320 Politikwissenschaft
This introduction provides an overview of feminist approaches to International Relations. The authors compare the Anglo-American debate with the Germanspeaking discussion in order to reveal similarities and differences. They identify three particular areas of research that characterize the German-speaking feminist debate in International Relations: (1) works evolving out of peace studies; (2) research on globalization and international economic institutions; (3) studies focusing on women’s movements together with most current works centering around international norms. They argue that feminist approaches to norms constitute a particularly promising research area which provides new "tools" to account for international, regional or domestic policy-change. Gender-sensitive research on norms also allows to address ethical questions that are vital for feminist understandings of science. Moreover, this new focus on norms enables bridge-building between feminism and the mainstream.
Content: 1 The Development of the Estonian Gender Policy Machinery 1.1 Initiation of Institutionalisation as a Result of International Commitments 1.2 Institutional Measures Facilitating EU Membership 1.3 Assessment of the Gender Equality Machinery 2 Conditions for Gender Mainstreaming in Estonia 2.1 Social Conditions 2.2 Administrative Conditions 3 Gender Mainstreaming Activities in the Estonian Public Administration 3.1 The Legal Foundations 3.2 Inter-ministerial Cooperation 3.3 Gender Mainstreaming Training 3.4 Knowledge Basis 3.5 Lack of Standards for data and Statistics 3.6 Non-adminsitrative Liaisons 4 Conclusion
Gender at the crossroads
(2021)
Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordination across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institutionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discursive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involvement of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.
Introduction
(2022)
Several global governance initiatives launched in recent years have explicitly sought to integrate concern for gender equality and gendered harms into efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism (CT/CVE). As a result, commitments to gender-sensitivity and gender equality in international and regional CT/CVE initiatives, in national action plans, and at the level of civil society programming, have become a common aspect of the multilevel governance of terrorism and violent extremism. In light of these developments, aspects of our own research have turned in the past years to explore how concerns about gender are being incorporated in the governance of (counter-)terrorism and violent extremism, and how this development has affected (gendered) practices and power relations in counterterrorism policymaking and implementation. We were inspired by the growing literature on gender and CT/CVE, and critical scholarship on terrorism and political violence, to bring together a collection of new research addressing these questions.