Feminist Foreign Policy

Citation:

Rajagopalan, Swarna. 2012. “Reflections on Feminism and Foreign Policy.” India International Centre Quarterly 39 (1): 93–102.

Author: Swarna Rajagopalan

Annotation:

Topics: Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Security

Year: 2012

Citation:

Hudson, Valerie M. 2017. “Feminist Foreign Policy as State-Led Expansion of Human Rights.” In Expanding Human Rights: 21st Century Norms and Governance, edited by Alison Brysk and Michael Stohl, 177–94. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Author: Valerie M. Hudson

Abstract:

The purpose of the chapter is to trace the arc of the idea that there could be a “feminist” state foreign/security policy, and then to assess both the promise and the pitfalls of such a stance. In this case, the state would become the main agent promoting this human rights expansion. A feminist foreign/security policy (FFSP) would embrace the idea that human rights and national security are not contradictory goals of state policy unless we choose to see them as such. However, an FFSP would go further and also propose that women’s empowerment, women’s voice, and women’s security constitute the great bridge between the two aspirations. The selection of Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State in 2009, and her tenure until early 2013, provides a rich case study of how the “women, peace, and security” standpoint articulated by the United Nations could be translated into a state agenda. However, given the state’s top-down nature, there will always be problems with utilizing the state to expand and secure human rights. Understanding the nature and source of the problems faced in this case is instructive, including moral quandaries, state inconsistency, insincere genuflection, distorted participation, and perverse incentives. (Abstract from Elgar Online) 

Topics: Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, International Organizations, Peace and Security, Rights, Human Rights, Security, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS

Year: 2017

Citation:

Authors: Karin Aggestam, Annika Bergman-Rosamond

Annotation:

Topics: Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Gender Mainstreaming, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Hierarchies, International Organizations, Justice, Rights, Human Rights

Year: 2016

Citation:

Achilleos-Sarll, Columba. 2018. “Reconceptualising Foreign Policy as Gendered, Sexualised and Racialised: Towards a Postcolonial Feminist Foreign Policy (Analysis).” Journal of International Women’s Studies 19 (1): 34–49.

Author: Columba Achilleos-Sarll

Abstract:

How can we theorise more effectively the relationship among gender, sexuality, race and foreign policy? To explore this question, and to contribute to the nascent field of feminist foreign policy (analysis), this paper brings together two bodies of international relations (IR) literature: postcolonial feminism and post-positivist foreign policy analysis (FPA). This paper contributes a fundamental critique of both ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ (namely post-positivist) FPA to demonstrate the lack of attention paid to postcolonial and feminist theories within FPA. In turn, this exposes the ways in which FPA marginalises, and renders inconsequential, the gendered, sexualised and racialised dimensions underwriting foreign policy practice and discourse. While post-positivist FPA seeks to rectify the silences that characterise ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ (namely constructivist) FPA, this literature remains blind to the ways that intersecting oppressions, operating through hierarchies of social categories made possible through their naturalisation, inform the process, the production and the resultant gendered consequences of foreign policy. Moreover, while there are limited country-specific examinations (residing outside of FPA) on gender and foreign policy that offer useful insights, they are theoretically limited. Like much post-positivist feminism, these examinations privilege gender as a social category, omitting race and other markers of difference. Rather than presenting ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’ and ‘race’ as concepts only for interdisciplinary inquiry, it is propounded here that they should be seen as vital to the study and practice of foreign policy. Advancing the untested promise of a postcolonial feminist approach to FPA that (re-) centres intersectionality, (re-)instates connected histories, and (re-)configures normative orders, this paper argues that foreign policy should be re-conceptualised as gendered, sexualised and racialised. It is hoped this intervention may offer a blueprint to seriously engage with the possibility of a postcolonial feminist foreign policy approach to FPA, and to think anew about how that may be translated beyond the discipline: advocating for a symbiotic and complimentary feminist foreign and domestic policy that fundamentally challenges rather that maintains the status quo.

Keywords: Postcolonial Feminist Theory, Foreign Policy (Analysis)

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Race, Sexuality

Year: 2018