Recent Projects
See also recent and ongoing collaborations
“Feminist Theories and Thinking Security Otherwise.” Security Studies 33(5)(2025): 860-884.
This article argues that the foundation built for Security Studies around Waltz is haunted by his ghost and should be recognized as not just incidentally but structurally exclusive. This article proceeds in four sections. The first argues that, according to Parent’s introduction to this Special Issue, the discipline “is working in a Waltzian paradigm by collective choice” structurally excluding gender from consideration. The second argues that gendered structure manifests in what the field considers as relevant to security, particularly in reference to what Parent identifies as Waltz’s lasting influence on the big questions of the field. The third section considers an alternative disciplinary sociology for Security Studies, inspired by feminist theorizing rather than in Waltzian thought. The final section briefly considers what such an approach might mean for the themes and essays in this Special Issue specifically, and the field more broadly.
“Violences in/of Critical Terrorism Studies.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 17(4) (2024): 878-902.
This article makes a case that CTS scholarship is always, necessarily, and specifically paradigmatically violent, even if one adopts CTS’ critiques of “mainstream” terrorism studies and understands CTS scholars to be normatively well-intended. In making that case, this article goes over different violences of CTS scholarship which have important impacts in the field and in the “real world” from which the field often distinguishes itself: the (often unreflected) reification of “terrorism” discourses, the (often uncritical) engagement with P/CVE initiatives, the construction and perpetuation of gendered and racialised ideas of agency in “terrorism” and “counterterrorism,” and the complex publication and citations practices in the field. The article then argues that the effects of these violences are made more intense by the violences involved with research reflexivity in the field, and even in this article. It concludes by discussing possible futures for a CTS, which acknowledges its own violences and looks to understand and even possibly redirect them.
(with Milena Aćimić Remiković) “Montenegrin Gender ‘Protections’ and the Limits of Gender Equality Law.” Women’s Studies International Forum 107(2024):103011.
Our basic argument is that Montenegro has an approach to gender equality law that appears and claims to be gender-progressive but actually (sometimes intentionally sometimes not) perpetuates gender subordination. What looks like a lack of effective enforcement of gender equality provisions is, we argue, actually much more complex. Gender equality laws can be deployed in ways that contravene real equality goals. We also argue that Montenegro it is not alone in the apparent internal contradiction of having high-quality gender laws ‘on the books’ and unexpectedly poor results. Instead, similar situations are widespread, and gender equality legal discourses often lack adequate tools to conceptualize and address their complexities. We propose, then, a different analytical approach to gender equality law that takes into account contradictions in, and regressions inherent in, (some) gender equality policies.
“Knock It Down? Unmaking, Deconstruction, and Deconstruction as/in Politics Research,” Global Studies Quarterly 3(4)(2023): ksad066.
Unmaking, deconstruction, and destruction are part of the everyday life of politics. This article makes an initial case for the plausibility of the argument that International Relations (IR) should expand its gaze and scholarly practice not only into material-aesthetic making, as suggested by the International Political Design (IPD) project, but also into material-aesthetic unmaking and destruction. If making is thinking, as Austin and Leander (2021) suggest, unmaking is also a scholarly enterprise, one that might be as intellectually significant as making, and have important implications for the project specifically and IR scholarship more generally. While I am not arguing that unmaking or destruction is always or even usually normatively good, I am arguing that it is intellectually important to understand and engage, and that thinking about unmaking has important normative implications for making. The first section of this article introduces the IPD project, and suggests that it is operationally and necessarily positive in its current instantiations, despite its criticality. The second section, drawing on inspirations as divergent as queer theory and realist IR, sets out an onto-epistemologically negative approach to IR/the world and uses that approach to problematize the positivity of the IPD project. The following three sections engage with potential negative approaches to making-as-scholarship: negative design, deconstruction, and destruction, engaging with the potential implications for both disciplinary inquiry in IR and the practices of IR scholars in the “world” as such. A conclusion talks about the importance of including deconstruction, demolition, destruction, tearing down, and unmaking in IR scholarship.
(with Cameron G. Thies) “Gender and International Relations,” Annual Review of Political Science 26(2023): 451-467.
This review article argues that this is both an exciting and fraught time in the study of gender and sexuality in global politics. On the one hand, feminist scholars build on more than 30 years of research in the field, with increasingly diverse scholars doing increasingly interdisciplinary research. On the other hand, crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and global inflation have shown that there are many sites of sharp, continuing gender inequities. In response to this combined excitement and challenge, this article addresses four areas of gender and IR research that are both enduring and growing: gender and political economy, gender and security, queer approaches, and feminist foreign policy. As we discuss each of these areas, we begin with a recent exemplar of scholarship and then discuss other scholarship in that area to give a sense of contours of each subfield of inquiry.
(with J. Samuel Barkin) “The Queer Art of Failed IR?” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 45(4)(2021): 167-183.
What is missing from the debate about the “end of IR theory” or the rejection of the now infamous “isms”? Queer theory. Those who declare that IR theory is over and those who see it as making a comeback; those who reject the “isms” and those who champion them seem like they are on opposite sides of a very wide spectrum. This article argues, however, that all is not as it seems. Instead, the various “sides” of the debates about the futures of IR all take for granted a common set of understandings of what research is, what research success is, that research success is valuable, and how those things predict the futures of IR. Their only significant disagreement is about how they see the story unfolding. We disagree on the result as well, but the root of our disagreement is in the terms of the debates. We see IR as failing in two ways: failing to find a self-satisfactory grand narrative and failing to achieve its necessarily impossible goals. The current state-of-the-field literature fights the failing of IR theory—even those who see it as over memorialize its successes. We argue that failure is not to be fought but to be celebrated and actively participated in. Analyzing IR’s failures using queer methodology and queer analysis, we argue that recognizing IR’s failure can revive IR as an enterprise.
“Quantum Ambivalence,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 49(1)(2020): 126-139.
My reading of quantum IR has always been in ambivalent, uncomfortable agreement, even if I could not articulate the reason for that ambivalence. This article confronts that ambivalence through reading Laura Zanotti’s Ontological Entanglements – an interesting and engaging book with which I largely agree, and read ambivalently. It brings the reader along on my reading of Ontological Entanglements, engaging my ambivalence and explicitly relating the some of the book’s key claims to feminist work on ontology and epistemology. It continues to explore the potential pitfalls with quantum approaches to IR through their manifestations in Ontological Entanglements. The article concludes by engaging Ontological Entanglements from the complex position of simultaneously being impressed with the work and opposed to its promulgation.