Antipositivism

The dominant discourses in international relations pay little attention to the roles and experiences of women. However, half of all human experience comes from women and to properly analyse the realities of our world, international relations theory needs to account for gender and sex. Feminist perspectives in international relations can do much to ameliorate the failure of established international relations theories to account for half of the human population. Accounting for gender in international relations can, in a positivist and post-positivist manner, provide crucial insights to international relations theory by challenging established assumptions and filling in the gaps of the current major theories. Feminist international relations (IR) incorporates a broad spectrum of perspectives. However, anti-positivist feminist IR can be detrimental to both the normative goal of improving the position of women in international relations and the goal of contributing to international relations theory. Positivist and post-positivist feminist IR is decidedly better at transforming the field of international relations as it can challenge dominant international relations theories on their own ground. Accounting for gender poses a fundamental challenge to the state-centrism and security focus of mainstream international relations theories since their conception of security does not lead to the protection of women. Feminist IR can help build international relations in an objective manner…

accurately portray the logic of scientific explanation and inquiry by asking, “By what criteria are we to judge the acceptability of statements, generalizations, hypotheses, theories, research programs, or paradigms?” (p. 99). Interpretivism has yet a different ontology, assumptions about what we can know, and epistemology, how and why can we know something, as a rejection of positivism: centrally, the knowledge acquired in this discipline is socially constructed rather than objectively…