Elisabeth Prugl

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies · Department of International Relations and Political Science

The article argues that gender can be understood to cause violent conflict, although the literatures on civil war and conflict transformation are largely silent on the matter. The problem is an understanding of causation as explaining regularities, which fails to grasp how gender, in intersection with other markers of difference, is productive and...

This conversation brings together feminist scholars from various backgrounds and epistemological traditions around a central topic in feminist debates that is today more relevant than ever, social reproduction. It begins by examining social reproduction as a concept and its entanglements with the dynamics of global capitalism from human geography a...

Conventional stories about conflicts often miss the role of everyday practices in escalating and de-escalating violence and how intersecting social dynamics of gender, ethnicity, age, and religion shape these practices. In this article, we introduce the Special Section on Gender and the Micro-Dynamics of Violent Conflicts. Situating the section wit...

In West Africa, women’s organizations have created the Women’s Situation Room (WSR) – a mechanism aimed at preventing and responding to episodes of violence and instability. Drawing on experiences from Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, the article explores how strategies developed and deployed by WSRs use gender as a productive force to counteract violen...

The article introduces the Forum on Commercializing Agriculture/Reorganizing Gender, which reports findings from DEMETER project, a collaboration of scholars from Cambodia, Ghana and Switzerland. The project examines how agriculture and food security policies have advanced or hindered gender equality and the right to food; analyzes the role of huma...

With gender equality becoming a key feature of the global food security agenda, international organizations have produced a rich body of knowledge on gender. This paper argues that such gender expertise generates political effects through identity constructions, problem definitions and rationalities. We critically analyse 59 documents relating to g...

In international governance circles it has become common to refer to gender interventions as "the gender thing." The article takes this formulation as an opportunity to interrogate what a new materialist approach, such as that formulated in Laura Zanotti's Ontological Entanglements, Agency, and Ethics in International Relations, could mean for inte...

Political Economy is inundated with foundational dichotomies, which constitute central concepts in its theorizing. Feminist scholarship has problematized the gender subtext of these dichotomies and the resulting blind spots, including the positioning of women’s labour, processes of reproduction, and private households as marginal to the economy. Th...

Reading time: 6 min Covid-19 has brought to the surface a long-lingering crisis of care under neoliberal capitalism, revealing a massive underinvestment in the care economy. The impact of the crisis on carers-disproportionately women-has been especially severe, both physically and economically. Similarly, it is women who were particularly impacted...

The article revisits the problematic relationship between feminist theory and praxis through the writings of Marysia Zalewski, one of the foremost feminist theorists of IR. Zalewski has dealt with this relationship through her work on methodology. In three sections, the article explores: (a) her engagement with standpoint theory through her interve...

A gendered bottom-up peacebuilding approach requires collaborations that valorise local knowledge and make visible existing situated peacebuilding practices. • A gendered approach to peacebuilding recognises that gender and other axes of difference can be a resource for peace: when communities value and manage their internal diversity they more ea...

Feminist ideas have entered the neoliberal agricultural development agenda, including increasingly ubiquitous public-private partnerships and businesses. Rhetorically committed to gender equality, these new development actors have reduced equality to a matter of numbers, seeking to include women in their projects while disregarding intersectionally...

The article draws on insights from feminist literature, science and technology studies (STS) and governmentality studies to explore how technologies introduced through agricultural research for development (ar4d) participate in performing gender. Drawing on gender audits of two international agricultural research institutions, we discuss the perfor...

The rise of gender expertise and gender experts as a new profession is a significant and highly controversial phenomenon of contemporary feminist politics. This introductory article provides a contextualisation of this phenomenon, a short review of the literature and a theoretical specification of gender expertise, drawing on insights from the prof...

This article conceptualizes gender expertise in global governance as a transnational field structured by cleavages and struggles. We situate the phenomenon within the literature on gender mainstreaming and transnational expertise and make the case for a new way to theorise gender expertise. We propose two main theoretical shifts: a depersonalizatio...

Sexual violence against men is an under-theorised and under-noticed topic, though it is becoming increasingly apparent that this form of violence is widespread. Yet despite emerging evidence documenting its incidence, especially in conflict and post-conflict zones, efforts to understand its causes and develop strategies to reduce it are hampered by...

The article identifies some research agendas in feminist security studies and global political economy at the contemporary historical juncture of political instability, power transition and neoliberal capitalism. These encompass explanations of the relationship between gender and war, including their co-constitution; the promises and pitfalls of th...

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, political scientists have been paying more careful attention to the role of banking institutions as economic but also political institutions whose financial decisions involve the exercise of power and shape the conditions under which governmental decisions are made. Because the United States is still the wo...

Neoliberalism has been discredited as a result of proliferating crises (financial, ecological, care) and mounting inequality. This paper examines the growing research on gender at the World Bank as a site for the construction of a new hegemonic consensus around neoliberalism. Drawing on a computer-assisted inductive analysis of thirty-four Bank pub...

Contemporary political science has generated extensive literatures on the themes of war, civil war, contentious politics, and social movements. But these literatures are often segregated in particular subfields, like International Relations and Comparative Politics, and typically speak past each other rather than to each other. Sidney Tarrow’s War,...

Feminism means engaging with power. Feminists have rallied against patriarchal power in order to undermine it, but they also have come together to empower themselves and challenge existing arrangements. Indeed, like all human agents, women have wielded power in various feminized roles throughout history. What is new in the contemporary era is the f...

Since the 1980s, the discipline of International Relations has seen a series of disputes over its foundations. However, there has been one core concept that, although addressed in various guises, had never been explicitly and systematically engaged with in these debates: the human. This volume is the first to address comprehensively the topic of th...

There recently has been an avalanche of critiques of the way in which feminism has gone to bed with neoliberal capitalism and become an instrument of governmentality. In this paper, I look at these phenomena as processes of a ‘neoliberalisation of feminism'. I illustrate such neoliberalisation by introducing women's empowerment projects run by tran...

From the World Bank's ‘gender equality is smart economics’ to The Economist's ‘womenomics’ and Nike's ‘girl effect’, feminism seems to have well and truly penetrated the business world. Government action on behalf of gender equality is well institutionalized but private corporations appear as a new actor in this cause. This article asks: What do bu...

A Discussion of Laura sjoberg's Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War - Volume 12 Issue 1 - Elisabeth Prügl

Does feminist International Relations (IR) have anything to say about development? Twenty years ago the question would have been purely rhetorical: feminists working in the field of IR were deeply informed by literature on gender and development, and they contributed to this literature. However, in the wake of the militarisation of international po...

The struggle for women’s rights and to overcome gender oppression has long engaged the efforts of inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations. Feminist Strategies in International Governance provides a new introduction to the contemporary forms of this struggle. It brings together the voices of academics and practitioners to reflect in pa...

Prügl, Elisabeth. (2012) “If Lehman Brothers Had Been Lehman Sisters...”: Gender and Myth in the Aftermath of the Financial Crisis. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2011.00149.x © 2012 International Studies Association In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/09, there was a remarkable preoccupation in the English...

Maria Wimer grew up on a family farm in Germany and dreamt of becoming a farmer. Yet it was clear that her older brother was going to inherit the farm, as has been the practice throughout Europe. This left Maria with two options: she could marry a farmer, to gain access to land and engage in farming; or she could train to become a farmer, lease lan...

Diversity management and gender mainstreaming can be considered technologies of government in the Foucaultian sense; that is, they are technologies that guide people to conduct themselves in a particular manner; their purpose is the “conduct of conduct.” This article illustrates the value of applying a Foucaultian “analytics of government” to gener...

Feminist international relations is situated uneasily within a subfield of political science, on the one hand, and within an interdisciplinary literature on globalization, on the other. Emerging in the 1990s from a critique of the realist and rationalist IR canon, feminist IR research has diversified considerably, including different lines of theor...

"The premise of mainstreaming gender is to bring equality concerns into every aspect of policy-making, and this brave book offers a close look at how feminists have taken up the challenge to transform the hidden dynamics of male domination in agricultural policy in Europe. In contrast to the automatic assumption that (neo)liberal policy always work...

This article explores the role of the multilevel and decentered European state in reproducing masculine domination through its rural development policies. I look at the implementation of gender mainstreaming in the European Union’s LEADER program in two regions in Germany. I argue that the postmodern state’s role in reproducing masculine domination...

The wide adoption of gender mainstreaming has rekindled debates about feminist engagements with the State. The purpose of this article is to provide a clearer specification of power politics in such engagements and develop the conceptual tools to assess the utility of feminist strategies. Drawing on feminist state theory and comparing two feminist...

This chapter examines gender approaches to the study of European integration and their ontological claim that gender matters when probing the process of European integration. European integration is part of a sociopolitical world that is fundamentally structured by understandings of femininity and masculinity and contributes to reconstructing these...

The Price of Gender Equality: Member States and Governance in the European Union. By van der VleutenAnna. Aldershot and Hampshire: Ashgate. 2007. 232 pp. $99.95. - Volume 5 Issue 1 - Elisabeth Prügl

European integration efforts have long envisioned the creation of unity out of diversity. The preamble to the Treaty of Rome famously set out the determination of the signatories “to establish the foundations of an ever closer union among the European peoples.” The creation of unity has entailed the building of common policies, but increasingly als...

Classical European integration theories provide us with limited knowledge about the interaction of diverse minority groups with and within the European Union (EU), as they tend to be teleologically wedded to the furthering of unity by way of integration. In contrast, as pointed out in our introduction, research programs exploring multilevel politic...

The paper assesses the contribution of gender approaches to understanding European integration. It offers a conceptualization of such approaches as including a distinct ontology, epistemology and methodology. While feminist literature on the European Union is diverse, all such literature sheds light on the gendered process of European integration....

The globalization of markets in the late twentieth century has entailed a significant restructuring of gender relations. Women have become workers in export-oriented manufacturing, they have moved into the informal sector and home-based work, and they have left farms and homes to work as maids, nannies, and in the global sex industry. In the agricu...

This article employs insights from the feminist welfare state literature and the feminist literature on global governance to illustrate ways in which global restructuring is implicated in the construction of gender relations in German agriculture. I argue that changes in modes of regulation have entailed a movement from a patriarchal agricultural w...

-

The discipline of international relations (IR) is witnessing a “constructivist turn.” In this article, we argue that the new preoccupation with constructivism provides a unique opportunity to further understanding between feminism and the IR mainstream. Feminism and constructivism share a commitment to an ontology of becoming that can serve as a co...

Feminist critiques of globalization have received insufficient attention in public discourse.Spike Peterson's RVP framework integrates feminist scholarship in a way that adds punch to such critiques. Its main contribution consists in bringing into view women's labor in the 'reproductive' economy. A shortcoming is that it retains the opposition betw...

We develop a new typology for examination of the effects of international institutions on member states' behavior. Some institutions lead to convergence of members' practices, whereas others result, often for unintended reasons, in divergence. We hypothesize that the observed effect of institutions depends on the level of externalities to state beh...

This paper starts from the presumption that gender politics in European agriculture are part of a larger process of patriarchal rule operating at the level of the European Union. It probes how and why the family farm came to be the unquestioned anchor of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and how the commitment to the family farm contribute...