Catherine Eschle
Biographic Data
| ID | 108722 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Eschle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Eschle |
| SIGNATURE | ESCHLE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Strathclyde |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4566-9176 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Base women and beyond
‘Why haven’t you known?’: Transoceanic solidarity and the politics of knowledge in feminist anti-nuclear activism
This article critically examines the character and extent of transoceanic solidarity in feminist anti-nuclear activism. Drawing on archival research into a British-based solidarity network, Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP), the article centralises the rhetorical question ‘Why Haven’t You Known?’ demanded by Māori activist Titewhai Harawira of her British audience in 1986, and extends it to contemporary scholars of…
Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism
This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, 'Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics'. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the articl…
Feminism and Solidarity on the Left: Rethinking the Unhappy Marriage Metaphor
In the context of efforts to revive and reconfigure the left, fraught solidarity relations between feminism and other left forces are again under the political spotlight. This article revisits the widespread use of the ‘unhappy marriage’ metaphor to characterise these relations, given that metaphors play a significant role in structuring political discourse and action. We argue that the metaphor has been used in uncritical and limiting ways, and …
Theorising feminist organising in and against neoliberalism: Beyond co-optation and resistance
This article reviews contemporary academic debates about feminist organising in and against neoliberalism, which we see as structured by a co-optation–resistance dichotomy. We outline three narratives: a high-profile ‘strong’ co-optation thesis; a more nuanced co-optation discourse; and an emergent counter-narrative of resistance. While sympathetic to the latter two, we critically unpack the account of neoliberalism, of feminist protagonists and …
Feminist scholarship, feminist institution-building, feminist friendships
Recollections of the daily grind and the deeper joys of editing a feminist journal
Nuclear (in)security in the everyday: Peace campers as everyday security practitioners
This article extends the emergent focus on ‘the everyday’ in critical security studies to the topic of nuclear (in)security, through an empirical study of anti-nuclear peace activists understood as ‘everyday security practitioners’. In the first part of the article, I elaborate on the notion of everyday security practitioners, drawing particularly on feminist scholarship, while in the second I apply this framework to a case study of Faslane Peace…
Troubling stories of the end of occupy: Feminist narratives of betrayal at occupy Glasgow
This article offers a feminist take on the question of why Occupy camps closed down, in the form of a narrative analysis of interviews from participants in Occupy Glasgow. In response to the emergence of an activist discourse emphasising the role of external forces in camp closure and the existence of a longer-term legacy in terms of individual and community politicisation, I build here on feminist interventions that point instead to serious inte…
Beyond Greenham Woman: Gender identities and anti-nuclear activism in peace camps
This article investigates the discursive construction of gendered identities in anti-nuclear activism and particularly in peace camps. My starting point is the now substantial academic literature on Cold War women-only peace camps, such as that at Greenham Common. I extend the analysis that emerges from this literature in my research on the mixed-gender, long-standing camp at Faslane naval base in Scotland. I argue that the 1980s saw the articula…
Faslane Peace Camp and the Political Economy of the Everyday
In what ways is ‘the everyday’ reproduced and reconfigured at protest camps? In this short piece reflecting on my research into Faslane Peace Camp, I focus particularly on the ways in which this camp entails the critical interrogation of everyday economic norms and practices
Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-Opted and Progressive Politics in a Neo-Liberal Age
This article engages with the influential narrative about the co-optation of feminism in conditions of neo-liberalism put forward by prominent feminist thinkers Nancy Fraser, Hester Eisenstein and Angela McRobbie. After drawing out the twin visions of 'progressive' feminist politics that undergird this narrative - couched in terms of either the retrieval of past socialist feminist glories or personal reinvention - we subject to critical scrutiny …
Gender and the Subject of (Anti)Nuclear Politics: Revisiting Women's Campaigning against the Bomb1
This article aims to rehabilitate women campaigners against nuclear weapons as a focus of study and interlocutor for feminist International Relations scholars. Highlighting the recent tendency in gender and security studies to ignore or stereotype these campaigners, I first show how their critical re-investigation has been facilitated by recent systematizations of poststructuralist-influenced feminist methodology. In this light, I then revisit th…
Roundtable: The Limits of Bridge-Building
This roundtable develops arguments presented at the 2008 International Studies Association (ISA) annual convention. The theme of the convention was `Bridging Multiple Divides' and its aim to enhance dialogue among the diverse research communities within international studies. The aim of the `Limits of Bridge-Building' panel at ISA, and the present roundtable, has been to probe the challenges presented by bridge-building and specifically the possi…
Feminist Scholarship, Bridge-Building and Political Affinity
In this short essay we consider, first, the reasons why feminist IR academics should seek to build bridges with each other, with other academics and with those outside the university. Second, we develop some tentative guidelines for how we should go about the task of bridge-building, drawing on our research into feminist activism at the World Social Forum. Our intention in so doing is not to reinforce what we have elsewhere criticised as a false …
Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State: A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident
This article enquires into the connections between gender and discourses of the nuclear weapons state. Specifically, we develop an analysis of the ways in which gender operates in the White Paper published by the UK government in 2006 on its plans to renew Trident nuclear weapons (given the go-ahead by the Westminster Parliament in March 2007). We argue that the White Paper mobilizes masculine-coded language and symbols in several ways: firstly, …
Rethinking Globalised Resistance: Feminist Activism and Critical Theorising in International Relations
This article argues that a feminist approach to the ‘politics of resistance’ offers a number of important empirical insights which, in turn, open up lines of theoretical inquiry which critical theorists in IR would do well to explore. Concretely, we draw on our ongoing research into feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism to rethink the nature of the subject of the politics of resistance, the conditions under which resistance emerges and how resis…
Bridging the Academic/Activist Divide: Feminist Activism and the Teaching of Global Politics
Our starting point in this article is the widespread belief that academia and activism are separate worlds, driven by contrasting aims and imperatives and governed by different rules. Such a view is based on a series of takenfor-granted and highly problematic ontological dichotomies, including mind/body, theory/practice, reason/emotion, abstract/concrete and ‘ivory tower’/ ‘real world’. Perhaps most fundamentally, these serve to set up thinking a…
Skeleton Women: Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement
This article searches for the feminists, and the feminism, in the antiglobalization movement. It first examines texts purporting to represent this movement, discovering that feminism is barely present, granted a fleeting mention at best and deliberately sidelined at worst. The article then turns, second, to the broader social narratives underpinning these texts for an explanation of the evacuation of feminism. The third part of the article examin…
Critical Theories, International Relations and 'the Anti-Globalisation Movement': The Politics of Global Resistance
Feminist Studies of Globalisation: Beyond Gender, Beyond Economism
This article offers a distinctive mapping of the feminist literature on globalisation. Part I sets the “new wave” of debate in the context of long-standing feminist theorising and organisation around global power and politics, drawing attention to a growing focus on economic processes. Part II explores the marginalisation of feminist arguments within globalisation studies, pointing to the dominance of an economistic model of globalisation as a ke…
Taking Part: Social Movements, Ingos, and Global Change
Can social movements make a difference in global politics? That question is, ultimately, one that only the historical practice of transnational social movements will answer. But is that answer likely to be heard or understood by analysts, even if it were to ring in the air around them? We think not, unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the transformative agency of social movements is conceptualized. In this article we try to substantiat…
Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Engendering Global Democracy
The inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in te…
Globalizing Civil Society? Social Movements and the Challenge of Global Politics from Below
In recent years, considerable academic attention and diverse political aspirations have focused upon the role of social movements in ‘civil society’. Confronted with the collapse of state-led socialism in Eastern Europe and the social democratic consensus in the West, many on the Left have seized upon long-standing traditions of civil society theory and the burgeoning activities of contemporary movements as sources of emancipatory possibilities w…
Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism
In Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism, Catherine Eschle examines the relationship between social movements and democracy in social and political thought. She does so in the context of arguments about the exclusions and mobilizations generated by gender hierarchies and the impact of globalization. A range of approaches in social and political thought are considered: long-standing liberal, republican, marxist, and anarchist traditions…
Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-Opted and Progressive Politics in a Neo-Liberal Age
This article engages with the influential narrative about the co-optation of feminism in conditions of neo-liberalism put forward by prominent feminist thinkers Nancy Fraser, Hester Eisenstein and Angela McRobbie. After drawing out the twin visions of 'progressive' feminist politics that undergird this narrative - couched in terms of either the retrieval of past socialist feminist glories or personal reinvention - we subject to critical scrutiny …
Rethinking Globalised Resistance: Feminist Activism and Critical Theorising in International Relations
This article argues that a feminist approach to the ‘politics of resistance’ offers a number of important empirical insights which, in turn, open up lines of theoretical inquiry which critical theorists in IR would do well to explore. Concretely, we draw on our ongoing research into feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism to rethink the nature of the subject of the politics of resistance, the conditions under which resistance emerges and how resis…
Theorising feminist organising in and against neoliberalism: Beyond co-optation and resistance
This article reviews contemporary academic debates about feminist organising in and against neoliberalism, which we see as structured by a co-optation–resistance dichotomy. We outline three narratives: a high-profile ‘strong’ co-optation thesis; a more nuanced co-optation discourse; and an emergent counter-narrative of resistance. While sympathetic to the latter two, we critically unpack the account of neoliberalism, of feminist protagonists and …
Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State: A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident
This article enquires into the connections between gender and discourses of the nuclear weapons state. Specifically, we develop an analysis of the ways in which gender operates in the White Paper published by the UK government in 2006 on its plans to renew Trident nuclear weapons (given the go-ahead by the Westminster Parliament in March 2007). We argue that the White Paper mobilizes masculine-coded language and symbols in several ways: firstly, …
Troubling stories of the end of occupy: Feminist narratives of betrayal at occupy Glasgow
This article offers a feminist take on the question of why Occupy camps closed down, in the form of a narrative analysis of interviews from participants in Occupy Glasgow. In response to the emergence of an activist discourse emphasising the role of external forces in camp closure and the existence of a longer-term legacy in terms of individual and community politicisation, I build here on feminist interventions that point instead to serious inte…
Bridging the Academic/Activist Divide: Feminist Activism and the Teaching of Global Politics
Our starting point in this article is the widespread belief that academia and activism are separate worlds, driven by contrasting aims and imperatives and governed by different rules. Such a view is based on a series of takenfor-granted and highly problematic ontological dichotomies, including mind/body, theory/practice, reason/emotion, abstract/concrete and ‘ivory tower’/ ‘real world’. Perhaps most fundamentally, these serve to set up thinking a…
Skeleton Women: Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement
This article searches for the feminists, and the feminism, in the antiglobalization movement. It first examines texts purporting to represent this movement, discovering that feminism is barely present, granted a fleeting mention at best and deliberately sidelined at worst. The article then turns, second, to the broader social narratives underpinning these texts for an explanation of the evacuation of feminism. The third part of the article examin…
Taking Part: Social Movements, Ingos, and Global Change
Can social movements make a difference in global politics? That question is, ultimately, one that only the historical practice of transnational social movements will answer. But is that answer likely to be heard or understood by analysts, even if it were to ring in the air around them? We think not, unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the transformative agency of social movements is conceptualized. In this article we try to substantiat…
Gender and the Subject of (Anti)Nuclear Politics: Revisiting Women's Campaigning against the Bomb1
This article aims to rehabilitate women campaigners against nuclear weapons as a focus of study and interlocutor for feminist International Relations scholars. Highlighting the recent tendency in gender and security studies to ignore or stereotype these campaigners, I first show how their critical re-investigation has been facilitated by recent systematizations of poststructuralist-influenced feminist methodology. In this light, I then revisit th…
Nuclear (in)security in the everyday: Peace campers as everyday security practitioners
This article extends the emergent focus on ‘the everyday’ in critical security studies to the topic of nuclear (in)security, through an empirical study of anti-nuclear peace activists understood as ‘everyday security practitioners’. In the first part of the article, I elaborate on the notion of everyday security practitioners, drawing particularly on feminist scholarship, while in the second I apply this framework to a case study of Faslane Peace…
Engendering Global Democracy
The inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in te…
Beyond Greenham Woman: Gender identities and anti-nuclear activism in peace camps
This article investigates the discursive construction of gendered identities in anti-nuclear activism and particularly in peace camps. My starting point is the now substantial academic literature on Cold War women-only peace camps, such as that at Greenham Common. I extend the analysis that emerges from this literature in my research on the mixed-gender, long-standing camp at Faslane naval base in Scotland. I argue that the 1980s saw the articula…
Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Feminist Studies of Globalisation: Beyond Gender, Beyond Economism
This article offers a distinctive mapping of the feminist literature on globalisation. Part I sets the “new wave” of debate in the context of long-standing feminist theorising and organisation around global power and politics, drawing attention to a growing focus on economic processes. Part II explores the marginalisation of feminist arguments within globalisation studies, pointing to the dominance of an economistic model of globalisation as a ke…
Faslane Peace Camp and the Political Economy of the Everyday
In what ways is ‘the everyday’ reproduced and reconfigured at protest camps? In this short piece reflecting on my research into Faslane Peace Camp, I focus particularly on the ways in which this camp entails the critical interrogation of everyday economic norms and practices
Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism
This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, 'Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics'. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the articl…
Feminism and Solidarity on the Left: Rethinking the Unhappy Marriage Metaphor
In the context of efforts to revive and reconfigure the left, fraught solidarity relations between feminism and other left forces are again under the political spotlight. This article revisits the widespread use of the ‘unhappy marriage’ metaphor to characterise these relations, given that metaphors play a significant role in structuring political discourse and action. We argue that the metaphor has been used in uncritical and limiting ways, and …
Globalizing Civil Society? Social Movements and the Challenge of Global Politics from Below
In recent years, considerable academic attention and diverse political aspirations have focused upon the role of social movements in ‘civil society’. Confronted with the collapse of state-led socialism in Eastern Europe and the social democratic consensus in the West, many on the Left have seized upon long-standing traditions of civil society theory and the burgeoning activities of contemporary movements as sources of emancipatory possibilities w…
Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism
In Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism, Catherine Eschle examines the relationship between social movements and democracy in social and political thought. She does so in the context of arguments about the exclusions and mobilizations generated by gender hierarchies and the impact of globalization. A range of approaches in social and political thought are considered: long-standing liberal, republican, marxist, and anarchist traditions…
Engendering Global Democracy
The inadequacies of hegemonic liberal democratic ideas and institutions have been exposed by feminist theorists focusing on the marginalisation of women and by global theorists examining the impact of globalisation. These theorists have developed two distinct sets of reconstructive strategies that, until very recently, have remained in ignorance of each other. Further, both feminist and global democratic schemes have been dogged by problems in te…
Critical Theories, International Relations and 'the Anti-Globalisation Movement': The Politics of Global Resistance
Feminist Studies of Globalisation: Beyond Gender, Beyond Economism
This article offers a distinctive mapping of the feminist literature on globalisation. Part I sets the “new wave” of debate in the context of long-standing feminist theorising and organisation around global power and politics, drawing attention to a growing focus on economic processes. Part II explores the marginalisation of feminist arguments within globalisation studies, pointing to the dominance of an economistic model of globalisation as a ke…
Taking Part: Social Movements, Ingos, and Global Change
Can social movements make a difference in global politics? That question is, ultimately, one that only the historical practice of transnational social movements will answer. But is that answer likely to be heard or understood by analysts, even if it were to ring in the air around them? We think not, unless there is a fundamental shift in the way the transformative agency of social movements is conceptualized. In this article we try to substantiat…
Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Skeleton Women: Feminism and the Antiglobalization Movement
This article searches for the feminists, and the feminism, in the antiglobalization movement. It first examines texts purporting to represent this movement, discovering that feminism is barely present, granted a fleeting mention at best and deliberately sidelined at worst. The article then turns, second, to the broader social narratives underpinning these texts for an explanation of the evacuation of feminism. The third part of the article examin…
Bridging the Academic/Activist Divide: Feminist Activism and the Teaching of Global Politics
Our starting point in this article is the widespread belief that academia and activism are separate worlds, driven by contrasting aims and imperatives and governed by different rules. Such a view is based on a series of takenfor-granted and highly problematic ontological dichotomies, including mind/body, theory/practice, reason/emotion, abstract/concrete and ‘ivory tower’/ ‘real world’. Perhaps most fundamentally, these serve to set up thinking a…
Rethinking Globalised Resistance: Feminist Activism and Critical Theorising in International Relations
This article argues that a feminist approach to the ‘politics of resistance’ offers a number of important empirical insights which, in turn, open up lines of theoretical inquiry which critical theorists in IR would do well to explore. Concretely, we draw on our ongoing research into feminist ‘anti-globalisation’ activism to rethink the nature of the subject of the politics of resistance, the conditions under which resistance emerges and how resis…
Gender and the Nuclear Weapons State: A Feminist Critique of the UK Government’s White Paper on Trident
This article enquires into the connections between gender and discourses of the nuclear weapons state. Specifically, we develop an analysis of the ways in which gender operates in the White Paper published by the UK government in 2006 on its plans to renew Trident nuclear weapons (given the go-ahead by the Westminster Parliament in March 2007). We argue that the White Paper mobilizes masculine-coded language and symbols in several ways: firstly, …
Roundtable: The Limits of Bridge-Building
This roundtable develops arguments presented at the 2008 International Studies Association (ISA) annual convention. The theme of the convention was `Bridging Multiple Divides' and its aim to enhance dialogue among the diverse research communities within international studies. The aim of the `Limits of Bridge-Building' panel at ISA, and the present roundtable, has been to probe the challenges presented by bridge-building and specifically the possi…
Feminist Scholarship, Bridge-Building and Political Affinity
In this short essay we consider, first, the reasons why feminist IR academics should seek to build bridges with each other, with other academics and with those outside the university. Second, we develop some tentative guidelines for how we should go about the task of bridge-building, drawing on our research into feminist activism at the World Social Forum. Our intention in so doing is not to reinforce what we have elsewhere criticised as a false …
Gender and the Subject of (Anti)Nuclear Politics: Revisiting Women's Campaigning against the Bomb1
This article aims to rehabilitate women campaigners against nuclear weapons as a focus of study and interlocutor for feminist International Relations scholars. Highlighting the recent tendency in gender and security studies to ignore or stereotype these campaigners, I first show how their critical re-investigation has been facilitated by recent systematizations of poststructuralist-influenced feminist methodology. In this light, I then revisit th…
Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-Opted and Progressive Politics in a Neo-Liberal Age
This article engages with the influential narrative about the co-optation of feminism in conditions of neo-liberalism put forward by prominent feminist thinkers Nancy Fraser, Hester Eisenstein and Angela McRobbie. After drawing out the twin visions of 'progressive' feminist politics that undergird this narrative - couched in terms of either the retrieval of past socialist feminist glories or personal reinvention - we subject to critical scrutiny …
Faslane Peace Camp and the Political Economy of the Everyday
In what ways is ‘the everyday’ reproduced and reconfigured at protest camps? In this short piece reflecting on my research into Faslane Peace Camp, I focus particularly on the ways in which this camp entails the critical interrogation of everyday economic norms and practices
Beyond Greenham Woman: Gender identities and anti-nuclear activism in peace camps
This article investigates the discursive construction of gendered identities in anti-nuclear activism and particularly in peace camps. My starting point is the now substantial academic literature on Cold War women-only peace camps, such as that at Greenham Common. I extend the analysis that emerges from this literature in my research on the mixed-gender, long-standing camp at Faslane naval base in Scotland. I argue that the 1980s saw the articula…
Theorising feminist organising in and against neoliberalism: Beyond co-optation and resistance
This article reviews contemporary academic debates about feminist organising in and against neoliberalism, which we see as structured by a co-optation–resistance dichotomy. We outline three narratives: a high-profile ‘strong’ co-optation thesis; a more nuanced co-optation discourse; and an emergent counter-narrative of resistance. While sympathetic to the latter two, we critically unpack the account of neoliberalism, of feminist protagonists and …
Feminist scholarship, feminist institution-building, feminist friendships
Recollections of the daily grind and the deeper joys of editing a feminist journal
Nuclear (in)security in the everyday: Peace campers as everyday security practitioners
This article extends the emergent focus on ‘the everyday’ in critical security studies to the topic of nuclear (in)security, through an empirical study of anti-nuclear peace activists understood as ‘everyday security practitioners’. In the first part of the article, I elaborate on the notion of everyday security practitioners, drawing particularly on feminist scholarship, while in the second I apply this framework to a case study of Faslane Peace…
Troubling stories of the end of occupy: Feminist narratives of betrayal at occupy Glasgow
This article offers a feminist take on the question of why Occupy camps closed down, in the form of a narrative analysis of interviews from participants in Occupy Glasgow. In response to the emergence of an activist discourse emphasising the role of external forces in camp closure and the existence of a longer-term legacy in terms of individual and community politicisation, I build here on feminist interventions that point instead to serious inte…
Feminism and Solidarity on the Left: Rethinking the Unhappy Marriage Metaphor
In the context of efforts to revive and reconfigure the left, fraught solidarity relations between feminism and other left forces are again under the political spotlight. This article revisits the widespread use of the ‘unhappy marriage’ metaphor to characterise these relations, given that metaphors play a significant role in structuring political discourse and action. We argue that the metaphor has been used in uncritical and limiting ways, and …
Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism
This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, 'Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics'. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the articl…
‘Why haven’t you known?’: Transoceanic solidarity and the politics of knowledge in feminist anti-nuclear activism
This article critically examines the character and extent of transoceanic solidarity in feminist anti-nuclear activism. Drawing on archival research into a British-based solidarity network, Women Working for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (WWNFIP), the article centralises the rhetorical question ‘Why Haven’t You Known?’ demanded by Māori activist Titewhai Harawira of her British audience in 1986, and extends it to contemporary scholars of…
Base women and beyond
Sociology (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Political science (19 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Feminism (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Gender Politics and Representation (9 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (7 works)