Judith Ann Tickner

1. Introduction

Judith Ann Tickner (1937–2024) is widely regarded as a foundational figure in feminist international relations (IR). Writing against the backdrop of a discipline dominated by realism and neo-realism, she argued that core IR concepts—power, security, anarchy, and sovereignty—are shaped by historically specific, masculine-coded assumptions. Her work shows how these assumptions structure what counts as rational action, legitimate violence, and meaningful political agency in world politics.

Tickner’s contributions are both theoretical and methodological. Theoretically, she “gendered” IR by demonstrating that international politics cannot be understood without examining how gendered divisions of labor, representations of masculinity and femininity, and hierarchies of vulnerability and protection organize global life. Methodologically, she helped establish post-positivist and standpoint-based approaches within IR, insisting that knowledge is situated and intertwined with power relations.

For scholars of political and moral philosophy, Tickner is significant because she reopens long-standing debates about human nature, rationality, and the ethics of war from a feminist perspective. Her reconceptualization of security as human and gendered, and of responsibility as relational, has influenced discussions of just war, humanitarian intervention, and global justice.

Tickner’s writings have become central reference points for critical security studies, feminist theory, and the philosophy of social science, generating extensive debates over the scope of IR, the meaning of objectivity, and the place of marginalized voices in global political thought.

2. Life and Historical Context

Tickner’s life and career unfolded alongside major geopolitical shifts and the rise of feminist scholarship in the social sciences. Born in 1937 in Rochester, New York, she came of age during the early Cold War, when IR in the United States was consolidating around realist and later neo-realist explanations of superpower rivalry. Her graduate training in the 1960s and 1970s occurred in departments where state-centric, military-focused theories dominated curricula and research agendas.

Her professional trajectory coincided with second-wave feminism and the institutionalization of women’s studies in North America and Europe. As feminist critiques of male bias in sociology, history, and political science gained prominence, Tickner began to transpose similar concerns into IR, a field that was slower than others to integrate gender as an analytic category.

The late Cold War and post–Cold War periods formed the immediate context for her major works. The nuclear arms race, proxy wars, and debates about deterrence provided the backdrop for her early criticisms of realist security thinking. The end of the Cold War, humanitarian interventions in the Balkans and Africa, and the rise of globalization and transnational governance then opened new empirical and normative questions that she addressed in her post-1990s writings.

Tickner’s later work on the war on terror and 9/11 was shaped by the securitization of everyday life, expanding surveillance, and shifting justifications for the use of force. Throughout, she was attentive to how these historical developments intersected with gender, race, and colonial legacies, situating contemporary IR within longer histories of empire and patriarchal social organization.

3. Intellectual Development

Tickner’s intellectual development is often described in phases that track both disciplinary change in IR and her engagement with feminist and critical theory.

Formation within Mainstream IR

Initially trained in conventional IR, Tickner worked within frameworks heavily influenced by Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and deterrence theory. Her early teaching and research were grounded in these paradigms, which treated states as rational, autonomous actors in an anarchic international system. Over time, she became increasingly skeptical about their silence on social hierarchies, everyday violence, and the absence of women as subjects or analysts.

Feminist Turn

In the mid-1980s, influenced by feminist scholarship across the social sciences, she undertook an explicit feminist rereading of realism. Her 1988 article on Morgenthau marked a transition from internal critique to systematic reconstruction: instead of simply appending women to existing theories, she questioned the gendered assumptions organizing those theories’ core concepts and ethics.

Post–Cold War Expansion and Methodological Reflection

With the publication of Gender in International Relations (1992) and Gendering World Politics (2001), Tickner extended her feminist critique to issues of development, global governance, and peacekeeping. During this period, she became a prominent advocate of post-positivist and interpretive methodologies. She engaged debates over explanation vs. understanding, objectivity vs. standpoint, and quantitative vs. qualitative methods, arguing for pluralism and reflexivity.

Ethics, Responsibility, and Global Justice

From the 2000s onward, Tickner focused more explicitly on ethics and responsibility, particularly in relation to war, intervention, and the global political economy. She developed the notion of relational responsibility, engaging with feminist ethics of care and critical theory to rethink how obligations arise in a deeply interdependent world.

Reflective Consolidation

In her later years, Tickner reflected on the trajectory of feminist IR, its partial institutionalization, and its blind spots, including Eurocentrism and insufficient engagement with the Global South. She participated in dialogues with postcolonial and decolonial scholars, revisiting and revising some earlier formulations to account more fully for race, empire, and global inequalities in knowledge production.

4. Major Works and Key Texts

Tickner’s major works are often discussed as milestones in the evolution of feminist IR and critical security studies. They span theoretical critique, thematic applications, and methodological reflection.

Monographs and Book-Length Studies

These books systematize arguments first developed in earlier articles and later elaborated in essays on methodology and ethics.

Influential Articles and Essays

These texts, taken together, have been used both as entry points for students into feminist IR and as touchstones in ongoing debates about security, method, and ethics within the discipline.

5. Core Ideas: Gender, Power, and Security

Tickner’s core theoretical contributions center on rethinking gender, power, and security as mutually constitutive dimensions of international politics.

Gender as Analytical Category

Rather than treating gender as synonymous with women, Tickner presents gender as a set of socially constructed meanings attached to masculinity and femininity. These meanings organize political roles (protector/protected), forms of labor (combatant/caregiver), and hierarchies of rationality and emotion. Proponents of this view argue that such gendered binaries underpin IR’s conventional separation of “high politics” (war, diplomacy) from “low politics” (social welfare, reproduction).

Power: From Domination to Relationality

Against images of power as control and domination, associated with realist thought, Tickner develops a relational conception of power. She emphasizes power as the capacity to enable, nurture, and sustain relationships, drawing on feminist theory and critical social theory. Supporters contend that this shift uncovers forms of structural and symbolic power—such as gendered economic dependence or sexualized violence—that traditional IR rarely theorizes.

Security: From States to People

Tickner’s most cited idea is a gendered reconceptualization of security. She argues that dominant definitions—focused on territorial integrity and military threats to states—mask everyday insecurities experienced by individuals, particularly women: domestic violence, economic deprivation, and environmental degradation.

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“If we shift our referent object from states to people, a different set of security concerns emerges.”

— Judith Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations, p. 66

Her work aligns with and influences human security frameworks but adds sustained emphasis on gendered divisions of labor, embodiment, and care. Critics sometimes claim that such broadening risks diluting analytic precision; advocates respond that it corrects a systematic neglect of pervasive, non-military harms.

Gendered Narratives of Protection

Tickner also examines how stories of heroic protectors and vulnerable protected legitimize violence and obscure its gendered consequences. She maintains that these narratives shape public consent for war while rendering invisible those who bear the brunt of conflict, including civilians and caregivers, thereby linking symbolic gender orders to concrete security practices.

6. Methodology and Philosophy of Social Science

Tickner’s methodological writings position feminist IR within broader debates about positivism, objectivity, and the nature of explanation in the social sciences.

Critique of Positivism

She argues that dominant IR methodologies, inspired by natural science models, presume a sharp separation between facts and values and aim for prediction through law-like generalizations. Tickner contends that such positivist approaches obscure the value-laden nature of key concepts (e.g., rationality, interest, security) and reproduce existing power hierarchies by taking the standpoint of dominant actors as neutral.

Proponents of her critique maintain that IR’s claim to value-neutrality often privileges Western, masculinized perspectives. Some defenders of positivism reply that Tickner underestimates the capacity of quantitative and formal methods to incorporate gendered variables and to uncover hidden biases.

Standpoint, Interpretation, and Reflexivity

Drawing on feminist standpoint epistemology, she maintains that knowledge is shaped by the knower’s social position and that marginalized standpoints can reveal aspects of world politics invisible from dominant perspectives.

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“What counts as knowledge in international relations is inseparable from relations of power: whose experiences are taken as typical, whose voices are heard, and whose are silenced.”

— Judith Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics, p. 12

Methodologically, Tickner defends interpretive and contextual approaches that prioritize understanding meaning, practices, and narratives over prediction. She aligns feminist IR with other post-positivist currents—such as critical theory and post-structuralism—while also emphasizing empirical grounding in lived experiences, interviews, and case studies.

Research Programs and Pluralism

In “What Is Your Research Program?”, she presents feminist IR as a research program with distinctive ontological assumptions (relational, socially constructed actors) and methodological preferences (qualitative, reflexive, participatory). She does not reject all forms of explanation but calls for methodological pluralism that recognizes different questions require different tools.

Ethics of Scholarship

Tickner also advances a philosophy of responsible scholarship, arguing that researchers are implicated in the power structures they study. She urges reflexivity about how academic narratives can either reinforce or challenge militarization, marginalization, and colonial hierarchies. Critics sometimes worry this blurs lines between analysis and advocacy; supporters see it as a realistic acknowledgment of the politics of knowledge.

7. Contributions to Political and Moral Philosophy

Tickner’s work intersects with political and moral philosophy by rethinking core categories of agency, responsibility, and justice in international affairs.

Rethinking Agency and Human Nature

Against realist images of atomistic, self-regarding individuals and states, she draws on feminist ethics and social theory to depict agents as relational and interdependent. This challenges philosophical accounts that ground political order in fear-driven self-help behavior and suggests alternative bases for cooperation rooted in care, trust, and mutual vulnerability.

Security, Violence, and Just War

By expanding security to encompass structural and gender-based violence, Tickner indirectly contests traditional just war theory, which tends to focus on interstate war and combatant conduct. Proponents argue that her perspective shifts moral attention to harms produced by sanctions, occupation, economic restructuring, and domestic abuse. Some ethicists, however, question whether such broadened notions of violence can be integrated coherently into just war frameworks without losing focus.

Relational Responsibility

Tickner’s notion of relational responsibility contributes to debates over moral obligation in a globalized world. She maintains that responsibility arises from webs of interdependence rather than from isolated choices:

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“Responsibility in world politics must be conceived as shared and relational, not simply as a matter of individual choice.”

— Judith Ann Tickner, “On the Frontlines or Sidelines…,” p. 385–386

This view aligns with feminist ethics of care and some communitarian and critical theories, challenging liberal accounts that prioritize individual culpability and state consent. Supporters see it as better capturing complex, transboundary harms; critics worry it may diffuse responsibility so broadly that assigning concrete duties becomes difficult.

Global Justice and Structural Injustice

Tickner’s attention to structural injustice—including gendered labor markets, militarized economies, and colonial legacies—intersects with philosophical debates on global justice. While not formulating a comprehensive theory of distributive justice, she foregrounds how global orders systematically allocate insecurity and vulnerability along gendered and racial lines. This emphasis has been taken up by philosophers and IR theorists interested in integrating feminist and postcolonial insights into accounts of global fairness and obligation.

8. Impact on International Relations and Feminist Theory

Tickner’s impact is visible both in the transformation of IR as a discipline and in the development of feminist theory about global politics.

Institutionalization of Feminist IR

Her writings helped legitimate feminist IR as a recognized subfield. Texts like Gender in International Relations became standard references in graduate syllabi, and her arguments were widely discussed in mainstream IR journals. Supporters credit her with opening space for subsequent generations of scholars to pursue gender-focused research on topics ranging from peacekeeping and diplomacy to global finance and climate change.

Engagement with Mainstream IR

Tickner’s critiques prompted sustained dialogue between feminists and mainstream theorists. Some realists and neoliberals incorporated gender as a variable into existing frameworks, while others debated her methodological and epistemological claims. The article “You Just Don’t Understand” is frequently cited in discussions of disciplinary boundary policing and the politics of citation, showing how her work not only introduced new content but also reshaped meta-theoretical conversations.

Contributions to Feminist Theory

Within feminist theory, Tickner is often cited as a leading figure who extended feminist analysis from domestic politics and development into high politics and security. Her emphasis on narratives of protection and the gendering of violence influenced feminist work on militarism, nationalism, and the war on terror. At the same time, some postcolonial and intersectional feminists later pushed her framework to engage more fully with race, empire, and the Global South, generating productive extensions and revisions.

Cross-Current Influence

Tickner’s ideas have interacted with other critical approaches—constructivism, critical security studies, post-structuralism—contributing to a broader “reflectivist” turn in IR. Her methodological arguments about standpoint and reflexivity influenced debates about interpretive methods and ethics of fieldwork. Conversely, engagements with postcolonial and decolonial scholars have led to critical reassessments of Eurocentric tendencies in early feminist IR, including aspects of her own work.

Overall, her impact is reflected in the proliferation of gender-focused research agendas and in the normalization of questions about who is secured, by whom, and at whose expense in contemporary IR scholarship.

9. Critiques, Debates, and Continuing Discussions

Tickner’s work has generated extensive debate across theoretical, methodological, and political dimensions.

Realist and Rationalist Critiques

Some realist and rational-choice theorists argue that her critiques mischaracterize mainstream IR by focusing on caricatured versions of realism and underestimating the flexibility of rationalist models. They contend that gender can be incorporated as an additional variable within existing frameworks without rethinking foundational assumptions about states, interests, or anarchy. From this perspective, her turn to interpretivism is seen as sacrificing predictive power and cumulative knowledge.

Methodological Objections

Defenders of positivist methodologies question Tickner’s stance on objectivity and rigor, suggesting that standpoint and interpretive approaches risk relativism or ideological bias. They debate whether her calls for pluralism adequately specify criteria for evaluating competing explanations, and whether normative commitments unduly shape empirical claims.

Feminist and Postcolonial Critiques

Within feminist and critical circles, there have been internal critiques. Some intersectional feminists and postcolonial scholars argue that early feminist IR, including parts of Tickner’s work, foregrounded gender while insufficiently engaging race, class, sexuality, and colonial histories. They call for decentering Western experiences and incorporating non-Western epistemologies, sometimes viewing her contributions as necessary but partial steps.

Others interrogate whether the focus on security and the state, even when “gendered,” may inadvertently reproduce statist or militarized logics. Debates continue over how far to move beyond security as an organizing concept toward alternative frameworks, such as care, commons, or decolonial solidarity.

Ongoing Discussions

Tickner’s notions of relational power and relational responsibility remain subjects of active discussion. Supporters explore their compatibility with existing theories of agency and justice; skeptics question their precision and applicability in policy contexts. Similarly, her broad conception of violence is praised for exposing hidden harms but challenged for potentially stretching the concept to the point of losing analytical clarity.

These debates have not displaced her work; rather, they have turned it into a key reference point against which subsequent theories define their own positions on gender, security, and knowledge in world politics.

10. Legacy and Historical Significance

Tickner’s legacy is often assessed in terms of her role in reshaping both the agenda and the self-understanding of international relations as a discipline.

Reframing the Discipline

She is widely credited with helping to institutionalize questions of gender and everyday life at the heart of IR inquiry. By insisting that the discipline’s core concepts were historically gendered and politically consequential, she contributed to a broader rethinking of what counts as relevant subject matter in IR, extending it beyond interstate war to include care work, domestic violence, and structural economic inequalities.

Canon Formation and Teaching

Her books and articles have become canonical readings in courses on IR theory, security studies, and feminist theory. This pedagogical presence has shaped the training of multiple generations of scholars, normalizing feminist perspectives as part of mainstream theoretical debates rather than as marginal add-ons.

Influence Beyond IR

Tickner’s reconceptualizations of security, power, and responsibility have influenced research in peace and conflict studies, development studies, and global ethics, where scholars draw on her work to analyze humanitarian intervention, peacebuilding, and global governance. Her methodological reflections contributed to interdisciplinary conversations about reflexivity, positionality, and the politics of knowledge.

Historical Position

Historically, Tickner is often situated within the “third debate” in IR—between positivist and post-positivist approaches—and within the rise of feminist and critical theories from the late 20th century onward. Commentators typically see her as a bridge figure, articulating feminist concerns in a language legible to mainstream IR while also pushing feminist theory toward global and security issues.

Her death in 2024 prompted renewed evaluations of feminist IR’s achievements and limitations. Scholars continue to revisit her work, sometimes revising or extending her arguments in light of contemporary concerns—such as climate change, digital surveillance, and decolonial politics—indicating that her conceptual innovations remain central reference points in debates over how to understand and ethically evaluate world politics.