Feminist approaches to international politics have only been allowed into the discipline of International Relations as ‘good girls.’ Several scholars have made an argument along these lines, with Weber’s (1994) response to Keohane’s (1989) article on contributions by different feminist theories to the study of International Relations (IR) being one of the most cited positions on the issue. Keohane evaluates feminist standpoint as having the greatest potential for supplementing the mainstream (including, but not limited to, neorealist and neoliberal) IR in the short run (hence Weber’s categorisation of Keohane’s representation of this theory as a ‘good girl’), feminist empiricism as having a promise of supplementation in the long run (hence a ‘little girl’) and feminist post-modernism as having no such promise at all (hence a ‘bad girl’). Weber (1994:338) argues that Keohane ‘mutilates’ the feminist body of literature threatening to overflow the established boundaries of IR; the result being not just a partial representation, but a complete transformation, of the three theories. This can be seen in Keohane’s identification of standpoint feminism with his own project of neoliberal institutionalism, despite the former’s ontological and epistemological assumptions, as epitomised by Hartsock’s (1983) historical materialist strand of the theory, being contrary to the latter’s.
When it comes to my own position on the issue (i.e., the kind of feminist approaches that have been allowed into the discipline of IR), I see IR as consisting of multiple functionally and/or geographically defined sub-disciplines (hereafter referred to as ‘camps,’ a term coined by Sylvester in Zalewski 2008). Following from this multifaceted understanding of IR, I argue that both ‘good girls’ and ‘bad girls’ exist in IR (albeit my definition of these categories differs from Weber’s), with some ‘camps’ being dominated by ‘good girls’ (alongside other positivist approaches) and others by ‘bad girls’ (alongside other interpretivist, hereafter referred to as post-positivist, approaches).
I focus on the ‘camp’ of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), which I see as more representative of the scholarship and practice of IR (hereafter referred to as global IR) than other ‘camps.’ I use the term global IR as a descriptive term for the multitude of IR scholarships and practices in/from countries across the Global North and the Global South, which should not be confused with the normative project of ‘Global IR’ proposed by Acharya (2014). When it comes to feminism, I argue that the Foreign Policy Analysis and practice are dominated by ‘good girls’ in both the Global North and the Global South. Although this essay focuses on the ‘camp’ of FPA and feminist theories, the core/peripheral positions of ‘good girls’ and ‘bad girls’ within FPA can be seen as representative of all positivist and post-positivist approaches within not just the ‘camp’ itself but global IR.
In terms of structure, the main body of this essay consists of two sections. The first section focuses on IR scholarship, providing details about my own understanding of IR (including its ‘camps’ and theories) against the background of its disciplinary development. The second section focuses on the practice of IR in relation to the scholarship. Here, I use examples of (both explicit and implicit) feminist foreign policies (FFPs) to illustrate the predominance of ‘good girls’ in not just foreign policy scholarship but also practice.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
