Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research focuses on reproduction, family, maternity, and health from a transnational historical perspective. Bourbonnais is the author of two books, Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean: Reproductive Politics and Practice on Four Islands, 1930-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Gospel of Family Planning: An Intimate Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Her current research project explores the history and politics of maternity at the World Health Organization from the 1940s to early 2000s. She is also a podcast host at the New Books Network, publishing interviews with scholars working on reproduction and sexuality across disciplines.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
One of the things I find most exciting about studying reproduction is the truly interdisciplinary nature of the field. Historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, demographers, geographers, and public health researchers come at the same basic questions – why people do or do not have children, why this becomes a site of public debate or policy – through very different methodologies and theories. Most recently, I’ve been branching out into feminist science and technology studies, feminist political economy, social reproduction theory, and maternal theory, all of which have added new layers to the way I think about global reproductive politics and practice.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
Probably the biggest shift has been in my understanding of who and what counts as “history” and “politics.” The classic “Great Man,” timeline version of history I encountered when I was young – those long lists of leaders and dates of battles – never really resonated with me. Only in my undergrad degree (at UBC in Vancouver) did I see that everything can be historicized and everyone is a historical actor. Every cultural norm, every social practice, every material object has a longer story behind it that helps explain who we are and why we do the things we do. Every person contributes to historical continuity or change, through both their action and inaction in the smallest of spaces. Likewise, “politics” – in the broad sense of struggle over power and resources – happens in all spheres of life, not just the public arena.
This orientation was further nurtured by my wonderful PhD supervisor Lara Putnam and the graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh, which also exposed me to the connections between social and global history. Rather than seeing “the global” as a sphere confined to high-level geopolitics and “the social” as a local category of analysis, we explored the way these were fundamentally linked. This is still the kind of history and political analysis that most interests me.
Your book, The Gospel of Family Planning, highlights how the everyday work of local nurses and community workers shaped family planning in ways that were often overlooked. What lessons can we learn from this for contemporary international reproductive health campaigns?
First, I think it challenges the still prevalent assumption that family planning was/is primarily a “Western” project projected onto the rest of the world. While we shouldn’t underestimate the role of Western institutions in promoting a particular model of contraceptive promotion (particularly during the high period of population control in the 1960s-80s), the broader story of family planning in most contexts pre-dates Western interventions and is shaped as much by internal actors and dynamics. If we start with that premise, then every new reproductive health project should start by charting the particular local history and landscape of reproductive politics/practice in any given context, rather than assuming a blank slate or a pre-determined power dynamic.
Second, I think focusing on practitioners allows us to see how critical the space of the clinic or the hospital ward or the home is towards shaping reproductive experiences. Paradigm shifts at the level of UN conferences – from family planning to population control to reproductive rights, for example – are of course very important in shaping reproductive health, influencing what kinds of programs get designed, funded, and implemented. But these frameworks only really acquire meaning if/when they are embedded in the daily work of the clinic, in the interactions between providers and patients. The ideologies of practitioners and the smallest decisions they make – what kind of speculum to use during a medical exam, how the risks/benefits of different contraceptives are framed – can profoundly shape whether the goals of any program are realized or entirely subverted.
Your article shows that mid-century family planning often used a humanitarian language of compassion and shared womanhood that could hide underlying hierarchies and unequal power. Do you think global health programmes still reproduce colonial logics in the way they address sexuality and fertility? What might a decolonised approach look like?
It’s hard to make a sweeping assertion about this – it would really come down to analyzing each program individually, from the level of framework down to practice. But there are certainly some general logics circulating in contemporary humanitarian and development circles that we might question by looking through a historical lens.
The first is the general belief that if a project has good intentions, if it wants to help people, and if it brings some clear material benefit, then this work will inherently or inevitably be empowering to those who are targeted. This narrative is often predicated on distinguishing the present from the past: before there were coercive, colonial neo-Malthusians and eugenicists, now we are health advocates and rights activists. Learning that many people from the past also saw themselves as health advocates and even “rights” activists and yet still ended up reinforcing power hierarchies or even engaging in coercive practices, complicates that story. It suggests that our narratives and motivations are not enough to ensure what we are doing is actually empowering in a more comprehensive way. There also needs to be a deeper understanding of the many contexts and power relations that shape people’s lives, an attentiveness to people’s criticisms and resistance, and an ability to adjust or even abandon causes altogether when they are not meeting people’s needs.
The second logic that continues to haunt us is the idea that states or organizations can/should actively intervene in people’s reproductive lives as a means to a larger end, whether it be colonial profit, national economic development, global security, or planetary survival. We can see this most recently in the resurgence of neo-Malthusian thinking in the context of climate change, as explored in Jade Sasser’s work, for example. While the temptation seems to return again and again, we know from history that tying reproductive policies to these larger agendas can too easily justify mandates that override people’s individual rights, freedoms, and desires.
There are several existing frameworks that put forward more empowering visions for reproductive interventions and policies, based on a deep understanding of past histories and contemporary power relations. The reproductive justice framework, for example, was developed by women of color in the US based on their own experiences of reproductive oppression. The transnational sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) framework also arose in part as a reaction against global population control politics and as an expression of principles already developing in local/regional women’s health movements. These frameworks were developed in conversation with one another over the course of the 1970s-1990s. At the core of both is the understanding that rights must extend across the entire spectrum of reproductive health (rights to contraception/abortion but also infertility treatment, prenatal care, post-partum care, long-term family welfare… etc.) and must be supported by the broader political, social, and economic resources needed to make rights real.
In both your book Birth Control in the Decolonizing Caribbean and in your chapter about sexual hierarchies, the Caribbean emerges as a place where people have generated their own ways of thinking about sex, family and autonomy. What can global history and international relations learn from Caribbean experiences in this space?
Looking at the Caribbean allows us to see the remarkable convergence in the way different European colonial empires – Dutch, Spanish, French, English – intervened in the intimate sphere, and the lasting legacies of these interventions. Colonial regimes violently broke apart families of enslaved Africans and literally owned their reproductive/sexual bodies, then turned around and blamed “fractured” Caribbean family forms for their own post-emancipation poverty. Colonial discourses of the hyper-sexualized Afro-Caribbean body also continue to position the region as a site of global sex tourism, illustrating the continuities between colonial and post-colonial sexual economies.
Scholars of the Caribbean like Kamala Kempadoo, Sasha Turner, Rosamond King, Faith Smith and Chelsea Schields (to name only a few) have provided deep analyses of this entangling of history, economy, reproduction and sexuality. But they have also moved beyond critique, putting forth alternative ways of thinking about family, sexuality, and the future. As Andil Gosine argues, it is not enough to deconstruct: one must also “construct and refashion.” Leighan Renaud challenges the privileging of the Western “nuclear” family altogether, arguing that we might see Caribbean families not as “fractured” but rather as “fractal”: composed of multiple circles of care, infinitely expansive. M. Jacqui Alexander outlines a broader vision of “sexual decolonization” and “erotic autonomy,” centered in freedom from both colonial and post-colonial sexual disciplining. Carolyn Cooper calls on us to see the power in “vulgar” sexual expression, rather than accepting Victorian sexual restraint as the ideal. Gloria Wekker, Vanessa Agard-Jones and others challenge the assumption that same-sex relationships in the Caribbean will or should “progress” to adopt the categories and strategies of European/North American movements.
This is only a small sample of a rich field that would be relevant to anyone interested in these subjects. But anyway, I think its generally good practice to try and read at least something about as many different regions of the world as you can if your interest is in global history/IR. Isn’t that the whole point?
In A Brief History of Women’s History you argue that intimate life has always been shaped by political forces, from state policies to global geopolitics. To what extent does mainstream international relations still overlook this link? What would IR gain analytically by integrating the personal into its core frameworks?
Well, my first real engagement with the field of IR/global studies was through scholars who most certainly do center these links, like Elisabeth Prügl (my colleague at the Institute), Cynthia Enloe, Cynthia Cockburn, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Sonia Alvarez, Uma Narayan, etc. I found it kind of bizarre to later learn that these are not always considered “mainstream” in IR: that feminist theories are, for example, still often confined to one week of discussion in the latter half of a foundational IR theory course. To me, these are not just optional add-ons to the key texts, they are central frameworks for understanding global politics that allow us to see so many levels of power relations operating at once. As Cynthia Enloe put it in Bananas, Beaches and Bases, viewing IR through a critical feminist lens allows us to see the world as a Jackson Pollack painting rather than a superhero comic: a more complicated, but undoubtedly more accurate, view of the world.
What is the most important advice you could give to young scholars of International Relations?
As noted above, I think it’s always valuable to read beyond your field or region, to see the different questions, histories, and debates that emerge from different places/perspectives. At the same time, I think it is okay to be somewhat “niche” in your research agenda, to narrow in on something that really, deeply interests you, for whatever reason, even if it is not always immediately easy to explain to the world. I think it sometimes feels like there is pressure to focus on whatever the issue or context or theory of the day seems to be, whether because it seems more exciting or more likely to win a grant or to lead to a position. But the “in” topic can shift radically and quickly: I think it is a shaky ground for a research agenda. And anyway, you can always find a way to relate your interests to the broader questions of the day. Indeed, I’ve found that studying the history of reproduction (though considered “niche” to some) gives me a unique entry point into nearly a million other subjects…I might be slightly exaggerating, but you get the point.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
