Since the end of World War I, the discipline of International Relations was born with the aim of being a discipline that is devoted to exploring various potential interactions across countries which at the same time have goals to avoid conflicts that have occurred in the past in order to prevent another conflict. However, in its development, the scope of International Relations studies has expanded into various issues of concern at the international level. International relations do not only focus on high-level politics involving the interests of war and peace, international cooperation, military defense, and economic power, but also low-level politics such as human rights, the environment, and gender. The inclusion of these new issues cannot be separated from the emergence of new perspectives. In particular, the issue of gender itself is brought up from a feminist perspective, which brings a new perspective to the phenomenon of international relations and focuses on aspects that were ignored by previous perspectives.
In real life, talks about gender issues and efforts to equalize it can be found easily in various places, but often people still have a wrong understanding of gender itself. Gender is the role, function, and responsibility of individuals in carrying out their social life, which is human-made, can change and can be exchanged, and applies based on time and cultural considerations. Meanwhile, sex is a biological form that is inherent in each individual, which is god-made, cannot be changed and cannot be exchanged, and applies anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, gender issues in international relations research are closely related to the term masculinity which means rational, strong and ambitious, and the term femininity which means irrational, weak, and accepting as it is. In today’s life, people associate the terms masculinity with men and femininity with women, thereby showing that men have a higher and more privileged status than women.
The issue of gender then slowly changed the topics of international relations which previously only discussed systems, states, and military defense which were the result of the views of men because the actors who played were dominated by men. Gender issues in the study of International Relations are closely related to the term masculinity which means rational, strong, and ambitious, and the term femininity which means irrational, weak, and accepts as it is. In consequence, feminism was born as a new perspective in international relations with the main aim of making the existence of women recognized and given equal rights with men, which started when the movement to demand suffrage for women in Britain and America was successful after the World War I.
The main agenda of feminism is to create a world that upholds equality between men and women so that there is no domination of each gender. Departing from this fact, the issue of gender and feminism began to be recognized in the international regime. The birth of the commission on the status of women was during the inaugural meetings of the United Nations General Assembly in 1964 when Eleanor Roosevelt read an open letter entitled “the women of the world”. A few days later, the Subcommission on the Status of Women was established under the Commission on Human Rights. In 2010, the most remarkable institutional change in addressing gender issues was the establishment of UN Women. Ever since that time, a long history of the commission on the status of women continuously and consistently developed in its effort to implement the equality of all women. As stated on the official UN Women website (https://www.unwomen.org/en/about-us/about-un-women), Working for the empowerment and rights of women and girls globally, UN Women’s main roles are:
- To support inter-governmental bodies, such as the Commission on the Status of Women, in their formulation of policies, global standards and norms.
- To help Member States implement these standards, standing ready to provide suitable technical and financial support to those countries that request it, and to forge effective partnerships with civil society.
- To lead and coordinate the UN system’s work on gender equality, as well as promote accountability, including through regular monitoring of system-wide progress.
The perspective of feminism in International Relations further adds to the dynamics of International relations studies, feminism thinking about gender equality that is promoted makes the eyes of the world community open to see something that is not always about the country but more about the people in it. Nowadays, the number of women as leaders of countries and large organizations affects the result of policy making.
