Despite general belief, gender and international security transcend the study of the relationship between women and war. As an example:The Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Africa left between 250,000 and 500,000 women and girls raped as their bodies were used for ethnic genocides (Amnesty International, 2004).Depending on cultural practices, in some countries the birth of a girl child is considered a defeat, in financial terms, a burden, leading to her sale, forced marriage, or murder (WSP, 2014).In 2016, the seven-year-old indigenous minor Yuliana Andrea Samboní was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by an architect in Bogotá (González, 2017).Trans women who tried to escape the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 could not enter other countries because of the gender indicative shown in their passport (Euronews, 2022).“Be male, stay and discuss head-on!” said former President Álvaro Uribe to Hugo Chávez in 2010 at the Rio Summit in Cancún, Mexico (Parra, 2010).
Recent transformations in the global structure, transnational social mobilization, global phenomena that impact on the environment, among others, require new perspectives and demand from our disciplines the ability to understand the complexity of today's world. Critical approaches such as feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial studies have questioned the traditional epistemological bases of international relations (IR). They have proposed to focus on dimensions such as gender, race, diversity and inequality. Since the 1980s, feminist currents have criticized the androcentric nature of the discipline and the exclusions that this bias generates. Latin American feminisms, for their part, have broadened the objects of study by considering the experiences of subalternized groups from an intersectional perspective.
