Navigating change in international relations: gendered games still

ABSTRACT

Living through global transformations – including our current pandemic – requires imagination to see through to the other side. How can Australian IR scholars contribute new understandings of the prospects for global change and security when they are so sorely needed? This essay reflects on two themes: First, the important role of Australian IR scholars and students in theorising change and envisioning alternative futures in a national context less constrained by the trappings of power and enduring forced isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic; and second, the significance of increasing gender diversity in political leadership for future transformations in international relations. A productive feminist subfield of IR scholarship has flourished in Australian universities, however, navigation of post-COVID global politics requires all IR scholars to critically examine the gendered games that political leaders, institutions, inter-state and global civil society actors play. Such gendered games both fuel and mitigate the dynamics of conflict and insecurity.

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Notes

1 Lady Popper would be a co-author with Karl Popper by today’s standards—similar to the partnership even of Milton and Rose Friedman—there is no historical record of this—spare the reflection by a University of Canterbury economist who befriended Karl Popper in the war years and mentioned his wife’s intellectual work.

2 James Blackwell (2021) argues that there is yet to be recognition in Australian foreign policy or the international relations field of the relevance of indigenous worldviews to how we see and act in the world, see also Synot (2019) and Lightfoot (2021) with regard to indigenous rights and negotiated, rather than, universal or monolithic sovereignty in the Haudenosaudee case (Canada).

3 Countries with more women in leadership, as measured by the US Council on Foreign Relations Women’s Power Index, were also found to be more likely to deliver COVID-19 responses that consider the effects of the crisis on women and girls.

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Notes on contributors

Jacqui True

Jacqui True is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Gender, Peace and Security Centre at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of Violence against Women: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford 2020) and The Political Economy of Violence against Women (Oxford 2012) and co–editor of The Oxford Handbook of Women, Peace and Security (2019).