Introduction

This brief introductory chapter provides an outline of the context within which the book was developed. We give an account of the 2019/2020 bushfires in Australia and the subsequent COVID-19 pandemic, explaining how these events are interconnected in perhaps surprising ways. The fires and the virus challenged our thinking, both about what this book might become and how we might bring the book into being. We were forced to reckon with the question of how to see a project through to completion in an era of such uncertainty and loss while maintaining our commitment to a feminist ethic of care and keeping front of mind the precarity of so much that we had previously taken for granted. These separate but related not-so-natural disasters demanded a different kind of navigation and ultimately a different kind of organisation of the third edition of Gender Matters in Global Politics, and we conclude this chapter with an overview of the book's structure and contents.