This Special Issue represents a welcome advance in the project of bringing feminist analysis to nuclear and conventional weapons. Demonstrating the political importance and analytical richness of bringing intersectional and decolonial perspectives to this field, its feminist sensitivity to the politics of knowledge production problematizes weapons’ place in the construction of “security,” as well as the very idea of “expertise” about weapons (what counts as expert knowledge? who counts as a knower?).

Taken together, the articles also invite us to reflect on what kind of feminist approaches are most crucial—not only for ameliorating weapons proliferation, or advancing the field of gender and disarmament, but also for our ability to confront a broader range of existential threats: the escalating, intersecting global crises that make a mockery of the idea of human security. They push us to question: what do any of us mean by, or want from, “feminist approaches”? Simply put, does “feminist” refer to a goal of gaining gender equality, of inclusion, within current structures? Or does it mark a wider set of values which require the transformation of the purpose of those structures, and does it offer epistemological and political means for doing so?

On the one hand, this issue demonstrates some of the continuing intellectual importance of inclusion. Research and activist practice that includes the experiences, knowledge and ideas of people who have been systematically excluded not only reveals something about those people and their insights; it also reveals that mainstream understandings of, well, almost anything will be flawed and inadequate, will misunderstand what they purport to analyze because their knowledge base is so (non-randomly) incomplete. For example, articles by Considine and Eschle reveal that we fundamentally misunderstand not only the genesis but also the effects of nuclear weapons programs without analysis of the patriarchal, colonial and racist dynamics which shape both the programs themselves and mainstream narratives about them. Or, in another example, Jurdi and Ehrenberg-Peters not only illuminate the relationship between gender-based violence (GBV) and small arms and light weapons (SALW); their article shows that any analysis of SALW proliferation will fundamentally misunderstand the problem if it neglects an analysis of men’s engagements with armed groups, ideas about masculinities, and the enforcement of specific patriarchal gender orders—and thus that analysis will fail as a basis for policies aimed at curbing proliferation.

On the other hand, this issue also shows some of the severe limitations of inclusion as a political and epistemic strategy. What is the value of the increasing participation of diverse women in arms control negotiations or positions in the United Nations or as heads of weapons manufacturing corporations? It might represent increased opportunity for individual women, but does it change more than that? Crucially, the articles by Acheson, Egeland & Taha, and Chan & Romani find that they do not change much; and even worse, inclusion may serve to legitimate and reinforce the status quo, rather than transform it.

This should not be surprising. As these articles show, institutions embody and reproduce gendered, racialized power relations, whether those are the power relations between the nuclear haves and have nots (Considine; Chan & Romani) or in regional organizations (Mukalazi), or in the governance of outer space (West). The means of perpetuating those power relations sometimes rest on violence or its threat, and are often demographic (i.e., institutional practices that exclude certain groups of people). But they are also, perhaps most importantly, epistemological. Power comes from and through defining whose experiences and ideas constitute “expert” knowledge, and whose are irrelevant. It comes from defining which values and goals are seen as “realistic,” “rational” and “productive” to pursue as institutional goals, versus which are too “idealistic,” “sentimental,” and “soft.” It comes from defining certain philosophical perspectives as accurate reflections of the world-as-it-is (e.g., man’s role is to control nature and bend her to his will; the natural basic state of mankind is one of anarchy, with the strong dominating the weak, etc.), while rejecting other worldviews as primitive and/or naïve (e.g., we are part of nature; plants and animals are our relatives; humans are interdependent with each other; care is a fundamental human proclivity).

Feminist epistemologies enable us to show that dominant knowledge systems embedded in the institutions which shape the conditions of our lives are not “realist” reflections of universal truths; instead, they reflect partial knowledges that have rested on the violent subordination and silencing of women, indigenous peoples, people of color, and other marginalized groups, and on the devaluation of ideas, characteristics and values associated with them. The articles in this Special Issue suggest that as long as those dominant knowledge systems remain in place, inclusion, as a political strategy, will not only have severe limitations; it will often likely help legitimate those very institutions which have created the existential crises we face today. However, these articles also highlight the diverse feminist praxis that is building political/epistemological alternatives to the so-called “realist” worldviews that have not only thwarted disarmament, but also brought us to the precipice of ecocide. Readers will here find a rich contribution to that urgent project.