Gender and Crisis in Global Politics

The global political arena is (again) in a time of crisis. Different sources pay attention to different crises: the Global Financial Crisis, the Debt Crisis, the Crisis of ISIL/Daesh in Iraq and Syria, the Crisis of Israel and Palestine, and the Iran Nuclear Crisis have gotten significant attention in media coverage of global politics. But those are not the only crises that scholars and practitioners discuss. Environmentalists warn of ecological crisis, health scholars warn of disease crises, cyber-security experts suggest a coming information crisis, and migration experts warn of population crises. Feminist work on global politics has addressed many of these crises - historical and contemporary - in crisis language and without it, as well as a number of the non-crises that looking for women and gender in the international arena draws into focus. That work, however, had generally not explicitly theorized the conceptualization of crisis, its gendered dimensions, and/or gender-based crises as such. Across this book, feminist conversations about crisis in global politics suggests that a single feminist approach to, definition of, or politics of crisis is impossible to find. That same variety of work, though, makes a strong case that paying attention to crises in the world and to the manufacture of crisis rhetoric alongside events in global politics is not only generally important but an important place for feminist scholarship, feminist political activism, and direct attention. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics.

Laura Sjoberg is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her work has been published in more than three dozen journals in Political Science, Law, International Relations, Gender Studies, and Geography. She is author or editor of ten books, including, most recently, Gender, War, and Conflict (Polity, 2014) and Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores (with Caron Gentry, 2015). Her current projects include an edited volume on quantitative methods in critical and constructivist IR, Interpretive Quantification (with J. Samuel Barkin, forthcoming), and a book on women’s perpetration of conflict sexual violence, Impossible Women, Impossible Crimes.