by Gillian Youngs
The heavy emphasis on questions that confront us in ‘The Hesitant Feminist’s Guide to the Future’ (Milojevic 2024) is a useful and powerful approach to the contemporary state of play in both the thinking about and application of what might be termed feminist principles. One takeaway message from the approach is the need for such questions to be recognized and extensively debated, including in diverse arenas of policy and practice. International relations is clearly one of these arenas, concerning as it does state-based patriarchal structures and their expression through state-to-state and wider international processes and events. Feminist international relations addresses historically-embedded patterns of gender inequalities – social, political, economic and cultural – which tend to be downplayed or absent from dominant masculinist perspectives (Peterson 1992, 2003).
Physical and psychological violence against women at micro and macro levels is in play here, from domestic (home and national) state settings to large-scale international processes, including trafficking for sex work and other purposes, rape as a weapon of war, and gender-based vulnerabilities in refugee and migrant conditions (Pettman 1996). Such focus represents an embodied human-centred approach that contrasts sharply with abstractions of the dominant mainstream male-centred framing of international relations in theory and practice. These abstractions derive from the binary patriarchal constructions of power, positioning male as subject and woman as object, with supporting binaries affirming and maintaining this subjecthood and objecthood in oppositional pairings such as strong/weak, rational/emotional, mind/body, active/passive (Elshtain 1993).
This oppositional construction works to position male subjecthood and influence in the ‘public’ sphere, notably in politics and the economy, and to identify female objecthood in the ‘private’ sphere of domestic, familial and intimate relations. Male dominance carries over from public to private, as domestic violence demonstrates, but even when women gain power and influence in public arenas, they carry their disempowering object status with them. Patriarchal hierarchies in state-based international relations contain women predominantly within domestic (home and state) boundaries, leaving them most out of place, disempowered and vulnerable beyond them.
Feminist human-centred stances aim to transcend the effects of masculinist abstractions and place embodied experiential realities at the heart of both theory and practice (Youngs 2000 and forthcoming 2025). It is important to stress that this has ontological and epistemological implications and is an essential dimension of understanding the continuing struggle to effect feminist transformations. To clarify further, masculinist abstractions not only work to empower men and disempower women in ontological respects through gendered binaries, but as a direct result also empower mainstream masculinist knowledge structures and processes and disempower their feminist counterparts.
Just as we can argue female subjectivity and power are constantly effaced by masculinist parameters in theory and practice, so is the knowledge with feminist purpose generated by women or focused on their interests. These dynamics are historically entrenched to the extent that the wide body of feminist analysis going back hundreds of years examining gendered power, its impacts and inequities, is also constantly effaced by mainstream theory and practice. The feminist knowledge base examining a holistic human-centred understanding of power relations and experience is marginalized, leaving reductive abstract masculinist framings of reality in the dominant position.
In the territorial state-based system of international relations, these framings are institutionally articulated in the entities of state governments, which are the sole legitimate users of force and primary executors of war and violent conflict, including in defence of their boundaries and citizens as well as against internal threats, notably from terrorists. States are masculinist actors pursuing national interests predominantly defined in masculinist terms that represent a reductive sense of human experience and purpose (Youngs 1999).
The United Nations may have been a powerful changemaker for bringing human rights to the fore in international relations – including in the area of gender inequalities – but its members are states, and while the principle of collective security has impact at times, the international system as a whole continues to work along state-centric power-based lines. These follow the masculinist ontological and epistemological trajectories discussed above. Their reductionism draws attention and power away from feminist frameworks that position men and women equally as subjects, and human experience as encompassing equally their concerns and interests.
A human-centred rather than a state-centred world would be the hope of many citizens across the globe, who may or may not identify as or consider themselves to be feminists but share the wish for more peace and less violence, as well as a turn away from the growing extremes of inequality gaps within and across states characteristic of recent times. Bringing a history of feminist knowledge and practice into the centre from the margins is one of the routes to greater awareness of the effects of masculinist histories and reductionism, and points to transformational possibilities beyond them. It may not offer ready answers to the huge global challenges we face but its potential contributions to different ways of thinking about them cannot be ignored.
Any paths towards evolution of state-centrism or new models of the UN would necessarily be long processes with a number of stages and varied forms of experimentation for effectiveness. One starting point could be new frameworks enabling connected learning across state and UN agencies in key areas such as human security, environmental sustainability, and economic development beyond the dominant growth principles. This could launch, for example, with a focus on the growing challenges and human and societal costs of displacement of people and migratory pressures of different kinds due to conflicts, economic plight or hopes, and political and sociocultural forms of oppression.
The high priority of these issues for states, regional organizations and the UN alike is strong motivation to generate joint agendas for future-scoping and scenario-testing new collaborative strategies to identify and experiment with fresh approaches and solutions. Teams engaged in this work could be constructed on a radical anti-hierarchical basis to foreground grassroots experience and knowledge and institute diverse and inclusive leadership at every level and stage. Understanding the complex impacts of intersecting inequalities, as well as intergenerational opportunities and possibilities for new forms of policy and practice, could be among the main drivers of the agenda-setting and learning.
Such drivers are concerned with how politics is undertaken and formed as much as its outcomes, including strategic goals and policy ambitions. These drivers would also impact on understandings of the nature of leadership, who should be engaged in it and how it can be made more inclusive. Processes of this kind could build not only new collaborative models of policymaking practice but also significant fresh critical awareness and reflectiveness about the limitations of masculinist state-centrism and innovative possibilities for transcending them to achieve better outcomes for all. This is about collective learning on new ways to undertake international relations beyond historically entrenched parameters.
Future scenarios on this path could include:
- An intergenerational UN Think Tank, meeting and updating each year understandings of human security in the light of changing global circumstances.
- A Shadow Feminist Security Council reviewing and feeding into decision-making processes.
- A UN Diversity in Leadership College running courses for members and developing new intercultural benchmarks on achieving excellence through diversity
- An annual Children’s Charter Conference involving children and young people future-scoping a UN beyond a state-centred world.
These kinds of initiatives could be seen as human-centred disrupters of UN state-bound power processes with potential to lead to new thought and action. Feminist human-centred perspectives have much to offer in this context and their long history and diversity are part of their richness for creating alternative futures. As Ivana Milojevic (2024, 30-1) points out: ‘feminism . . . has had many beginnings, phases, endings, revivals and manifestations. Its roots are both ancient and modern, and its forms are as diverse as the geographical localities within which these various forms and phases appear.’
References
Elshtain, Jean Bethke (1993). Public Man/Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Milojevic, Ivana (2024). The Hesitant Feminist Guide to the Future. Tamkang University.
Peterson, V. Spike (1992). Gendered States: (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
Peterson, V. Spike (2003). A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies. London: Routledge.
Pettman, Jan Jindy (1996). Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics. London: Routledge.
Youngs, Gillian (1999). International Relations in a Global Age: A Conceptual Challenge. Cambridge: Polity.
Youngs, Gillian ed. (2000). Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspectives. London: Macmillan.
Youngs, Gillian (forthcoming 2025). Feminist International Relations Through a Technospatial Lens: An Interdisciplinary Approach. London: Routledge.
