GenDip research
Diplomacy – the official relations between governments by other means than military force – is a central institution of international politics. The GenDip program aims to map and analyze the changing gender character of bilateral diplomacy as carried out by men, women and other career diplomats around the world.
In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, diplomacy was an institution that was gendered in a particular way: diplomatic officials were all men whereas women performed crucial diplomatic functions as wives, typists, servants and more. Gender-differentiated norms and heteronormativity structured diplomacy. In the 2000s, a rapidly increasing number of women have entered diplomatic office.
The GenDip program provides a collaborative platform for researchers to address crucial questions about the changing gender character of diplomacy, including:
- What has happened to the gender of diplomacy as a result of the entry of women as diplomatic officials?
- How did women come to enter diplomatic office in larger numbers?
- How did diplomacy become an institution consisting of only male officials with women in key support functions to begin with?
The program is committed to producing research that is empirically novel, theoretically innovative and of relevance to the diplomatic community and public at large.