Feminist Foreign Policy and Gender Justice on the International Agenda (original) (raw)

The Growth of Feminist (?) Foreign Policy

2020

Discussion of gender equality within international organisations and foreign policy is longstanding. States have long paid attention to gender within foreign and development policy, from National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security to work on Sustainable Development Goal 5, and reaching even further back to the Beijing principles and the UN Conferences on women. Yet this action has all largely focused on the concept of gender (and, preceding this, women). There has been little employment of the notion of feminism within the work of states’ foreign policy or the language of international institutions.

WORLD LED BY WOMEN: THE IDEOLOGICAL EVOLUTION AND FUTURE OF FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY

2024

This paper highlights the amalgamation of feminism with foreign policy and international relations. It analyzes the brief history of this intersectionality while articulating the need, methods and implications of a feminist foreign policy. Lastly, it also highlights, through significant case studies, why feminization of foreign policy is crucial.

Trajectories Towards Feminist Foreign Policy

International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA), 2021

Sweden, France, Canada, Mexico, Luxembourg, Spain have all adopted Feminist Foreign Policies. How did they get there? A new report exploring trajectories to Feminist Foreign Policy, by International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA). Includes my collaboration for the Mexican case.

The Past, Present, and Future(s) of Feminist Foreign Policy

The Past, Present, and Future(s) of Feminist Foreign Policy , 2023

Almost a decade after Sweden first declared that it would follow a feminist foreign policy (FFP), a further eleven countries from across Europe, North and South America, and North and West Africa have adopted, or have signaled an interest in potentially adopting, an FFP in the future. These developments have been accompanied by a growing body of feminist scholarship. Although still in its infancy, this literature can generally be divided between more normative accounts and those that are empirically focused, with particular attention paid to the FFPs of Sweden and Canada. Yet, few studies compare FFPs' uptake across different countries and regions, examine its connections to longer histories of ideas around women and gender, or unpack the policy intersections FFP (tentatively) engages. Contributing to these different areas, Part I provides an overview of the history of FFP, interrogates FFP in the context of Foreign Policy Analysis, and explores what FFP can achieve in the current (liberal) global system. Part II turns to consider policy intersections in relation to the climate crisis, migration, militarism, and bodies. Thinking through its origins, policy intersections, and potential future(s), the contributors to this Forum explore FFP's multiple and contested future(s). Ultimately, the Forum takes Achilleos-Sarll, Columba et al.

Global Gender Policy in the 1990s: Incorporating the "Vital Voices" of Women

Journal of Women's History, 2012

Tracing the origins of the conference and the formation of the new women's policy agency, the OIWI, to the end of the Cold War transformations in U.S. foreign policy making and new attention to women's human rights and their role in civil society building globally, this article addresses theoretical and practical issues of employing insider-outsider strategies when organizing for global feminist change. "When we met, many of us in this room, together in Beijing we came to declare in clear and unequivocal terms that women's voices must be heard, and we offered a clear proposition: that a nation's progress depends on the progress of women, that the strength of a political system depends on the inclusion of women. That the vibrancy of an economy depends on the full contribution of women. That the richness of civil society depends on the participation of women. That human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights."

Role of Feminist Movements in Gender Mainsreaming Policies: The Case of Un

2019

Recognizing the fact that policy decisions have differentiated outcomes on men and women is the first step to promoting a gender equal environment which, in turn catalyses sustainable economic development. Gender mainstreaming, as a concept, emerges from this recognition – policies have gender differentiated outcomes and thus, gender differences shape policy processes. This concept was established as a global strategy to achieve gender equality in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action ratified by all United Nations member states. It is now incumbent upon nation-states and international organizations to carry out gender mainstreaming. Since then, there has been mainly three sets of people who have helped carry forward the discussion on gender mainstreaming: scholars, feminist policymakers and feminist activists. One of the major participants who constitute the political link to policymakers are the feminist and gender equality activist movements witnessing high mass participation from...

Theorising feminist foreign policy

International Relations

A growing number of states including Canada, Norway and Sweden have adopted gender and feminist-informed approaches to their foreign and security policies. The overarching aim of this article is to advance a theoretical framework that can enable a thoroughgoing study of these developments. Through a feminist lens, we theorise feminist foreign policy arguing that it is, to all intents and purposes, ethical and argue that existing studies of ethical foreign policy and international conduct are by and large gender-blind. We draw upon feminist International Relations (IR) theory and the ethics of care to theorise feminist foreign policy and to advance an ethical framework that builds on a relational ontology, which embraces the stories and lived experiences of women and other marginalised groups at the receiving end of foreign policy conduct. By way of conclusion, the article highlights the novel features of the emergent framework and investigates in what ways it might be useful for fut...

The Gender Agenda A feminist foreign policy: has the domestic become international

In September 2014, the Social Democrats and the Green party secured enough votes in the Swedish general election to be invited to form a minority government. Later the same year, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven announced that his government would be the world’s first explicitly feminist government. In October the same year, Margot Wallström, then newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, declared in her first foreign policy announcement that Sweden would be the first, and to this day the only, country in the world to adopt an explicitly feminist foreign policy (FFP). What this would mean in practice was initially, and to some extent still remain, unclear; and since its announcement, and later publication, the Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy (SEFFP, or ‘the Policy’) has been the subject of scrutiny by journalists and academics. A small number of studies have been conducted on the Policy, but a detailed account of what a feminist foreign policy should look like based on insight from Feminist International Relations (FIR) theory remains unexplored. Although there is no lack of feminist criticism of domestic and foreign policy, and of international relations and conflict studies, little agreement exists on what concretely a feminist foreign policy should consist of; what issues it should address and what measures it should prescribe.