Feminist and Anti-Gender Politics in International Relations
Course by Susana Galan (IBEI) & Tutku Ayhan (IBEI)
- Schedule: 17 & 18 June (10-13:00h and 14-16:00h)
Anti-gender politics has emerged as one of the most significant global challenges to democratic institutions and human rights, notably women’s and LGBTQI+ rights. In parallel, a number of countries have adopted Feminist Foreign Policies (FFPs) to advance their international commitments to gender equality. This builds upon prior efforts such as the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS), which since the early 2000s has been laying the groundwork for gender-sensitive approaches to security, peacebuilding, and conflict resolution. The course will situate these contemporary developments within broader international processes, including state feminism, feminist diplomacy, and gender and development approaches. The different sessions will analyze these two emerging trends in international relations to address the following questions: What are the ideological foundations of anti-gender mobilizations, and how do they intersect with authoritarian, nationalist, and populist agendas? Conversely, to what extent do FFPs challenge the mainstream understandings of security, diplomacy and global governance? How do these developments contribute to shaping contemporary global politics? Additionally, the course will examine the transnational nature of anti-gender mobilizations and also how feminist, LGBTQI+, and women’s activists resist and respond to these challenges. It will also address feminist critiques of FFP as well as the potentials and limitations of these top-down policy instruments. By analyzing these two contrasting forces - anti-gender politics and FFPs - the course will explore their impact on institutions and policymaking. The class methodology will be a combination of short lectures to clarify the main concepts and ideas covered in each of the sessions, class discussions to critically reflect on the required readings, and in-class group presentations at the end of the course.
Susana Galán is a Ramón y Cajal Assistant Professor at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. She has a PhD in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University (USA), a Master in European Studies from the Europa-Universität Viadrina (Germany), and a BA in Journalism from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Her research adopts an intersectional, interdisciplinary, transnational, and social justice approach that draws upon feminist and queer theory, affect theory, feminist media studies, and feminist geography. Her work has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Gender and Society, Gender, Place & Culture, the Journal of International Women’s Studies, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research, the Observatori del Conflicte Social, and the books Young People Shaping Democratic Politics (Palgrave), Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (Duke University Press), and Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab Uprisings (Terreform).
Between 2022 and 2024, she coordinated the COST Action Platform Work Inclusion Living Lab (PWILL), of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology, and the project “Gender equality qualities of the platform economy. A framework of analysis,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Tutku Ayhan is a Fellow in International Security at IBEI. Before joining IBEI, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at State University of New York, Binghamton.
Broadly situated within Feminist Security Studies, Tutku's research examines gendered dimensions of war and its aftermath from an intersectional framework. She is mainly interested in post-conflict gender dynamics and women's post-conflict experiences, particularly their experience of resilience and empowerment. Her work also explores forced displacement, ethnic conflict and genocide, as well as sexual and gender-based violence.
Her research methodology involves extensive, multi-site fieldwork among marginalized communities affected by conflict. Using a combination of in-depth interviews, participant observation, and ethnographic techniques, she follows forcibly displaced individuals surviving conflict in various settings, including camps, informal shelters, and cities across both the Global South and Global North.
At IBEI, she has been coordinating "The Securitization of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities and the Rise of Xenophobia in the EU" (SECUREU) project.