Gender and International Relations

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.