Gender could be defined as knowledge about sexual difference. This means that understandings about the appropriate relationships between women and men, the roles which they fill, even what it is to be “feminine” or “masculine”, vary across time, place and culture; that is they are social constructs. The important thing is that gender is not a neutral category but “femininity” is considered a lowering one.
It is said that International Politics of all the social disciplines has been one of the most resistant to incorporating feminist analyses of gender studies. There are a variety of reasons for this, the most obvious of which is that scholars of mainstream International Politics have taken the causes of war and the conditions of peace order and security as their central concern. Such concern appears to be antithetical to study of women. The “high politics” of international security politics is a man's world, a world of power and conflict in which warfare is a privileged activity and from which women traditionally have been excluded.
Eight authors of this volume daringly challenge to incorporate analyses of gender studies into International Politics. Firstly TAKENAKA Chiharu tries to use the intellectual tools of gender studies to analyze international politics. KARATANI Rieko focuses on the female overseas care workers under the point-system which the UK government introduced in 2008 as part of its attempts to modernize and streamline the British immigration system. WADA Kenji's paper demonstrates the ways in which the securitization of women can be relevant to the production of “bare life” in the state of exception rather than the rise of their security drawing on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics focused the post-conflict conditions of Afghanistan. OGAWA Ariyoshi evaluates a female politician Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norwegian Prime Minister 1981, 86–89, 90–96) who drove forward the dual development of environmental politics and gender politics in the national as well as in the international areas.
KAWAMOTO Kazuko and KOJIMA Kazuko study gender politics in the Communist world. KAWAMOTO examines how the public/private distinction was constituted in the Soviet Union of Khrushchev era and how it af-fected gender relations in society. KOJIMA's paper aims to depict gender politics in contemporary China by analyzing the relevant actors' discourses and behaviors towards the gender disparity in retirement age policy. TOMITA Akiko tries to make a new type of Gender Empowerment Measuring (an indicator that measures female participation in political and economic scenes) focusing on the importance of national, formal and transnational as well as local, informal level and individual woman and women in the group. Lastly NAMAMURA Yui asserts that microfinance, an innovative mechanism which aims at enabling poor women to improve their social wellbeing through a market-based approach, is now facing challenges because under the considerable influence of the for-profit sector in the recent microfinance world, there has been a growing concern over whether a normative agenda can be sustained in order to respond to the needs of poor women.
All the papers here demonstrate that their analyses are legitimate focus of study of International Politics.

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How can we use the intellectual tools of gender studies to analyze international politics? Although a gap between the two fields has been wide open, the author will try to bridge it in order to analyze engendered phenomena in international politics.
Firstly, gender studies have refreshed an old concept of regime, patriarchy, which originally meant the rule of father or “patriarch” over women, children and servants, referring “to male dominance, to the power relationships by which men dominate women, and to characterize a system whereby women are kept subordinate”, as an Indian feminist, Kamla Bhasin, described. Although this is one of the oldest forms of dominance, it was hardly noticed by intellectuals, mostly male, who discussed about politics and rule. Aristotle even argued that male was “naturally” born to rule, while female, born to be ruled.
Such a form of dominance has been inherited until today. Many concepts of politics and rule embody the essence of patriarchy: sovereignty, supremacy, dichotomy of domestic and foreign, non-interference, and so on. Everybody learns that the state of nature is the essence of international politics, but this Hobbesian idea implies the nature which requires men to fight for security as well as women to obey men. Logic of power politics is based on patriarchal organization of society, and it causes engendered chains of events in international politics, that is, gender dynamics of international politics.
Let's see the phenomena of “War, Democracy and Women's Liberation” in the 20th century: what kind of change was brought to women after the First World War in victorious nations such as the United Kingdom and the Unites States of America, defeated nations such as Germany, and dependent or colonial societies such Canada and British India. The total war forced marginalized peoples to suffer from incredible damage, in spite of the fact that they were not treated as equal as male citizens in the imperial center. The states had to persuade them to fight and the easiest method was concession to give voting rights after the war to women, young generation, immigrants, racially discriminated residents and colonial subjects.
It might suggest a dangerous statement that wars make women free. But it is too crude to conclude so. Wars also subjugate women cruelly, as we see in the recent cases of Bosnia, Rwanda and Afghanistan. However, here is a new tendency: more empowered women take key roles in international politics with new ideas alternative to the patriarchal ways of management. The gender dynamic of the 21th century is not predetermined and could go beyond a male-dominated Hobbesian international politics.

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This article focuses upon the point-based system which the UK government introduced in 2008 as a part of its attempts to modernise and streamline the British immigration system. By examining how female overseas care workers are treated under the point-based system, this article indentifies the immigration system as consisting of a three-step series of (i) sorting, (ii) positioning and (iii) (dis) favouring migrants accordingly. In this process, those women who work in the female-dominated sectors such as caring and domestic work are sorted in accordance with their assumed “skills and talents” and, on that, are then positioned within the labour market hierarchy. Their low status within it, the government argues, accounts for their disfavoured (or subjugated) treatments in their daily lives. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that, in the current era of “managed migration”, the concrete sufferings of those female overseas care workers are a priori legitimatised, if not created, through this new point-based system. Alleged to operate in an efficient and objective manner, the system categorises those women as low skilled and replaceable workers per se, thereby implying that harsh treatment as such is deserved or at least legitimate.
This article consists of three parts. First, it presents a general overview of international migration today, and the treatment of female overseas workers in immigration laws and policies in particular. It also explains how systems of entry control are established. The second part explores immigration policy in Britain and, in so doing, highlights how the point-based system was prepared as the foundational system of the current phase of “managed migration”. Once in office, the Labour government officially acknowledged the economic benefits which immigration had brought to Britain, and subsequently tailored its immigration system to the needs of the economy. The third section focuses on the practice of sorting and positioning of female overseas care workers through the newly introduced system.
In conclusion, the author argues that the female overseas care workers in Britain actually face two layers of sorting; horizontal sorting based on place of origin, i.e. inside or outside the EU, and vertical one in relation to the alleged skills and the defined needs of the domestic labour market. Under the new point-based system, nonetheless, it becomes justifiable to treat women from outside the EU in a tough manner on the basis of their alleged talent and ability. It is debatable, however, on what grounds the point-based system could claim that its judgement of their skills is fair and objective. It, as a result, leads us to question the overall validity of the system.

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The current operations of post-conflict reconstruction missions on the international scale increasingly focus on women by designing special projects to enhance their security while meeting their needs such as health, education and employment. This trend can be called the securitization of women. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the ways in which the securitization of women can be relevant to the production of “bare life” in the state of exception rather than the rise of their security, drawing on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. The specific focus is placed on the post-conflict conditions of Afghanistan since it contains the dual frontlines of the reconstruction support operations and the war on terrorism. Through examining the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team to Kandahar (KPRT) and its strategic operation of various “signature projects” in Afghanistan, this paper endeavors to address the question: how and to what extent these signature projects are designed not only to meet the needs of the local population, but also to be readily identifiable as ‘Canadian projects’ because the primary goal is to change the overall image of Canadians and their soldiers from “occupiers” to “liberators.” By doing so, this paper highlights the paradox surrounding the signature projects, that is, the more the local population becomes healthy, the more the risk of their death raises. In this vein, it is further maintained that this paradox appears on female bodies rather than male bodies. This paper thus insists that the securitization of women propelled by KPRT amounts to forcing Afghan women to be in the most fragile position among the local population.
To this end, this paper is composed of two sections. The first section briefly discusses the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics to illustrate how these concepts allow us to look into the dynamism of world politics by shedding light on the ways in which sovereignty is deterritorialized and local lives are globally depoliticized. It explains that international society attempts to sustain the existence by surveying, controlling, and improving the lives of the populations in “failed or failing states.” The second section more specifically examines the signature projects of KPRT that aim to improve the lives of the local population, women and children in particular. The careful examination exposes how these projects are operated to prevent the local population from supporting and/or joining armed groups. It also highlights that the projects transform the recipients into the targets of armed groups who use killing to show the incapability of international society and the Afghan government.

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As Kari Norgaard and Richard York suggests, dual development of environmental politics and gender politics. Since the 1970s, Norway has shown remarkable achievements in both environmental and gender equality policies. Gro Harlem Brundtland (prime minister 1981, 86–89, 90–96) was a female political leader who drove forward this dual development in the national and international arenas, through the introduction of gender quota in all public boards in the government, the launch of the Strategy for Women and Gender Equality in Development Cooperation, and not least the chairmanship of the WCED (the World Commission on Environment and Development) that proliferated the idea of “sustainable development.” Brundtland was both a successor and an outsider in the Norwegian democratic political culture. Historically, the Norwegian democracy had developed in the Scandinavian “state-friendly” society (Per Selle). The conventional social democratic politics depended on “planning” and centralized corporatist organizations which were unequivocally male-dominated. But it was wildered by changing political culture in the wake of the national debate on the European Community membership in early 1970s. The EC debate contrasted “hierarchical” and “centralized” Europe versus “equal” and “dispersed” Norway. The Norwegian government froze the EC accession as a result of the referendum in 1972 with more “no” votes than “yes” ones. The Brundtland politics turned out much more open to the new post-material and feminist movements than the traditional labor party and unions. In the global environmental politics, Brundtland organized the final report of the WCED (the Brundtland Report), which deliberately linked the environmental concern in the North with the problem of underdevelopment and poverty in the South (“the Brundtland Link”). Later, the idea of “sustainable development” was viewed more critically in more complicated and acute contexts of the global environment and development. In sum, Brundtland cut out an active-inclusive (John S. Dryzek) path of politics, in both the national and international dimensions, to prevent “organized irresponsibility” in the global risk society (Ulrich Beck), where uncertainty and “subpolitics” circumscribe the conventional public politics—a path which is now controversial but still innovative.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine how the public/private distinction was constituted in the Soviet Union of Khrushchev era and how it affected gender relations in society. The public/private distinction cannot be ahistorically fixed but it changes from time to time by conscious or unconscious political decisions so that it could show political characteristics of each era.
Although many researchers insisted that there was no autonomous private sphere in the Soviet Union, it does not mean that there was absolutely no room for people to act on their own will. Moreover, no one has denied that intimate relationships as those between family members could still be autonomous to a certain extent. From this point of view, the author tries to reveal the Soviet way of making public/private distinction by watching closely what kind of policies influencing the family had been adopted.
The Soviet government in the Khrushchev period encouraged people to participate in the policy process, since Khrushchev called for building the communist society where ordinary people would govern themselves without the state. For example, many people sent letters to the state or the party so that their opinions could be incorporated in the new family law. Professionals including leading family law scholars who prepared drafts of the law never ignored opinions from people.
The new family law acknowledged some room for self-determination on the ground of the intimate nature of relationships between spouses. However, people could not always enjoy their autonomy in family matters, because the party-state could have ideologically legitimate interferences in their lives. The government encouraged people to organize the comrade courts in factories as well as residential quarters to solve daily problems as minor violations of work regulations, quarrels, hooliganism and so on. Judges elected by the members of each unit often intervened in family matters to deal with cases. Women's Soviets, established in many communities, also meddled in family life helping women to keep house in the scientific and socialistic manner. In this way, the private sphere of the Soviet people was very limited, while they might have reduced the privacy through their own social activities under the ultimate control by the party-state.
From the gender perspective, it was clear that women publically had responsibility for running household as the name of the women's soviets suggested. Soviet women had to work both inside and outside home as working mothers, while men had lost their status as the head of family after the October Revolution and were not seriously expected to be working “fathers.”

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This paper aims to depict gender politics in China by analyzing the relevant actors' discourses and behaviors toward the gender disparity in retirement age policy and to answer the research question: By what structures of power, interests, and values is the hegemony of gender discourses determined in China?
Since the end of WWII, international gender theory has undergone a major shift from “protection of women” to “gender equality”. However, China has consistently maintained its “women-protective” legal systems that date back to the 1950s, despite the Chinese government having ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted in 1979) in 1980.
In such contrasting circumstances, a growing number of female cadres and intellectuals, as well as the All-China Women's Federation and grassroots women's groups, which had previously acknowledged the political and economic disadvantages posed by early retirement systems for women, have started calling for adjustments in gender disparity in the retirement age since 2001. They readily accepted international gender theories and began to question not only the current retirement system but also Chinese traditional philosophy about women and division of labor based on sex. They are increasing pressuring the government through various actions, such as submitting bills or proposals to People's Congresses or to People's Political Consultative Conferences at national and local levels, co-hosting symposiums with the ILO, and appealing to the judiciary.
On the other hand, a new sense of gender is not easily promulgated in the national context of China. First, the authoritarian political regime, which places maximum priority on the nation's economic development and political stability, tends to marginalize the women's claims for individual rights, and to frame the issue of gender-neutral retirement system in terms of the issues of national economy, such as pension system reforms or unemployment problems. Second, growing gaps between social strata inhibit the formation of common interests and common basic values including right to work, protection of women, gender equality between elite women and blue-collar women workers. Whereas intellectual elites assert women's right to stay in the workforce as long as men, most blue-collar women workers hope to be freed from hard labor earlier. Third, traditional norms of protection of women and a feudalistic sense of the sexual division of labor still remain deeply rooted in society. Even among educated women, there are noteworthy trends to prize “womanhood” or some kind of admiration for full-time mothers as a backlash against the promotion of the negation of sexual differences during the Cultural Revolution.
When we discuss gender politics in China, we should analyze the structures of the above-mentioned factors (power, interests, and values) and the dynamics of the hegemony of gender discourses.

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Gender Empowerment measuring is the indicator that measures female participation in political and economic scenes. There are two different ideas about the concept of “gender empowerment (GE)”. One is the idea thought by UNDP (United Nations Development Program). They think that gender empowerment can be accomplished by the movement of individual woman in national, formal level. And they focus on only politics and economics.
On the other hand, South women and many feminists claim the importance of national, formal, and transnational, and local, informal level. And, they focus on individual women and women in the group. And, they consider not only political, economical aspects, but also social and culture aspects.
As above, there are two different ideas about the concept of “gender empowerment (GE)” internationally.
I think that the latter idea suits to modern gender empowerment condition. Gender empowerment in modern times can be seen not only in national, formal level, but also in local, informal levels. And, I focus on political gender empowerment this time.
Concretely, I make new type of GEM. That is the indicator that is added the aspect of local, informal, group. By seeing the output of this indicator, I can measure gender empowerment condition in modern times more realistically and adequately.
In this thesis, I think that this new GEM can measure gender empowerment more realistic than the present GEM. And, I can suggest another and original thought about gender empowerment condition by seeing the transition between the present GEM and new GEM. This is the point of my thesis.

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Microfinance, an innovative but conflicting development mechanism which aims at enabling poor women to improve their social wellbeing through a market-based approach, is now facing challenges. Although microfinance takes different forms and model according to the principles, governance structures and approaches of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs), the vast majority of development practitioners share a common assumption about microfinance systems—its effectiveness in poverty reduction and in ‘women's empowerment’. However, consensus of ‘women's empowerment’ in the sector has never been made, and each MFI holds different perceptions about female empowerment and evidence supporting the effectiveness of microfinance based on their principles and knowledge about ‘empowerment’. For example, poor women have become the potential clients or untouched resources that make the business successful for many commercial-oriented MFIs. Meanwhile, they can also be agents for social change from a feminist perspective. The perception of ‘women's empowerment’ does matter, as it influences what missions MFIs expect for poor women, which is directly and indirectly impacting on women's lives as MFIs design and manage their activities based on this presumption. In other words, in the achievement of the wellbeing of women, much depends on how the term ‘empowerment’ is interpreted.
Under the considerable influence of the for-profit sector in the recent microfinance world, there has been a growing concern over whether a normative agenda can be sustained in order to respond to the needs of poor women. This paper seeks to examine this unique but ‘conflicting’ element of micro-finance, which aims at achieving ‘social’ goals, including female empowerment, based on market principles. It also explores the empirical evidence on how development practitioners in India tackle such dilemmas, interprets ‘women's empowerment’ and design and manage the microfinance (Self Help Group) programs to fulfil the multi-dimensional needs of poor women in this era of commercialisation of microfinance.
The findings of the case study of four Indian NGOs indicate that they have made various efforts to prevent their social missions from being abandoned in the pursuit of financial sustainability. However, a challenge still remains as to how microfinance can incorporate not only the basic daily material needs but also the strategic interest of poor and marginalised women, in an endeavour to transform the unequal power relations deeply embedded in the society. Due to this conflict of microfinance, some NGOs have strategically not become involved in microfinance and merely remained in a supportive role, while those enormously affected by the commercial-oriented approach tend to reduce their commitment to the social justice agenda in their program regardless of their excellent financial performance with a much wider target population.

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In recent years, a growing number of transnational cooperation among private firms has come to play a significant role in making international public institutions. While much of the recent empirical works on this topic emphasize the increasing impact of private interests in international politics, the process of how they exercise the power remains poorly examined. It is still widely believed that only states make international institutions and that the relationships between states are enough to explain the formation process. However some cases show that a firm in one country cooperates with other firms in foreign countries, aiming to make an international public institution without governments' involvement. Here we can see a new political process, which is different from firms' conventional lobbying to their governments. Why does a firm cooperate with a foreign firm so as to make an international institution instead of relying on its government? Under which conditions does such an involvement influence international institutions? In this article, I address these research questions.
This article provides one hypothesis with respect to the formation of an international institution and firms by focusing on the regulatory process at domestic level: A firm attempts a direct commitment in building international institution, when its government refuses to change its domestic regulation for a new international institution. In other words, when the government is reluctant to change its domestic regulation that the firm sought, the firm cooperates with those in foreign countries to form an international institution without relying on the government, so that it ultimately enables the domestic regulation to be changed. Furthermore I investigate the effect of this business-to-business cooperation in the formation of international institution, by analyzing the government's reaction to regulatory changes the firm sought.
I examine the above hypothesis with one important case: the making process of the 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual property Rights (TRIPs) administered by the WTO. In this case, there were three private business groups involved; the Intellectual Property Committee (IPC; US), Union of Industrial and Employers' Confederation of Europe (UNICE) and Nippon Keidanren. They cooperated to craft a proposal and presented it to the GATT Secretariat and the governments that participated in the Uruguay Round. Some researchers regard this business-to-business cooperation as the critical factor to the adoption of the TRIPs Agreement. However the existing studies focus only on the behavior of the US industry. The meeting joined by their counterparts in Europe and Japan remains unstudied. Therefore, this article investigates behaviors of both the government and the firms in each country to draw the conclusion that the domestic regulatory change is the critical factor in the relationship between transnational cooperation among firms and the formation of an international institution.

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This paper explores Canadian intelligence toward Japan during the Pacific War by focusing on E. H. Norman (1909–1957), a Japan-born historian as well as a Canadian diplomat. Previous literatures have emphasized the two aspects of wartime Japan-Canada relation: the battle of Hong Kong and the aftermath, and the Japanese Canadian internment. Discovering Norman in the Pacific War, however, suggests that Canadian wartime policy toward Japan was much more different and constructive than previously expected.
Like his contemporary scholars and diplomats, Norman was interested in policy, but it was in the conduct of intelligence that he excelled. As only a few Japanese experts in Canada, Norman had considerable opportunity to access firsthand information regarding the Pacific theatre, and hence to engage in the various ways of intelligence toward Japan. In September 1942 shortly after repatriating from Tokyo, he got to launch the Japanese intelligence section as a part of the Examination Unit, the foreign intelligence organization in Ottawa. He was there involved into different intelligence activities such as signal intelligence (SIGINT), human intelligence (HUMINT) and psychological warfare. His duty was mainly to analyze the decoded Japanese diplomatic communication from the legations on the three continents to Tokyo. By combining his expertise of Japanese history and SIGINT, he energetically prepared a number of insightful reports including the one which accurately predicted Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu's new policy toward Russia in 1943. Within the dual context of the Allies-Japan relation and intra-Allies relation, he also made efforts to serve Canada's national interest through the propaganda campaigns. More important, he successfully shaped himself as a significant node to connect the policymakers, Asian scholars and intelligence officers across Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. In this manner—intelligence—Canada had maintained considerable interests in Japan.
Based on these experiences, he finally worked on making Canada's own postwar policy to reform Imperial Japan in late 1944. His memorandum which was put forward to Prime Minister Mackenzie King was supposed to solve the long standing dilemma of Canadian attitude toward East Asia. Canada had painfully faced a kind of zero-sum relation between pro-Japan and pro-China in the 1930s when Japan pursued the supremacy in China through non-peaceful means. Norman's plan attempted to liberate Canada from this dilemma so that the national interest and security of Canada should be more enhanced in the Pacific area.
This paper concludes that Canadian wartime intelligence toward Japan led a way to Canada's emergence as a Pacific State after the war. Although previous studies on this period have been weighted in the policy of middle power or the Atlantic relations, Norman as a unique intelligence officer played an important role to prepare a postwar Canadian policy for East Asia.

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