Rethinking National Security

Rethinking National Security: Gender, Theory, and Practice examines the relationship between gender, feminism, and national security at a time of global crisis and backlash against gender equality. Across seventeen chapters drawing on diverse theoretical lenses and geographical cases, contributors demonstrate that gender is not peripheral to national security but constitutive of it.

The book is organized around three interlocking themes. The first concerns the theoretical and epistemological foundations of national security, challenging the state-centric and masculinized assumptions that have long dominated the field. The second examines feminist interventions in security policy and institutions, tracing the opportunities, constraints, and contradictions that arise when feminist ideas encounter bureaucratic and militarized structures. The third addresses the intensifying global backlash against gender equality, which the book's contributors collectively argue is not incidental to contemporary security politics but integral to it. The book makes a timely intervention in debates about the future of the Women, Peace and Security agenda, feminist foreign policy, and the relationship between democratic backsliding and the erosion of gender equality norms worldwide. Overall, it argues that gender is central to understanding national security and that current backlash is reshaping international security governance and policy debates.

Rethinking National Security will appeal to scholars and graduate students of International Relations, Security Studies, Gender Studies, Political Science, and Sociology.