*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Paul Kirby is a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London. His work has largely focused on gender governance, feminist theory, and critical war studies, with side interests in pop culture and the philosophy of social science. At the time of interview, he is doing archival work for a history of feminist encounters with foreign policy and statecraft and beginning a project on the governance of masculinity in world politics. Recent publications include ’The Future of the UK’s Women, Peace and Security Policy’ (with Hannah Wright and Aisling Swaine), New Directions in Women, Peace and Security (co-edited with Soumita Basu and Laura Shepherd); ‘Sexual Violence in the Border Zone’, on the limits of the European Union’s gender initiatives in Libya; and a new analysis of eighteen years of the Women, Peace and Security ecosystem, co-authored with Laura Shepherd. Also with Laura Shepherd and to be published with Columbia University Press in early 2024 is Governing the Feminist Peace: Vitality and Failure in the Women, Peace and Security Agenda. Paul is also the author of the gender chapter in the Baylis, Smith and Owens textbook The Globalization of World Politics and has previously written for e-IR on the digital commons and open access International Relations. Despite everything, he still tweets.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field? 

The first bit of good news is that the ‘fields’ of gender, critical war studies, international theory and disciplinary history are now so productive that I am left totally inadequate to the task of surveying them. When you can catch your breath, that is exciting: what makes up ‘International Relations’ is much changed from two decades ago, and overwhelmingly in a positive direction. 

With a bit more precision, there’s an incredible sophistication and care of critique in something like Rahul Rao’s Out of Time and (a little while ago) Megan Daigle’s From Cuba with Love. The call for a ‘martial empiricism’ issued by Antoine Bousquet, Jairus Grove and Nisha Shah really resonated with me, and is being taken up with great flair on topics from the messy history of bomb disposal to the collective ideology of the tank-warrior and the living saving properties of the military videogame. I’m an ingenue in disciplinary history and the history of political thought so all of it is bright and alluring at the moment. I’ve learnt much from Duncan Bell’s work on imperial thought and Vineet Thakur and Peter Vale’s South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations, and was recently left energised by Nicholas Guilhot’s caustic account of counter-revolutionary realism. The Women in the History of International Thought project has been hugely important in recovering theory by the canonically excluded. This is all too impressionistic, but I’m generally encouraged by the deepening inroads of critical thinking on race and gender, and the accompanying reassessment of what International Relations has been (see, for example, Jasmine Gani and Jenna Marshall’s recent special issue of International Affairs), even as we’re not always so sure what to do with it next.

Less celebratory, but also more urgent, is the critique of American and Western European feminism in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. In the months after February 2022 too many relied on a brutal idea of ‘peace’, a myopic view of race and empire, and even indulged high-realist armchair geopolitics. Inexcusably, Ukrainian and East European perspectives were almost entirely absent from the initial ‘western’ feminist response, including in IR. So I’ve been trying to head the critiques levelled by Tereza Hendl, Maria Sonevytsky, Yuliya Yurchenko, Olena Lyubchenko and others. That’s less a question of scholarly debate than hard thinking, though Míla O’Sullivan and Katerina Krulišová have also set out the stakes for the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

There’s a long........

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