutions and texts to identify the issues contributing to the inefficacy of the agenda. It is counterproductive to partially confront patriarchal stereotypes, and a special focus on the language of the document is necessary to ensure real impact. In this article, we are using the dichotomising of gendered experiences of conflict into binaries of ‘protector vs protected’ or ‘peaceful vs violent’ to argue that such an oversimplified grouping overlooks the complexities of manifold gendered experiences of women in conflict situations and reproduces the patriarchal theory and practice of discrimination and exclusion. The article argues that we cannot expect an effective change as far as gender equality is concerned if the WPS agenda remains fragile.

Another result of this collaboration is forthcoming in The Women, Peace, and Security Agenda: A Normative Framework Under Pressure, edited by Annika Bjorkdahl, Jenny Lorentzen, and Inger Skjelsbaek. In this chapter, we weave our argument around the three identified sub-clusters: gender equality, women’s participation and women’s protection. Our figuration analysis includes these three sub-clusters in an overlapping manner. The intersection of the three sub-clusters is apparent in our identified figurations of ‘woman’ in the agenda, with, at times, one sub-cluster appropriating more prominently one figuration, and at other times two or even all three sub-clusters defining a particular figuration. In the first figuration, with predominant input from the protection sub-cluster, the instrumental ‘woman’ in WPS is a stand-in for wars’ victims writ large — she is constituted as the ‘beautiful soul’ for whom the ‘just warrior’ fights, and for whom ‘he’ must fight. ‘Her’ role in WPS can be as a reminder of the horrors of war, particularly for its ‘innocent’ ‘bystanders’ whom ‘she’ comes to represent without regard for agency, complexity or depth. In the second figuration, with predominant input from the sub-cluster of participation, inherited associations between women, femininity, maternity and peace are predicated to suggest that women (as feminine) are essential to peace because they are peace(ful) — (perhaps) equal to men (except) without their flaws. With predominant input from the sub-cluster of gender equality, the third figuration as a proxy for state/nation constitutes the ‘woman’ (as mother) as biological and cultural reproducer of state/nation as ‘essential’ to peaceand security in ways related to her ‘essential’ role in making possible the future(s) of her state/nation. Looking at these figurations, we argue that the ‘woman’ in WPS is anything but forward and unproblematic — and ‘her’ instrumentalization can be understood as key to some of the pathologies in, and backlashes towards, the WPS agenda.

(with Laura J. Shepherd) On Emotion and International Relations Scholarship

Recently, Laura J. Shepherd (University of Sydney) and I had a conversation about emotion in IR scholarship layered on top of IR scholarship about emotion. In “Thinking-Feeling-Doing International Relations Research,” we make the case that research is necessarily emotional because it is a human endeavor and scholars are feeling creatures—something important to understand with every word that we as international relations (IR) scholars think, write, and share. IR research is not only unimaginable without, but is also substantively and methodologically shaped by, two highly emotional conversations with self—one about the substance of the research and the other about its process. Who we are emotionally is bound up in every research choice that we make, although research is a distorted and imperfect mirror in which to evaluate the appearance of our selves. This chapter explores how we think–feel about, and make the choices that shape, our research, reflecting on our research practices and the emotions that surface in the contributions to this volume.

(with Luise Benfeldt) Sexuality and International Security

This collaboration started as a discussion of the intersections between Luise Benfeldt (Swedish Defense University) and I about the conceptual overlaps between her research on incels and mine on early modern treaty marriage consummations. We started thinking about how to conceptualize sex in international relations generally and in international security specifically.

This conversation starts in “Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and International Security,” in which seek to build a research agenda arguing, with recent research in feminist and queer security studies, that sexual relations are international relations, that international relations are sexual relations, and that the sexuality in/of international relations has profound applications for the distribution of security and insecurity in global politics. Sex, gender, and sexuality play key roles in the delineation of state borders, the distribution of violence, and indeed the allocation of life and death in the global political arena. We introduce that argument in three sections. First, we provide an overview of the relevant concepts and fields of research upon which our work on sex and international in/security builds. We then explore two snapshots of our research on the role(s) of sexualities in (in)security: roles of sexuality in discourses about misogynistic incels’ political violence and sex acts in migration politics. TWe go on to propose some preliminary theoretical observations based on this work, arguing for a consideration of how ‘sex rules’ govern (understandings of) international global politics and in(security).

(with Jonathon Whooley) On Feminist Pedagogy in and for International Relations

This collaboration reflects long conversations between Jonathon Whooley (San Francisco State University, University of California-Berkeley) and I on how feminisms enter classroom practices, teaching texts, and methodological discussions in International Relations. In our chapter “Security and Conflict” in the textbook Political Science is for Everybody, we present what we see as an intersectional feminist approach to teaching security in International Relations classrooms accessibly. We try to apply this to a reference discussion in our contribution on “Security” to the Encyclopedia of Political Sociology, where we discuss the fraught nature of the term alongside teaching expected basics.

We theorize about how teaching IR with gender in mind and teaching gender in the IR classroom can be informed by intersectional feminist principles in our article “Teaching about Gender and Sexuality in the International Relations Classroom” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. In that piece, we argue that feminist pedagogy considers the scholarship on and practices of teaching gender and sexuality in global politics. Humans narrativize (tell stories about) their lives, creating stories about the world that they see in order to make sense of their complicated realities. As such, there are multiple story lines of the ways that a feminist curiosity can affect approaches to teaching, strategies for teaching feminist curiosity, the role that genders and sexualities play in constituting the international relations (IR) classroom, and approaches to teaching material related to genders and sexualities in global politics. There are six story lines that reveal the distinctive features of feminist pedagogy: foregrounding an explicitly feminist politics, treating knowledge as situated, reimagining the purpose and structure of the classroom, recognizing and combating alienation, broadening the view of texts available for teaching and learning, and including explicitly activist components in teaching strategies. Across these story lines, feminist teaching is an important part of feminist academic practice, where pedagogy with a feminist curiosity foregrounds the politics of feminisms and the politics of pedagogy.

We have also applied the parts of these conversations about what it means to use feminist lenses to think about global politics to methodological discussions. For Sage Research Methods Cases, we use our empirical research on the Arab Spring as an example of what it means to allow feminist curiosity to inspire and guide research design and research methodology. In a more critical piece in the Handbook of Research Methods in International Relations, we look at the problems of a non-critical approach to methodology for IR’s application to ‘the real world’ that we both study and live in. Questioning the ways in which IR methods are understood and mapped, this chapter engages methods choice as social and performative. It then breaks down the very premise on which many disciplinary methodological choices are made, and disciplinary research is performed: that a researcher is and can be separate and separated from what she/he/they research(es). It then suggests understanding the ‘policy impacts’ of research (broadly understood) as a part of the research endeavour itself. It argues that seeing IR research as ‘in the world’ should be much more expansive than it is often viewed by in methods textbooks, and provides some paths forward to theorizing method choice as performative.

(with Aine Bennett) On the Nature of State Security

Aine Bennett (University of Warwick) and I have been in conversation about what it means to theorize security, from a feminist perspective and more broadly, when most security theorizing in IR is state-centric, and feminist work critiques state-centrism in both policy action and scholarly study.

The conversation begins in a chapter called “State Security” in Security Studies: An Applied Introduction. This chapter accounts for state-level security theorizing by asking how security theorists imagine ‘the state’ and tell its histories and evolutions. It starts with the story of loan Vraciu, an asylum-seeker from Romania in the United Kingdom, and how the state related him to its security. From this story and other examples, the chapter suggests that ‘the state’ and ‘state security’ in global politics are often interdependent concepts. Both policymakers and scholars act on and therefore make real associations between statehood, security, and sovereignty that
further particular forms of the ‘sovereign state’. Looking beyond these continuously reified associations, this chapter debunks myths that ‘the state’ is always a provider of security. Instead, it shows both that ‘the state’ makes and hides insecurities within its borders, andthat theories of state security often obscure the insecurity of states and insecurity in them.

(with Bryant Harden) On Teaching Feminist Theory

Bryant Harding (Florida State University) and I have been talking about the ways to teach feminist theory since he first started teaching – when we were using very different methods to bring feminist theory to students. Our conversation has led to both theoretical work and practical advice about what to teach from feminist IR in IR undergraduate classrooms and how to do so from a feminist perspective.

The first published part of this conversation is a chapter called “Teaching Feminist Theories” in the Palgrave Handbook on the Pedagogy of International Relations Theory. In this chapter, we provide some ideas for navigating decisions about what to teach about gender and how based on our experiences. The chapter begins with some parameters for defining feminist theories, and an exploration of how the substance of feminist theories influences teaching (feminist theory in) IR. It continues by discussing some potential challenges of teaching feminist theories in global politics. It then introduces some pedagogical tactics and example assignments for teaching feminist theorizing. Finally, this chapter concludes by discussing some key themes with related texts and key takeaways.