Gender, Orientalism, and the War on Terror ― Representation, Discourse, and Intervention in Global Politics

This book offers an accessible and timely analysis of the ‘War on Terror’, based on an innovative approach to a broad range of theoretical and empirical research. It uses ‘gendered orientalism’ as a lens through which to read the relationship between the George W. Bush administration, gendered and racialized military intervention, and global politics. The author argues that legitimacy, power, and authority (to create knowledge, to identify and classify groups of people, to prescribe and undertake certain actions) in global politics, and the ‘War on Terror’ specifically, are discursively constructed through ‘official’ representations that are gendered and racialized – often orientalist. The book focuses on the ways in which ‘official’ US ‘War on Terror’ discourse enabled – indeed, required – military intervention into Afghanistan and Iraq, offering a feminist analysis to broaden the scope of critical analyses of the ‘War on Terror’ and reflect on the gendered and racial underpinnings of key relations of power within contemporary global politics. The book draws specifically upon poststructural and postcolonial scholarship and is situated within the existing feminist work that has been done on the ‘War on Terror’, and in feminist International Relations more broadly. The author provides a unique, innovative and significant analysis of the operation of orientalism and gender in global politics, and the ‘War on Terror’ specifically, using over 200 primary sources.

This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and all those involved in gender politics, development, humanitarian intervention, international (global) relations, Middle East politics, security, and US foreign policy.