ABSTRACT
Gender was first recognized as an issue in international relations (IR) in the early 1970s with the publication of Berenice Carroll’s ‘Peace Research: The Cult of Power’ in the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Murphy 1996: 513). However, it was the publication of a special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies in 1988 that effectively legitimated the study of gender in IR. In the introduction to the Millennium special issue Fred Halliday highlighted that, unlike other social sciences, IR had failed to recognize the significance of the study of gender – either in terms of its role or its consequences – with regard to how the international system operates. Instead, the consideration of gender, and the knowledge that international relations could potentially derive from it, had remained hidden. Halliday suggested that gender could have significant consequences for the study of IR:
[O]ne aspect is a study of how gender issues and values do and could play a role within international relations; the second aspect is analysis of the gender-specific consequences of international processes, be these military, economic, political or ideological. The latter modification has, of course, broader implications for the whole study of international relations, since it rests upon the argument that international relations should study the consequences of international processes within societies, and the resulting impact of these internal changes on international relations, as well as analysing the sphere of international relations tout court.
