The Positivist Study of Gender and International Relations

Abstract

Up until about 2000, most of the work on gender and international relations (IR) was nonpositivist in nature. Since 2000, there has been a burst of positivist gender/IR scholarship, much of it quantitative. This work has addressed several important areas in IR, including terrorism, interstate war, human rights, civil war, violence against civilians, public opinion, international norms, globalization, and others. Much of this work has developed new data, advanced theory, and employed rigorous empirical methods. This article surveys this positivist scholarship. It discusses how positivist and nonpositivist gender/IR work complement each other. This article makes recommendations about directions for future scholarship on gender and IR.