Despite the fact that conventional International Relations theory has generally dismissed or trivialised the role of gender identity in international politics, gender is present in the structuring of the small, day to-day administration of institutions that are instrumental in the international, and also of the interstate system structure as a whole. A critical feminist perspective in IR can provide an analysis of what gender is and how it is ideological, how our understanding of gender guides military policy (and how military policy in turn reproduces gender), and how the international system structure, the nation, and war are all gendered.