Feminism and the World

I have mentioned this before in one of my blog entries but and I will mention it again. I feel that the purpose of research in IR is to explain how the world works. Why states do what they do. That, in my humble opinion, is why there is IR research. So my problem with the article that Julie Mertus is that the first thing she does is tell a person story about when she was living in Yugoslavia. In statistics we would call that anecdotal evidence and the first thing that I learned on the first day of class in statistics is that anecdotal evidence is no good. Mrs. Mertus wants to hear the individual stories on individual people. That sounds good in theory and there is nothing wrong with wanted to connect to your fellow human, but the problem that arises is that it isn’t a very good way to understand the world. Unless she puts together a random sampling of all of the people in Yugoslavia at the time of the Kosovo crisis, and then talks to each of the people that are chosen in her sample she does not have valid data. It might be very interesting data, it probably has value to understanding how those individual people were living, and it would make a great book, but it doesn’t explain the world. Mrs. Mertus is doing very interesting research, but isn’t doing IR research.

I don’t want this to be construed as an attack on feminist theory. Feminist theory has its place (in the kitchen, just kidding but I had to get at lease one joke in here) but that place isn’t IR. I imagine it would fit much better in sociology, or psychology or something else like that. Individual stories can tell us something about the world we live in. But they are can’t tell us how the world works, unless they happen to be the stories of the people that are actually controlling the world, political leaders, military leaders, business leaders and such (notice how all of my examples contained the word leader, not average person). The feminist theory that Mrs. Mertus chooses to use is flawed from the start. Not by any fault of hers but because the way that it approaches IR does not fulfill the primary goal of IR, understanding how the world works.

Matt Bank