Women and LGBTQI people in diplomacy

Peace and Gender is a new podcast about the people behind the research on gender, peace, and security. In this episode, AndreaThiis-Evensen meets up with Professor Karin Aggestam, a Swedish researcher who specialises in the underrepresentation of women and LGBT people in diplomacy. 

This is the first in a series – a collaboration betwen Mojo News (Monash Journalism) and   Monash Gender, Peace and Security, a group of policy and community engaged scholars whose research is focused in this area. The aim is to use the research to inform people, educators and policy-makers on the gendered politics of armed conflict and the search for peace.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea:  Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen.  Welcome to Peace and Gender, the podcast about the people behind the research on gender, peace and security.  In this podcast series I'm going to meet up with new professors and academics coming from all around the world who specialise in gender, peace and security. 

In this podcast I'm trying to not only get a better understanding of the studies, but also the people behind the papers and research.  Who are they?  Why do they research these issues?  Most importantly, what are the issues regarding gender, peace and security that we actually need to talk about today?

In this episode, you will meet Professor Karin Aggestam.  Karin is a professor in political science at Lund University in Sweden.  In this episode, Karin's going to talk about the underrepresentation of women in diplomacy and why this is a problem.  Karin also talks about a topic that I myself had never considered which is how difficult it can be for LGBT people in diplomacy, but more on that later.

To begin with, when did Karin start studying gender, peace and conflict?

Karin:  My area of interest in - generally like peace and conflict - has been all my career, including also as an under graduate and a post graduate.  Peace and conflict has been an area which I find extremely interesting because it's also inter-disciplinary, and it provides lots of opportunity to lots of interesting stuff in academia.  I've never left that area. Then I've worked also for a very long time on the Middle East, and particularly on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. 

When it comes to gender it's something that I already - as a PhD candidate, together with some other of my colleagues, we got together in the 1990s - in the end of the 1990s - and had a big conference on feminist perspective in international relations, which at the time was considered very new area.  We had a great conference and a great launch at Lund University.  That also goes a long way back in time.

Andrea:  Like many other professors and people, Karin has a life project within her academic world.  A specific academic curiosity as she calls it, or an issue that she wants to explore. 

Karin:  My sort of curiosity, academic curiosity, has always been driven by a search for how we can sort of enhance a peaceful world order.  That's actually one reason why I did get - I was promoted to the Pufendorf Chair Professor because I have been working consistently in all my work, even though it has been very diverse, and diverse empirical domains.  Also theoretically it has always had us and our overarching quest of how we can advance a more peaceful world order.

Andrea: One of Karin's most recent books is Gendering Diplomacy and International Negotiation.

Karin:  There is so few studies in the field of diplomacy.  I put together, a couple of years ago, two panels at one of the big international conferences for international studies on diplomacy, together with Ann Towns who's a professor at Gothenburg University.

We had these two panels and very exciting discussions and interesting papers.  From there we decided that we wanted to pull together these papers into book because - to make one step further to create a more robust theoretical field and also for empirical studies, so having a first take on that.

Andrea: Karin's book addresses the critical question of where are the women in contemporary diplomacy and international negotiation. 

Karin: Well my key interest in diplomacy is related to peace and conflict and that's why I have studied.  I spent lots of time on peace negotiations which are so c