Looking Forward, Conceptualizing Feminist Security Studies

In previous work, I characterized Feminist Security Studies as pluralistic, but transformative: Research in Feminist Security Studies reformulates mainstream approaches to traditional security issues, foregrounds the roles of women and gender in conflict and conflict resolution, and reveals the blindness of security studies to issues that taking gender seriously shows as relevant to thinking about security. Together, these works, as a research program, show that gender analysis is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international security, important for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm. (Sjoberg 2009a, 184; see also Sjoberg 2006, 2009b; Sjoberg and Martin 2010.)