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Imagine you’re in a restaurant. You’ve ordered your meal, but you’d like to wash your hands before you eat. You ask a member of staff the way to the bathrooms (or restrooms, toilets, cloakrooms – whatever is the culturally acceptable term) and you are directed through a single outer door, to be confronted by a pair of doors. On each door there is a sign, bearing an image rather than a word.

Which door do you go through? Can you make sense of those signs? If so, then you have a theory of gender. You have a theory, or an understanding, of what the signs signify and of their social importance, because in order to make sense of the signs you have to accept that there are two types of people and that each type of person is represented by one or the other figure in the sign. The chances are good that you know automatically which door you’d go through. But think for a moment about your silhouette today: do you most closely resemble the figure on the left or the figure on the right? We don’t go through whichever door we go through because we look like the figures on the signs, we go through the doors because we understand what the signs mean. They may bear no relevance to the way we look, today or ever, but they order the way we behave in the world.

This is not, however, an article about how to avoid embarrassment when dining out. So what has the issue of where you wash your hands got to do with International Relations (IR)? I would suggest that the political salience (that is, importance) of identity, particularly gender identity, should not be underestimated in the study and practice of international relations. There is a range of ways to conceptualise ‘gender’ (to think about how our gendered bodies come to have meaning in socio-political situations) and to conceive of the relationship between sex and gender: essentialist accounts, constructivist accounts and poststructural accounts are perhaps the most commonly identified.[2] Typically, feminist IR scholars working within any of these frameworks ask different questions about different aspects of gender and global politics and use different methods to go about answering the questions they pose. This makes it difficult to provide an overview of gender and global politics in one short article. However, ideas about appropriate and inappropriate gendered behaviours are wide-ranging, influential and sometimes unconscious, but because they affect (and effect) how we behave in the world, they are of interest to the scholar of global politics, as global politics is practised and studied by gendered individuals. Whether the issue at hand is security,[3] global governance,[4] nuclear proliferation,[5] peacebuilding[6] or international law,[7] feminist scholars have written extensively about (how) gender matters in global politics and, further, argued that paying........

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