The Sexual Politics of Liberal Internationalism, 1990s to the Present

That the ‘universal subject’ of political liberalism is implicitly gendered male is a feminist argument as old as liberalism itself; feminist scholars of international law have made similar arguments about liberal concepts of human rights or humanitarian law. Feminist theorists of twentieth-century international relations have suggested that sexual and international orders of masculinism and militarism are mutually constitutive, whether in the boardrooms of foreign policy establishments, on military bases, or in other local sites of intervention in the name of liberal internationalism. Postcolonial, gender and queer theorists continue to challenge the western, masculine and heteronormative bias of the latest iteration of liberal internationalism, which since the Cold War places greater emphasis on the universal rights of women and minorities, while limiting their application by resurrecting discourses of cultural relativism, humanitarian suffering and moral value.

This workshop aims to start a conversation about the sexual politics of liberal internationalism after 1989 in Central Europe and beyond. Our focus on Central Europe is driven by a desire to explore the rise and fall of liberal internationalism in the late twentieth century outside the Anglo-American world. Central Europe became a laboratory for experiments in international economic or political order during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the collapse of multinational empires, the rise and fall of democratic, fascist and state-socialist regimes, until the political and economic transformation that followed the 1989 revolutions. The conjunction between liberal internationalism and neoliberalism adds another dimension to the question of sexual politics in post-Cold War Central Europe, opening up space for comparisons with other parts of the world.

We invite proposals that explore the sexual politics of liberal internationalism since the 1990s in international, transnational or global perspective, as well as papers that place the post-1989 moment in a longer historical trajectory. We are interested in the ideas and institutions that inform liberal internationalism, as well as the practices, performance and reception of liberal internationalism by elites, experts, practitioners, or ordinary people. Topics for discussion might include, but are not limited to: the politics of abortion regulation; sexual violence in conflict and non-conflict situations; trafficking, slavery, prostitution; immigration and asylum; military intervention and peace-making; and the gendered effects of international programmes of economic reform, democratization and good governance.

We expect to be able to cover participants’ travel and accommodation costs.

Please send an abstract of 100 words and a brief CV to Celia Donert (chd31@cam.ac.uk) by 31 October 2024.

This workshop is generously funded by the Cambridge DAAD Hub for German Studies and the KFG / Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘Universalism and Particularism in European Contemporary History’ at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.