Book Review: Martin Jacque's "When China Rules the World"

Coming on the heels of the United States withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, many scholars and prominent figures in politics and journalism saw this as just another sign of the decline of the West (at the very least, another abdication of global leadership by the United States in favor of rising nation-states like China). Many drew this conclusion coming off of the news breaking not long after President Trump would withdraw the United States from the Accords, which his administration viewed as unduly limiting economic development, that China would assume de facto leadership of the global fight against climate change. This all is part of a larger discussion concerning the future of the international order and whether developing countries like China and India, the latter looking more economically dynamic coming off of the 2006-2008 financial crisis, will become the new great powers in the international system. Martin Jacques, in his 2012 book When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, makes a similar case in which he sees China likely to overtake the West as the preeminent power of the international system within half a century.

Like Charles Kupchan in No One's World, Jacques sees the coming of a global order that, if not dominated by China will at least be heavily influenced by many new power centers of the East and the developing world, such as India, based upon various statistics illustrating the growth of these economies in comparison to those of the West. This rising economic power is the critical ingredient to a projected future power because nation-states like the United States have translated economic power into the development of both soft power (diplomatic) and hard power (military) mechanisms in order to better shape and maintain the international order that the super-power ultimately relies upon to maintain this power. Also not unlike Kupchan, Jacques broadly highlights broad historical trends and recent developments which portend the peaking and ultimate decline of Western hegemony, in which the process of globalization has bound the world closer together, having boosted the developing world but hurting established economic sectors in the West, such as manufacturing, through increased competition. This decline in economic power ultimately has allowed developing countries like China to push for membership in and reform of major international institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) as developed countries like the United States gradually give ground mainly due to economic stagnation that has reduced the resources available to maintain Western hegemony (such as resources that go towards maintaining overseas military bases). 

However, unlike other books focusing on the coming transition in the international system which have largely treated the China question superficially, Jacques situates these broad trends within a larger historical view of China itself, going in depth about early Chinese civilization and how it would affect how it might behave as a global power. To sum up a very lengthy argument towards this end, Jacques sees China behaving both like and unlike the great powers of the past, with China acquiring and maintaining its power mostly through economic dynamism (see above) like other powers. While China is likely to acquire its status through similar means (and already seems to be doing so presently), Jacques would argue that Chinese culture and history should not be discounted in trying to predict China's future behavior. Moreover, he sees Chinese ascendancy as returning a form of what Jacques terms the "tributary state system" in which other nations acknowledge the superiority of Chinese civilization and maintain a beneficial relationship with it (almost in a sense of being informal satellite states of China) in return for considerable autonomy (unlike the Western version of colonialism). Jacques sees this primarily within Asia in the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and their almost European Union-like economic and political integration, but allows that this neo-tributary state system could become a global phenomenon if China becomes the sole power of the international system, especially in Africa where considerable Chinese investment and settlement has taken place. 

Overall, I thought that Jacques presents a sound argument based upon solid evidence concerning the big message of the book that the West needs to learn from the rising powers in the East as much as the East has learned from the West if the international system is allowed to reconfigure itself peacefully (i.e. without a military conflict between China and the United States). This reconfiguration of the international system will be something to watch going forward as the developing world continues to modernize rapidly. Lastly, as this book is somewhat outdated (having been published in 2012), it would be interesting to see a more timely update on China (and India) in light of recent events (the Paris Accords, the increasingly tense South China Sea conflict, etc.) showing the developing world increasingly asserting itself on the global stage the West has largely dominated for the past two centuries. Notwithstanding the latter points and the lengthiness of the book, Jacques presents an intriguing narrative that I think is especially instructive for not only international relations scholars, but for anyone that is curious about China as the China question continues to be more and more salient.

Sources Cited:

Jacques, M. (2012). When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Books.

On Security Theory: A Feminist Perspective

Many scholars of international studies today have come to depend upon three main assumptions about the nature of the international system: that it is anarchic, composed of territorially-defined states that constitute the more legitimate actors on the world stage, and that states have incentives to look after their own interests and security (Tickner, 2001). These fundamental aspects of the international system derive mainly from the realist school of international relations (IR) theory (Tickner, 2001). Realism’s dominance in explaining matters of state security and military conflict has its roots in the Cold War, where many of the key tenets of the theory were best able to explain the security competition between the United States and Russia (Ashworth, 2011; Tickner, 2001). In turn, the Cold War and the American-centered nature of much IR scholarship crowded out many other theoretical alternatives, such as feminist IR perspectives (Ashworth, 2011). However, with the rise of international institutions post-WWII and their growing numbers after the Cold War, competing perspectives arose that sought to explain the growing cooperation among states (especially in the realm of state security), including feminist perspectives (Ashworth, 2011; Blanchard, 2003; Sjoberg, 2011; Tickner, 2001). Thus, this week we will explore the ways in which feminist security perspectives have challenged realist perspectives in IR and seek to redefine the traditional definitions and understandings of state security. 


To achieve the latter, I will first briefly examine the history of feminist theory in IR and outline the various methodological differences between the positivist (empirical/scientific) approaches such as realism and “post-positivist” critical approaches like feminist security theory (FST) (Tickner, 2001, p. 35). Secondly, I survey the literature to give an overview of the debates within the FST field and with closely related critical theory (Tickner, 2001). Thirdly, in addition to providing context to the scholarly debates within the maturing field of FST studies, within this paper I also give an overview of the FST literature in application to the diverse state security threats that exist today. To conclude, I will reflect on the relevance and applicability of FST today in understanding increasingly complex matters of state security in the twenty-first century and potential solutions the FST literature ascribes to military and non-military sources of insecurity.

Despite realism achieving a status as a theoretical cornerstone of modern IR studies, feminist perspectives were part of the IR mainstream prior to the 1940s in what was known as the “first wave” of feminist theory development in the 1920s-1940s concurrent with the suffragette and peace movements (Ashworth, 2011, p. 25). These first-wave perspectives would prove to be the theoretical precursors and foundations for the feminist perspectives that arose starting in the 1980s by voicing the first critiques to the dominant realist balance of power ideas that serve to legitimize “physical force as a basis of society” and the resulting subordination of women as largely reproductive vessels that serve to regenerate the population after violent conflicts (Ashworth, 2011, p. 30, 38). The increasing interdependence of states in the international system more apparent after the Cold War that meant that “military-centered definitions of national security” were flawed in such a context as security threats today are often “not amenable to statist [unilateral] solutions” like humanitarian or environmental crises by way of defining and operationalizing security policy via realism (Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 299; Tickner, 2001, p. 43). Thus, feminist perspectives have gained new prominence in mainstream IR as well as accompanying criticisms from realist theoreticians who challenge the validity, generalizability, and overall scientific nature of FST tenets (Tickner, 2001, p. 43).

One of the first charges aimed at feminist theory in general by those who espouse traditional “positivist” empirical approaches like realism is that feminist IR’s quest to redefine state security to include economic, social, and environmental aspects to its primarily military-political definition is that such changes will seriously harm the “intellectual coherence” of the IR field in general (Tickner, 2001, p. 43). Other elements of feminist theory generally adopted by FST that are seen to threaten the “intellectual coherence” of security studies is its diminishing of the state’s importance in security in favor of examining individuals and nonstate actors (especially women) and their responses to the world as “objects of security” embedded into “broader structures of violence and oppression” (Tickner, 2001, p. 43, 46-47). These larger socially-constructed frameworks evident in the international system today include gender in that the very concepts of “war and peace” are constructed to devalue the perceived utopianism and non-attainability of the feminine ideal of peace and to normalize more masculine “realistic” realities of militarized conflict in the international system (Charlesworth, 2008; Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 43, 236-238; Tickner, 1999, p. 4; Tickner, 2001, p. 37). Aside from concerns over the definition of security and also contributing to a marginalization of the discipline from the mainstream is its overwhelming preference for more sociological qualitative versus quantitative strategies for data-collection and analysis (Sa’ar et al., 2011, p. 53, 63).

Implicit in FST studies then are challenges to how “masculine knowledges” generated by positivist theories such as realism have served to construct and legitimate our masculine-centric present and historical understandings of the anarchic, state-centered nature of the international system today as well as questioning assumptions that link women with peace and men with war and the idea that wars are fought to protect “vulnerable” groups like women and children (Blanchard, 2003, p. 1290; Charlesworth, 2008; Tickner, 1999, p. 3; Tickner, 2001; Sjoberg & Via, 2010). Rather, FST carries on a critical theoretical tradition in critiquing realism as a “patriarchal discourse” that “relegates women to a space outside politics” in the international system and seeks to recover and reintegrate the perspectives of women and other marginalized groups into the broader IR security discourse (Blanchard, 2003, p. 1290, 1293; Tickner, 2001). Tying the critical nature of feminist IR discourse together is the overall utilization of multiple disciplines and a “bottom-up” focus of human agency within these global social structures that dictate how states and individuals relate more akin to sociology than political science (Tickner, 2001, p. 132). Feminist IR theorists generally reject the determinism of structural-based theories in favor of individual agency within the international system that challenges the “reality” of militarized conflict on the international stage and the subordination of women and other marginalized groups that results from this justification of conflict (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 43, 236-238; Tickner, 1999; Tickner, 2001).

Because of the uncertain and transdisciplinary nature of feminist IR and FST, it is not surprising that the discipline has come into conflict with other post-positivist perspectives as well as traditional positivist perspectives in its attempts to elucidate and challenge socially-constructed global power relations that generate security for some at the expense of other groups (Blanchard, 2003; Tickner, 2001). This has been the case in the struggle over reconciling state security and human security between the FST and human security perspectives (Nuruzzaman, 2006). Even though human security and feminist IR perspectives share many tenets in dropping a state-centered focus on security and broadening the definition of security to include “non-military sources of insecurity,” human security discourses are found to have retained many of the basic theoretical tenets of realism, including its “scientific” methodology and implicit support of the “global and national status quo” in the advocation of incremental reforms to the current system to address increasingly prevalent non-military sources of insecurity (Marhia, 2013; Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 299). Therefore, FST is less likely to see incremental reforms of the status quo system as a panacea for the continued global inequalities that consistently maintain various forms of continued insecurity and institutionalized power structures (Marhia, 2013; Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 299; Sjoberg, 2011; Tickner, 2001).
To a lesser degree, there are similar debates within FST that challenge feminist perspectives that retain the state as a unit of analysis in their explorations of non-military sources of insecurity, which are seen by some feminists in postcolonial contexts in the Global South as seeking to sustain the global order of the “socially powerful” who are more likely to benefit from military policies and interventions by powerful countries in developing countries (Marhia, 2013; Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 299; Sjoberg, 2001; Sjoberg, 2011; Sjoberg & Via, 2010; Tickner, 2001).

Moreover, these postcolonial feminists have critiqued the way in which military policies and resources are deployed disproportionately in the developing world on the part of developed countries because they are often based on the assumed “universal applicability” of Western cultural ideas, practices, and feminist perspectives concerned primarily with realizing human rights based on “individualist rights based discourses” (Pierce, 1998, p. 298). These approaches that involve the imposition of Western conceptions of human security and feminism in other countries are often ineffective because they fail to consider sociocultural variations in regards to the “tension between individual rights and collective obligations” in terms of how people construct their identities and concurrently perceive problems and needs (Pierce, 1998, p. 298). In the erasure of differences among cultures and peoples and their degree of access to resources within the international system, these policies unintentionally deny women and men their agency by failing to acknowledge and address their context-specific needs (Pierce, 1998, p. 298). Ann Tickner (2001) notes that because militarized conflicts have been “removed to the peripheries of the system” in the process of more powerful states pursuing universalistic notions of “systemic security” abroad that this has served to produce a deceiving stable (“domestic”) peace within the territorially defined borders of states in the Global North versus a disordered insecurity in the Global South (p. 41). Thus, the conduct of powerful states’ security policies serve to reinforce the socially-constructed “dualism between first and third world” that reveal the “connected inequalities…in the pathways of global exploitation” of the South by the North in many dimensions aside from national security (Pierce, 1999, p. 298). Essentially, this means that security for some is pursued at the expense of chronic insecurity for others, a chronic insecurity FST wishes to understand and remedy (Blanchard, 2003; Nuruzzaman, 2006; Tickner, 2001). Similarly, some FST perspectives problematically emphasize the special role of women as critical agents in promulgating peace in a masculinized world, such as in their participation in brokering ceasefires or in peace movements (Ticker, 2001). This tends to reinforce essentialist notions of women as peace-makers and men as war-makers (Tickner, 2001).

While perspectives with a primary focus on the state versus the individual or groups of people and women as agents of peace have produced significant fault lines within the FST epistemic community, all FST perspectives share an “emancipatory” project of investigating and correcting the inequalities generated by state security policies by “contesting the privilege attributed to ‘high politics’ and instead focusing on international relations in everyday lives” (Blanchard, 2003, p. 1298; Innes, 2014, p. 566). Moreover, as we will see later, attempts have been made within the FST community to bridge the methodological and other pedagogical gaps between feminist IR and traditional IR and to utilize the best of both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection and analysis to provide grounding for a deeper analysis of the context-specific insecurities tied to one’s position in the international system (Sa’ar et al., 2011).

With the theoretical context established, we will now turn to the ways in which FST has approached state security in the 21st century, through a survey of literature on military conflicts, the international fight against terrorism, private military contractors (PMCs), country-specific contexts and asylum-seekers. However, before delving further into the current FST literature, a brief word is in order to establish the psychological dimensions of the international context introduced above. Undergirding these case studies is the concept of the militarization of society in which “military practices are extended into the civilian arena” and thus infiltrate the everyday political conduct of states by becoming embedded within the “specific institutions of social control that maintain patriarchal social and political orders” (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 7, 43; True, 2015). This fusion and operationalization of patriarchal ideas in a state’s social, political, and economic apparatus is known as “hegemonic masculinity,” which in turn constitutes a “security state” in which citizens are subject to “ad hoc surveillance, search or detention” and which “repress criticism of such arbitrary power” by justifying these measures as necessary to fulfill the primary protective function of the state (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 43; True, 2015; Young, 2003, p. 8). A central component of militarization and hegemonic masculinity is the protection of a weaker “feminized other” (often women and children, sometimes victimized men as well) in service to one’s nation-state, even though conflicts disproportionately produce casualties among the groups nation-states are claiming to protect with their security policies (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 45; Tickner, 2001).

Often, these protectors are men who fit the archetypical ideal of a brave, patriotic soldier protecting defenseless women and children “back home” in serving in military campaigns overseas (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 214; Young, 2003). Thus, militarization and the mindset it engenders serve as powerful psychological tools during peacetime and war which the state can use to “transform and control populations” both at home and abroad in the name of security to engender compliance on the homefront for international military campaigns (Marhia, 2013; Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 246). Naturally, it is this manipulation of various populations by states in the exploitation of a militaristic or “masculinist protection” mindset that produces a chronic state of insecurity for many in the world and in domestic contexts also serves to subordinate citizens on the homefront like “women in the patriarchal household” in order to protect the citizens from “the enemy outside” or “others” beyond state borders (Marhia, 2013; Sjoberg & Via, 2010; Tickner, 2001; Young, 2003, p. 1-2, 8). The danger lies in the fact that this logic introduces a harmful “us versus them” mindset that not only engenders fear and state dependence but serves as further justification for military actions against other countries or groups (especially “other” men) that are seen as “aggressive” and “unsocialized in the ways of mature democracies” (Hansen, 2000; Sjoberg & Via, 2010; Tickner, 1999, p. 6-7; Tickner, 2001; Tickner, 2002). This implies that there is not “violence inside states” but only outside and this violence is generated by groups that aren’t as civilized or as “human” as the citizens within the state borders (Marhia, 2013; Tickner, 1999, p. 7).

We will now proceed into our exploration of how FST has analyzed security and chronic insecurity around the world and uncovered its gendered and racialized coding, starting with the “War on Terror” (Tickner, 2001; Tickner, 2002; Young, 2003, p. 11). The latter has provided one of the best examples of FST demonstrating how a “security state” that utilizes a militaristic mindset operationalizes its foreign policy and military objectives abroad (Marhia, 2013; Tickner, 2002; Young, 2003, p. 2). Like other militaristic interventions abroad, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were framed in such a way by the West in the name of protecting and liberating “other” women and “oppressed groups” from “backward” religions and cultures associated with Islam as much as it was about combating the menace of nonstate terrorism abroad threatening Western lifestyles (Marhia, 2013, p. 30; Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 28; Ticker, 2002, p. 344; Young, 2003). As Marhia (2013) notes, “raising the (not-yet-Human) inhabitants of certain unruly spaces of the global South up to the level of the Human, then was cast as helping to secure our (Western, modern) way of life against external threats, and terrorism in particular” (p. 31). Furthermore, the predominant gendered imagery used after 9/11 in the United States has been a “male hero…presenting a beefy front of strength to a nation seeking steadiness and emotional grounding,” which is a common manifestation of the “ideal-type” soldier (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 216; Tickner, 2002, p. 335). As aforementioned, these male heroes were dispatched to rescue the women of Iraq and Afghanistan (Tickner, 1999; Tickner, 2002). This reliance on the part of developed countries as portraying the countries being intervened in as needing intervention only serves to reinforce certain gender and racial hierarchies on the global stage as well as deprive groups of their agency by denoting certain groups as victims, such as the women of Afghanistan (Hansen, 2000; Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 28; Ticker, 2001).

In Afghanistan, the above logic of “masculinist protection” was deployed even though Afghan women had been conducting grassroots mobilization since 1977, primarily in the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) organization (Tickner, 2000, p. 341; Young, 2003). RAWA works towards its vision of a democratic, secular polity by helping to provide education and healthcare to women as well as training women to be politically active (Tickner, 2000, p. 341-342). Instead of Afghan women being portrayed as having agency, women’s oppression in Afghanistan became synonymous with the burqa in much of the news coverage leading up to and during the Afghan invasion, despite some regarding the burqa issue as part of their identities rather than as a symbol of gender oppression in Islamic societies (Tickner, 2002, p. 340-343). More often, these women point to the chronic insecurity generated by the Taliban and Afghan government forces in the Afghani civil war of 1992-1996, the 1979 invasion by the Soviets, the Western-sponsored invasion in 2001, and the aftermath of those conflicts as the more pressing issues to be addressed (Tickner, 2002, p. 340-343). This denial of agency on the part of the US and its allies in the invasion of Afghanistan and the provision of developmental assistance to promote security was thus disproved by the agency demonstrated by groups like RAWA in developing country contexts supposedly incapable of their own defense or development (Marhia, 2013; Tickner, 2002).

Like with the post-9/11 anti-terrorism campaigns, a similar situation of gender and racial coding in Bosnia during the 1990s played in to justifying intervention by NATO in the former Yugoslavian province of Kosovo in 1995 (Hansen, 2001). In this context, the gendered and racialized coding involved competing explanations as to whether “wartime rape should be understood as an individual risk or a collective security problem…and whether it should be defined in national or in gendered terms” after a United Nations investigation into a mass rape of an estimated 20,000 Bosnian women (Hansen, 2001, p. 55). In other words, the article embodied the realist and feminist debate about including “gender-based insecurity” as part of national security rather than ignoring individual insecurity in favor of state security (Blanchard, 2003; Hansen, 2001, p. 56-57; Tickner, 2001). Three competing interpretational dichotomies arose, mirroring this long-term debate between realists and feminist theorists: “rape as normal/Balkan warfare,” “rape as exceptional/Serbian warfare,” and “Balkan patriarchy” which all had different perspectives on whether international intervention was warranted in the Kosovo context (Hansen, 2001, p. 57). The former perspectives embodied traditional realist perspectives in the sense that the rape in war was recognized as not being a priority and even as a “normal” product of war and thus generally advising against NATO forces intervening in Kosovo (Hansen, 2001, p. 55-57).

However, FST scholars took the latter perspective (“Balkan patriarchy”) and noted how the mass rape was used as a tool of war by Serbia to “constitute the entire Bosnian nation as humiliated, inferior, weak, and feminine” as the Bosnian men had failed to defend “their” women and ultimately fulfill their masculine protector role (Hansen, 2001, p. 56; Tickner, 2001). More importantly, FST perspectives highlighted the theoretical biases of realist understandings of state security where the “domestic” sphere is separated from realist understandings of what constitutes the state in its distinguishing between rape as a “individual risk” or “international security problem” when it threatens the collective security of a nation-state (Hansen, 2001, p. 65). The latter definition of rape as a security problem involves the thorny ethical question of when does rape reach critical mass and be constituted by outside powers as “mass rape” that then constitutes a national security problem and a subsequent justification for intervention on the part of the West to protect Balkan (or other) women (Hansen, 2001, p. 65-69). Instead, this perspective argues for emphasizing the gendered insecurities of women on both the Serbian and Bosnian sides of the conflict against “patriarchal nationalistic leaderships,” but was ambivalent on whether the 1995 intervention by NATO helped address gendered insecurity or rather contributed to this insecurity by reinforcing the image of Bosnian or Serbian women as victims (Hansen, 2001, p. 55, 67-69). Ultimately, the international community combined the perspectives of the “rape as normal” and “rape as exceptional” in relation to the Balkan context, while going on to prosecute various Balkan nationalist leaders in the International Crime Tribunal (ICT) with war crimes related to the mass rapes (Hansen, 2001). It remains unclear as to the extent to which non-prioritized “domestic” sources of insecurity remained invisible despite the international attention in the Bosnia case (Hansen, 2001, p. 56).

As with the case of Bosnia, more FST scholars have focused their attention on emphasizing chronic gendered insecurity and its possible “invisibility” by focusing on the case of Israel in the context of its ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip territories (Sa’ar et al., 2011, p. 50). Sa’ar et al. (2011) took an intersectional approach to expose these “invisible” insecurities produced by armed conflict by analyzing how one’s social, political, and economic position in society was impacted by the ongoing military conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and as a methodological proof of bridging the gap between largely qualitative FST approaches and more quantitative ones within the IR discipline (p. 50, 63). As in other cases of armed conflict, women were disproportionately affected by ongoing armed conflict, because in many cases, women had the double burden of domestic and public sphere labor (Sa’ar et al., 2011, p. 60-62). However, the degree and prominent type of suffering was different based off one’s socioeconomic background and sociopolitical position within society, with Palestinian women more often in economic distress versus their Israeli counterparts who emphasized emotional and physical distress generally and in terms of gender-based violence (Sa’ar et al., 2011, p. 62). The latter reflects a general trend that in times of conflict, while many groups suffer overall, the impacts of armed conflict are “particularly grave among women from low social classes, ethnic and national minorities, and women who were victims of gender-based violence” (Sa’ar et al., 2011, p. 62).

Expanding the examination of insecurities produced by military conflict and broader power structures within the international system and their impact on both women and men is Laura Sjoberg & Sandra Via’s (2010) and Amanda Chisholm and Saskia Stachowitsch’s (2016) analyses of the salience of private military contractors (PMCs) today in national and international security. PMCs and the private security industry have emerged concurrent with globalization and increasing state outsourcing of security functions to the emerging security commodities market to provide the perceived “unique strategic and tactical responses” needed to address transnational security threats such as terrorism in “international and intrastate security” contexts (Sjoberg & Via, 2010, p. 47). While PMCs like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy have shown evolution in the type of “hegemonic masculinity” adopted in their public relations and operational strategies, both sets of scholars have recognized PMCs as complicit in maintaining “gendered and racialized” power structures that privilege certain groups over others in the provision of security services (Chisholm & Stachowitsch, 2016, p. 815; Sjoberg & Via, p. 47, 52). Focusing specifically on Nepalese Gurkhas working for Western PMCs, Chisholm and Stachowitsch (2016) examine how these PMCs recruit labor for their multinational operations and contribute to “racialized and gendered migration patterns” of peoples like the Gurkhas which tend to maintain the institutional remnants of colonization that perpetuate inequalities in the Global South (p. 815).

While the Gurkhas have achieved significant socioeconomic privilege with their 200-year-plus interactions with the West, primarily with the British Army and now with PMCs, the authors maintain that this relationship is nevertheless one of exploitation and subordination by the West’s recruitment of labor from the “Global South” (Chisholm & Stachowitsch, 2016, p. 816). This is primarily because PMCs are drawing upon gendered and racialized notions of Gurkhas and other men from the Global South as “martial” or as “natural warriors” who exhibit a strong loyalty to Western military and security operations (Chisholm & Stachowitsch, 2016, p. 819-820). In the end, this labor recruitment process was found to reinforce global gendered and racialized power structures in and outside of the security industry, as PMC preference for Gurkha men have inhibited access to the profitable security industry for economically disadvantaged Gurkha men and women and make many countries like Nepal overly dependent on remittance income generated by this industry (Chisholm & Stachowitsch, 2016).

While the cases investigated so far have emphasized how the conduct of states and closely associated private actors have produced chronic and differing forms of insecurity for diverse and often marginalized populations, Alexandria Innes (2014) focused on how individuals like asylum seekers attain security absent the state in a case study of a UK migrant and asylum seeker (p. 565-566). This assertion challenges both the structural determinism and state-centric methodologies of realist approaches to national security by focusing on human agency and calling into question the state’s primacy and willingness to adequately secure people when compared with nonstate actors like NGOs and other civil society groups that are usually ignored in most realist IR perspectives (Blanchard, 2003; Innes, 2014; Sa’ar et al., 2011; Tickner, 2001). In the case of migration, migrants are forced to work through nonstate channels to achieve security because they are constituted as a “threat to the [security of a] state” for their ability to cross borders and claim multiple, inherently conflicting citizenships that clash with sovereign norms of citizenship generated by individual states (Innes, 2014, p. 570). The result is that the act of escaping insecurity in one context tends to produce insecurity in another context when a migrant or group of migrants to a sanctuary state are denied asylum and the accompanying security that comes from citizenship rights (Innes, 2014). However, a migrant asserts power and regains security in challenging their state-imposed marginalization by seeking shelter with nonstate groups outside the established state channels, despite occupying precarious positions like that of the legal limbo of an unauthorized immigrant (Innes, 2014, p. 570). Through this study and others explored in this paper then, one can see how FST has consistently challenged, reconstituted, and expanded the definition of security to argue that the social, economic, political, and military security of individuals or groups does matter to a state’s overall security (Innes, 2014).

As we’ve seen in this paper, FST and the broader IR feminist discipline has challenged fundamental theoretical tenets of IR perspectives like realism that establish the state as the central actor in securing itself from the various problems present on the international system, primarily of a military-political nature (Ashworth, 2011; Blanchard, 2003; Charlesworth, 2008; Tickner, 2001; Sjoberg & Via, 2010; Shepherd, 2013; Tickner, 2002; Young, 2003). FST argues for an expansion of state security to encompass the social, economic, and environmental dimensions in addition to the traditional military dimension (Ashworth, 2011; Blanchard, 2003; Marhia, 2013; Tickner, 2001). Why is FST relevant for our understandings of the international system today? Has FST elaborated on any solutions to the increased range of state security problems today? I will briefly touch on these questions to conclude this survey of FST literature.

While for the most part ambivalent about the exact path of change the international system would have to take to address the power structures that perpetuate insecurity for some at the expense of others outside of whole-scale system-wide change, some FST scholars have approached military conflict from the angle of gender equality (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Tickner, 2001; True, 2015). Domestic levels of gender equality have been hypothesized to be a tentative predictor of a state’s international behavior and its willingness to use violence as a means of conflict settlement (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001). The crux of the argument is that “states with higher levels of domestic gender equality are less likely to use violence during interstate conflict than states with lower levels of domestic gender equality” (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001, p. 503). Caprioli and Boyer’s (2001) study measured gender equality in terms of women’s representation in legislatures and ultimately confirmed the gender equality hypothesis raised by other scholars, with the caveat that the severity of violence in conflicts was reduced, but not eliminated in the use of force by states internationally (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001). Therefore, this suggests that state security policy could be potentially changed as institutional barriers to gender equality are reduced and both genders are allowed more equitable access to the state’s social, economic, political, and military apparatus (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Sjoberg & Via, 2010; True, 2013). If so, addressing institutional barriers to gender inequality internationally and at the state level suggests broad implications for realizing a more peaceful world on the part of FST (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001).

FST studies and its parent discipline, feminist IR, remain relatively new in mainstream IR studies; because the discipline is currently in the process of maturation, it has yet to find broad acceptance as a serious field of study in both academia and within the policymaking apparatus of states (Sjoberg & Via, 2010; Tickner, 2001). Despite these growing pains, the wide-reaching impacts of FST, including the broadening of the security agenda to address the increasingly interdependent nature of problems in the international system today make it a discipline worthy of following as the world grapples with the new and diverse security problems of the twenty-first century that may require resources and solutions that state actors alone cannot provide (Caprioli & Boyer, 2001; Tickner, 2001; True, 2013).

 
Works Cited:

Ashworth, L. (2011). Feminism, War and the Prospects for Peace. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13(1), 25-43.

Blanchard, E. (2003). Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory. Signs, 28(4), 1289-1312.

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