ABSTRACT
IR has traditionally studied war as a structural, strategic, or ideologically driven phenomenon, rather than something analysed through its connections to people and their experiences. Neo-realists tend to explain and study war on a systemic level where ‘international anarchy’ becomes a permissive cause of war. Liberals on the other hand largely analyse war through theories of ‘democratic peace’ and often attribute war as a failure of international cooperation (Sjoberg, 2013: 110). Many feminists in IR on the other hand argue that it is impossible to grasp the meanings, feeling, and practices associated with the dual concepts of war and security outside of its gendered manifestations (Peterson, 2010; Sjoberg, 2013, 2016). While feminist approaches to war and security come in various forms (Sjoberg, 2013: 4-5; Sylvester, 2013), they tend to want to unveil the gendered and racial underpinnings of much of IR scholarship (Kronsell, 2012: 110) through shifting the gaze from the disembodied to the embodied.
