Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow Alison Brysk spoke yesterday to a group of students and faculty about the way in which the U.S. government uses foreign policy initiatives to promote women's rights around the world.
The feedback that I get from my students is that they would like to hear more about gender issues in international relations so we wanted to do something about that," Professor of Political Science Richard Eichenberg said. "I got together with a group of faculty ... and we decided to bring in several speakers."
Gender issues are a growing component of foreign policy, according to Eichenberg.
"Issues of global gender equality are at least a nominally declared priority of American foreign policy around the world," he said. "The programmatic activities have grown greatly and there are a number of initiatives under way in the foreign policy establishment ... There's a lot going on and we thought it was about time to publicize it a bit and engage [students] in a conversation."
Eichenberg explained that he experienced difficulty finding a scholar who focused on women's rights as a U.S. foreign policy objective. He added, however, that Brysk, the Mellichamp Professor of Global Governance in the Global and International Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was the perfect person to discuss global gender initiatives.
Brysk said that her recent work on gender equality grew out of her previous research on human rights and human trafficking.
"I started working on this issue out of about 20 years of human rights scholarship and I had been running across a lot of issues related to gender, women's rights, gender equity, women's empowerment all along the way," she said. "When I turned to this issue I wanted to know in what ways it follows a certain pattern with other human rights issues and in what ways there are distinctive concerns related to gender and related to identity issues and how that influences the concrete policy environment."
A major problem in achieving global gender equality is violence, according to Brysk. She said that one in three women have experienced gender-based violence and one in five women have been subjected to sexual violence. She cited Malala Yousafzai as an example of her concerns.
"Here is a young woman who is finally gaining access to education, who is finally gaining some potential for realizing just the most basic conventional rights and equity in her society," Brysk said. "What's stopping her? It's not law
More from The Tufts Daily
