This is a guest post from Linda Åhäll, a Lecturer in international relations from Keele University, UK. Follow her on Twitter at @DrLindaAhall

This is the sixth post in the series on #metooacademia 

An Australian newspaper described #MeToo in Sweden as “the biggest Swedish women’s movement since women secured the right to vote almost a hundred years ago”. Here I offer my impression on events in Sweden during 2017 and examine: What is distinct about the #MeToo movement from previous movements for women’s rights and/or against gender-based violence? I identify three interrelated themes in the #MeToo debate: from rights to justice; from victims to perpetrators; and from gender equality to feminism as understanding logics of power. Together, these themes offer an opportunity to re-situate feminism as a key tool to expose power. However, I end on how #MeToo has also uncovered an increasingly stronger anti-feminism backlash that we must take very seriously. Continue reading

This is a guest post from Swati Parashar, an Associate Professor in Peace and Development at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. She tweets @swatipash

This is the fifth post in the series on #metooacademia 

#Metoo started as a twitter hashtag, but has no doubt become one of the most effective, visible and also controversial feminist strategies across time and space. While it has been embraced widely for its ‘impact’ factor, it has also revealed the faultlines and dilemmas in feminist strategies and activism. In this short piece, I want to draw attention to the significance of #metoo in the context of postcolonial India and the challenges it has presented to the feminist movement there.

Continuity over exceptionality

In several Western contexts, #metoo seems to have been more successful and has created its own strong vocabulary and visibility, almost making its appeal exceptional. In several other non-Western contexts, however, #metoo is part of a continuing trend of everyday resistance against gendered violence experienced by women and the impunity enjoyed by perpetrators. #Metoo has emerged out of these local and global campaigns and also contributed to and strengthened them. At the global level, the #metoo campaign must be seen in continuity with the One Billion Rising which is one of the biggest transnational movements addressing violence against women. This movement originated in 2012 and argues that everyday domestic and sexual violence, which is experienced by at least one third of women globally in their lifetime, needs to be addressed as a pressing matter. Continue reading

This is a post from the Duck’s Stephen M. Saideman, Paterson Chair In International Affairs, Carleton University.

This is the fourth in the series on #metooacademia

It is not surprising that #Metoo was the overwhelming choice for the Pressing Politics Panel. Not only has this been one of the big stories of the year, but the difficult situations facing women in their various professions have been of much concern for years. In my own corner of the internet, I have found that of the ten blog posts with the most hits, four are those that address sexism and sexual harassment in political science and international affairs. I don’t write those posts to get hits—I rarely have a clue about which posts will get more interest—but because I have seen enough harm over my 25 years or so as a professor. In this post, I first address the consequences for workplaces beyond the individual who are harming and being harmed. I then complain about the standard procedures. I conclude with some suggestions for what we can do. Continue reading

This is a guest post from Katharine A. M. Wright, a Lecturer in International Politics at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on gender and international security institutions, including NATO. In this blog posts she reflects on the issues raised by #metoo in relation to UK Universities. Follow her on Twitter @KAMWright.

This is the third post in a series on #metooacademia.

Sexual violence* is endemic and structurally imbedded in our higher education institutions. For those of us working on the ‘front line’ of the academy, this is increasingly difficult to ignore and never more so than for women in the academy. We hear stories from students and colleagues, about other students and other colleagues. As women in a disciplinary space where men are overrepresented, students and colleagues are more likely to seek us out and confide in us, placing an additional layer upon our responsibilities as scholars. This holds more true for women of colour. It has therefore felt perplexing for those of us who have been confided in to hear other colleagues question whether the University, and our discipline of IR more broadly, is a space impacted by the epidemic of sexual violence too. We are left wondering how ‘they’ cannot have seen it. In this blog post, I reflect on the institutional barriers to acknowledging sexual violence in Higher Education (HE) and link this to the personal cost of ‘complaint’. Continue reading

This is a guest post from Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, F. Wendell Miller Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa.

This is the second in the series on #metooacademia.

Like many female academics, I have experienced #Metoo moments. As a graduate student, I was invited to a visiting faculty member’s apartment expecting multiple people to be there. I found myself alone and being propositioned for sex. As a married assistant professor, a senior faculty member at a conference invited me to his room after we had been drinking together. In both cases, the professors respected my decision to say no to their propositions. As I began to advise more female students and faculty members, however, I noticed that my experiences were mild relative to what some of them experienced. Some of my students and colleagues were raped, some were assaulted or grabbed, while others were persistently harassed in a sexual manner. When my colleague, Arthur Miller, was accused of trading sexual favors for grades, an act that ultimately led to his suicide, my eyes became open to the broader dynamics of the #Metoo movement. Many students I advised were humiliated in my colleague’s office, facing a choice they should never experience. Some of my senior male colleagues knew about Art’s behavior which infuriated me. I didn’t initially post anything about the #Metoo movement because I felt that my experiences, while unpleasant on the harassment side, did not compare to students and colleagues who had been raped, assaulted, and placed into professionally inappropriate situations. Our discussions at the 2018 International Studies Association (ISA) conference, though, helped me to embrace my own place in the #Metoo movement. Continue reading

This is guest post from Nina Hall, an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS (tweets @ninawth) and Sarah von Billerbeck is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading (tweets @SvBillerbeck). The authors would like to thank the other Pressing Politics panel co-organizers: Christine Cheng (@cheng_christine), J. Andrew Grant (@jandrewgrant), and John Karlsrud (@johnkarlsrud). We hope to host another Pressing Politics panel at the 2019 annual convention on a topic ISA members deem most pressing.

This is the first post in a series on #metooacademia.

How an ISA Pressing Politics Panel Tackled #Metoo

The International Studies Association (ISA) annual convention is one of the largest academic conferences for International Relations scholars, it attracts approximately 6,000 attendees from all over the world each year. This year the ISA conference decided that the most pressing politics issue to discuss was the #metoo movement in academia. In an innovative roundtable, six panelists from India, Sweden, the US, Canada, and the UK, discussed how the #metoo movement affected them and the academics institutions to which they belong.

This panel was the first of its kind at ISA: a small group of us had worked with ISA to establish a Pressing Politics panel for which the topic was held open until approximately a month before the convention, after which members voted for the topic in an online poll. Our aim was for ISA members to select a pressing, recent, issue that had come up since participants had submitted their conference proposals. We wanted an issue that would not be discussed otherwise at ISA, but that needed academic attention.

Our inspiration for the panel came from the 2017 ISA annual convention, which took place in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s travel ban on individuals from several Muslim-majority countries. Numerous scholars were prevented from attending the ISA annual convention, which provoked outrage and some ended up boycotting the conference. For those who did attend, discussions in hotel lobbies and hallways and at receptions and post-panel happy hours focused heavily on the ban. This is hardly surprising among a group of individuals who dedicate themselves to better understanding how the international system works, where and when cooperation happens, and why relations between states are good or bad. However, because the deadline for submitting paper and panel proposals is approximately 10 months before the actual conference, there were no formal panels or other fora available to assess, analyze, and debate this late-breaking event, something that many found frustrating. We wanted to establish the tradition of at least one Pressing Politics panel at ISA, to ensure we as the academic community debate and engage with the major issues of our times. Continue reading