What is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions

- Robert Keohane has challenged feminists to come up with a research program using “scientific method in the broadest sense” - he outlined a possible research program for IR feminists focused on a variant of the democratic peace theory
- Keohane described himself as a “neopositivist” (now prefers to describe himself as a “scientific realist”) - he insisted that researchers must strive to be as objective as possible
- Keohane´s suggestion for a feminist research program using the conventional social scientific methodology have some similarities with what Sandra Harding terms “feminist empiricism”, an epistemology that argues that sexism and androcentricism in existing research are social biases
- IR feminist empirical research took off in the mid-1990s
- IR feminist have used a variety of methods from all the field of IR as post-positivist, reflectivist, or interpretivist
- feminist empirical research has been situated in critical, constructivist, or post-modern frameworks
- methodology = a theory and analysis of how research does or should proceed
- method = a technique for gathering and analyzing evidence
- there is no unique feminist research method