The Duck of Minerva

Laura Sjoberg

Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her research addresses issues of gender and security, with foci on politically violent women, feminist war theorizing, sexuality in global politics, and political methodology. She teaches, consults, and lectures on gender in global politics, and on international security. Her work has been published in more than 50 books and journals in political science, law, gender studies, international relations, and geography.

Recent Posts

Feminist IR 101, Post #8, Human Rights

by Laura Sjoberg | 31 May, 2011 |

Controversial feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon titled her latest book Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. MacKinnon was, of course, referring to a feminist campaign to have women's rights recognized as human rights (see, e.g., the work of Charlotte Bunch) ...but what struck me about this title is the normalcy it implies - like, questioning women's humanity (and thus their eligibility for human rights) is as commonplace as any other international dialogue.Feminist work on human rights has been very diverse - and by no means only a project of Feminist IR. Women, and feminist...

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Feminist IR 101, Post #7, Political Economy and Globalization

by Laura Sjoberg | 28 May, 2011 |

Why is it that women represent 70% of the world’s people living in poverty? What does it mean to have economic stability? How do international structures interact with local structures to produce or disturb that stability? Is economic stability something people (or states) only gain at the expense of others? Are sex trafficking, migration patterns, home-based work, and base economies, related? If so, what does gender have to do with it? These are some of the questions feminist IR political economists ask.Women are the majority of people in poverty around the world. The percentage of women...

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A puzzle in promotion: Petraeus at the CIA

by Laura Sjoberg | 27 April, 2011 |

This is a guest blog by Jarrod Hayes, who is is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research broadly focuses on the social construction of foreign and security policy.The New York Times is reporting that President Obama plans on moving Leon Panetta to the position of Secretary of Defense and David Petraeus to the position of CIA director. While the Panetta move is interesting in its own right (i.e., will Panetta have the force of will necessary to manage the DoD?), what I find far more interesting is the move of General David Petraeus...

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Horrorphilia (Or … I couldn’t resist weighing in on the zombie debate)

by Laura Sjoberg | 11 April, 2011 |

Though I clearly swim in the shallow end of the pool of those who think about Zombies in International Relations - in fact, I learned what a zombie is from Dan Drezner's book. At the same time, I can't really resist a brief observation on the popularity of the Zombie book, and follow-up journal articles, blog posts, and ISA panels. I don't mean this to engage all of the relevant issues, but can't resist a few reflections.Dan Drezner asks what the global political community would look like it the undead walked among us. What if the undead were aggressive attackers looking to exterminate...

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A Reply to the Reply: Jean Elshtain, Gender, and IR (Part III)

by Laura Sjoberg | 5 April, 2011 |

Part 3 (of 3) ...In concluding, Elshtain characterizes my essay as “overreach,” “hyper-theorizing,” and “prosaic,” arguing that (like “the entire post-structural arsenal”), “when you get down to the nitty-gritty, things slip through your fingers.”Its true that my essay discusses more than it could ever back up – because the essay is not a research essay or an original work, so much as it is an accounting for, and asking for recognition for, hundreds of books and thousands of articles that provide evidence for the points mentioned in it which are categorically ignored in Elshtain’s discussion...

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A Reply to the Reply: Jean Elshtain, Gender, and IR (Part II)

by Laura Sjoberg | 3 April, 2011 |

Elshtain, before characterizing my article as a “massive shopping list” of “feminists argue,” “feminists claim,” etc. (i.e., as the critical literature review that it is and she forgot to do before writing her initial article), “engages” my questions about her approach to each of Waltz’s three images, and her finding that gender would not change how we think of any of them.Though she characterizes my work as failing “to grapple in a theoretically sophisticated way with the Waltzian inheritance,” doing that inheritance justice requires it engage with ideas that have evolved in the last 50...

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A Reply to the Reply: Jean Elshtain, Gender, and IR (Part I)

by Laura Sjoberg | 1 April, 2011 |

Some of you might have seen the summer 2009 issue of International Relations; a retrospective on Man, the State, and War, by Kenneth Waltz, and its fiftieth anniversary. Among those essays was one by Jean Elsthain, entitled “Women, the State, and War,” where Elshtain asks whether gender as a category of analysis or as a central feature of a logic of explanation alters in significant ways Waltz’s levels of analysis, and answers in the negative. My (empirical and theoretical) response to her article is published in the March 2010 issue of the same journal, which published Elshtain’s reply...

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“Manning Up” and Making (the Libyan) War

by Laura Sjoberg | 23 March, 2011 |

Women are supposed to be those innocent of war, protected by chivalric warriors. The Trojan War was made over Helen. G. W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq with the platitude that “violence against women is always and everywhere wrong.” Yet Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times Op-Ed Section, notes that the story of the Libyan no-fly zone is one of “a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war.” A number of others have been framing this in terms of gender as well.Dowd notes that “we have come a long way from the...

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Feminist IR 101, Post #6, War and Security (In Practice)

by Laura Sjoberg | 10 March, 2011 |

(after a long hiatus, which you don't even want to know about) When we last visited "Feminist IR 101," we were talking about the ways that gendered lenses reformulate the way(s) we think about what security is and how it is practiced (empirically and normatively) in the global political arena - and I promised to put gendered lenses to work to talk about a "real world" security problem - what Feminist Security Studies might look like in practice.The usual caveats apply - theory is practice, the "real world" as IR theorists see it is overdetermined by and co-constituted with IR theory's...

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What is really “Anonymous”?

by Laura Sjoberg | 30 January, 2011 |

I realize that this is not the Feminist IR 101 post that you may have been expecting, or some bright engagement with what's going on in that area we seem to be able to so easily group as "the Middle East ..." but it is something that I've been thinking about recently, so ...In theory, journal review is double-blind: the reviewers shouldn't know who the author is, and the author shouldn't know who the reviewers are. In practice, this almost never works, and seems like a dying standard anyway. That said, for the purposes of this rant, take it as a given: reviews should be, and often are,...

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