Description
Feminist IR has illuminated the importance of gender to understanding how foreign policies and the organisations that make and implement them are produced. The discipline of international relations, however, continues to suffer from “racial aphasia”, and mainstream feminist IR has been criticised for failing to centre analyses of ‘race’ and coloniality. Nonetheless, there is a burgeoning academic literature on the topic of ‘race’ in/and IR, which demonstrates how the racial structures and hierarchies created by slavery, Empire, colonialism, and capitalism, remain central to international politics and foreign policymaking.
This panel explores the intersections of gender and ‘race’, and colonial afterlives, in shaping the life of organisations in international politics, including governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations. It will trace these intersections across the foreign policies developed and implemented across these organisations. The panel asks: how does gender and ‘race’ shape the everyday practices of organisations that constructs or influences foreign policies? How do processes of gendering and racialisation in these organisations influence foreign policymaking, or make particular foreign policies possible or intelligible? How are spatiality and power dynamics shaped by the colonial afterlives of organisations/, and vice versa? In what ways does gender and ‘race’ reproduce colonial-racial logics in foreign policymaking, and how might these processes be subverted?
