Originally published in 1993, this title provides a unique insight into the challenges faced by the women who shaped United States foreign policy at the time. The authors examine the "Gender Gap" in beliefs between men and women in the State and Defense departments. Highlighted by interviews with ten leading women in the field – including Jeane Kirkpatrick and Rozanne Ridgway, then the two highest ranking women in foreign policy – the book provides an intimate glimpse into the making of foreign policy during the Reagan administration. Based on 79 interviews with women and men senior executives in the departments of State and Defense, this title poses a number of key questions. Who are the women in the State and Defense Departments, and how do their background and lifestyle choices compare with those of their male colleagues? What problems do they confront in an attempt to influence policy in the international arena? Do the women on the inside make a difference in how policy is formulated or how the departments are managed? Are women by nature more peaceful than men? Will they alter the face of foreign policy? Or are they more likely to hold the same views as men? This title provided an important insight into these questions, and would have been provocative reading at the time of publication.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

This book provides a critique of the discipline of international relations from a feminist perspective. The critique is developed, first theoretically. Then the author examines both feminist theories and theories of international relations with a view to developing an approach to world politics which incorporates an analysis of gender, and gender relations. The critique is secondly developed through the application of the notion of gender to the activities of two international institutions, the International Parenthood Federation and the International Labour Organisation.

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power – scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening. This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order – the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflict – the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations. International Studies Association: International Communication Best Book Award

Why is feminist research carried out in international relations (IR)? What are the methodologies and methods that have been developed in order to carry out this research? Feminist Methodologies for International Relations offers students and scholars of IR, feminism, and global politics practical insight into the innovative methodologies and methods that have been developed - or adapted from other disciplinary contexts - in order to do feminist research for IR. Both timely and timeless, this volume makes a diverse range of feminist methodological reflections wholly accessible. Each of the twelve contributors discusses aspects of the relationships between ontology, epistemology, methodology, and method, and how they inform and shape their research. This important and original contribution to the field will both guide and stimulate new thinking.

How can governments ensure that women have the same employment and entrepreneurship opportunities as men? One important step is to level the legal playing field so that the rules for operating in the worlds of work and business apply equally regardless of gender. Women, Business and the Law 2018, the fifth edition in a series, examines laws affecting women’s economic inclusion in 189 economies worldwide. It tracks progress that has been made over the past two years while identifying opportunities for reform to ensure economic empowerment for all. The report updates all indicators as of June 1, 2017 and explores new areas of research, including financial inclusion.

Though recent US government attention to global women¿s rights and empowerment is often presented as a new phenomenon, Karen Garner argues that nearly two decades ago the Clinton administration broke barriers to challenge women¿s unequal status vis-à-vis men around the world and to incorporate their needs into US foreign policy and aid programs. Garner draws on a wide range of primary sources, including interviews with government officials and feminist activists who worked with the administration, to present a persuasive account of the emergence, evolution, and legacy of US global gender policy in the 1990s.