Laureation Address: Professor Cynthia Enloe
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
Laureation by Professor Anthony Lang, School of International Relations
Tuesday 1 July 2025 – afternoon ceremony
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the Degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, Professor Cynthia Enloe.
Professor Enloe is a scholar and teacher of International Relations who has brought her ‘feminist curiosity’ to the multiple forms of militarism that shape our global system. Her rich empirical work and theoretical sophistication has resulted in 15 books, numerous articles and chapters, and a reputation as the most important feminist thinker in International Relations.
She is the recipient of multiple awards and honorary degrees, ranging from SOAS to the University of Iceland (and now from St Andrews), and three different prizes have been established in her name. Her works have been translated into numerous languages, including Ukrainian, Japanese, Turkish and Chinese, to name only a few.
Yet it is not just her publications and honorifics that merit our attention. Professor Enloe has long been a tireless teacher of and advocate for students and junior scholars. As one example, soon after I completed my PhD in the late 1990s, I co-authored a short paper using Professor Enloe’s work, which I posted to her. Even though my work does not focus directly on feminism, Professor Enloe responded immediately, and has been a support and friend throughout my career, reading some of my later work and giving me insights into how to better incorporate the ‘feminist curiosity’ for which she has become so well known. And, when she came to St Andrews in 2017 to deliver the School of International Relations Distinguished Scholar Lecture, Professor Enloe spent two days meeting with academic members of staff, PhD students, and other students to discuss their work and encourage them in their thinking about global politics.
Her lecture, in the midst of the first administration of Donald Trump, given without notes to a standing-room-only audience, gave those who attended hope for how we might see the role of the United States differently, again using that feminist curiosity to highlight an alternative way of doing politics, both domestically and globally.
She is not only a scholar, but an activist and organiser, one who has worked with feminist colleagues around the world to better understand the too often ignored contributions that women make in their efforts to counter militarism. In her most recent book, Twelve Feminist Lessons of War, Professor Enloe captures, I think, the essence of her approach to being a scholar and activist, when she writes the following:
“Feminists working to prevent or end wars in so many countries need us to be in solidarity with them. They are teaching us, though, that to be in genuine solidarity calls for our sustained curiosity. We need to put ourselves in other girls’ and women’s shoes. It is not enough even to be sympathetic. To become feminist in our efforts at solidary, we need to learn about each other’s gendered histories, each other’s gendered economies, each other’s gendered hopes and worries.”
Professor Enloe, throughout her distinguished career, has done exactly that: made us aware of the gendered dynamics of world politics. She creates that solidarity in so many of her works, connecting women’s struggles across time and space.
As just one small example, her 2010 book, Nimo’s War, Emma’s War, tells the story of how an Iraqi woman and an American woman were impacted by the gendered dynamics of the 2003 Iraq War. The book refuses to make the war a battle between good and evil but instead opens us to the impact this war and so many others have had on the lives of women. In a field of study often defined by war, trade and conflict, she has helped us see how those traditional practices rely on and sustain assumptions about gender.
Thank you from all of us who have tried to understand global politics for revealing the global politics of patriarchy and, even more importantly, giving us the tools by which we might counter such practices in our thinking and our actions.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of her major contribution to feminist theory and practice in global politics, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, on Professor Cynthia Enloe.