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Spring/Summer 2019
76 DIPLOMACY: THE FUTURE IS FEMALE
The Seton Hall
Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
Volume XX, Number 2
Diplomacy:
The Future is Female
IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
Lyric ompson and Rachel Clement
I
In 2014, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström took the world
by storm when she launched the world’s rst explicitly feminist foreign
policy. e new policy would be a way of doing things dierently in Sweden’s
international aairs, organizing its approach to diplomacy, development,
and defense under a 3 Rs framework of women’s rights, resources, and
representation, the latter of which this journal issue seeks to explore.
How did this come to be? For Sweden, it was not just the future of
diplomacy that was female; it was the past and present as well. Sweden’s
parliamentary representation has hovered near parity for some time. It has
also boasted a long line of female foreign ministers dating back to the 1970s.
us, there was a strong historical precedent of women’s leadership that had
normalized female power in such a way as to enable the country to oer
something unique to the world: a feminist foreign policy.
Sweden’s feminist foreign policy contribution gives us a window into
what a female future for diplomacy might look like. Looking back to the
Swedish example – and also examining a few subsequent, though not quite
as ambitious, case studies from Canada and France – we argue that a female
future of diplomacy should not be solely female but should be feminist in
name and content. In other words, a feminist foreign policy should not only
be produced by women and for women, but it should go beyond; carrying a
gendered lens that recognizes and seeks to correct historical and patriarchal,
as well as racist and/or colonialist imbalances of power. Irrespective of one’s
gender, this is an all-inclusive benet: feminism is an agenda everyone can
promote and one that seeks equity for all, not the dominance of one over
another. As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated, “I know many
women [who] are not feminists, and I know some men [who] are.”1
Further, the feminist future we seek should not limit itself simply to the
realm of diplomacy but should encompass all auspices of foreign policy and
international relations. If done right, the approach will include aid, trade,
and defense, in addition to diplomacy, and it will ensure the use of all tools
available in the foreign policy toolbox in order to advance a more equitable
world.
In the same vein, as part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), 192 member states have agreed to achieve gender equality by 2030.
Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
e question that arises and which concerns us in this paper is: if this is
such a widely-accepted premise, why have so few governments adopted a
feminist approach to foreign policy?
D F F P
Over the past several years, we have been examining the global state of
aairs with regard to feminist foreign policy, and we have found a number of
explanations for the lack of a widespread uptake of the concept.
Governments may not be embracing the mantle of feminist foreign
policy because there is no universal denition. Although this is treacherous
ground to trod, we will attempt it here, if only for the sake of trying. Since
feminists themselves have diculty in dening feminist foreign policies
how can they expect governments to do so?
e Merriam-Webster dictionary denes foreign policy as, “the policy of
a sovereign state in its interaction with other sovereign states.”2 e concept
of sovereignty is central to this denition, which has been a challenge for
the concept of universal human rights – women’s, or otherwise – from the
very beginning. e United States, for instance, has consistently refused to
ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW), the preeminent international treaty on women’s
rights, citing sovereignty concerns, putting it in an ignominious minority of
only six other holdouts, such as Iran, Somalia, and Sudan.3 is American
reticence has also applied to treaties on disability, children, and other key
populations.4 is includes the most widely ratied human rights treaty in
history, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the United States
is the lone UN member state not to ratify.5 We will return to CEDAW and
the other historical precedents for feminist foreign policy later in this paper.
at is foreign policy. Dening feminist encounters even more diculty.
Again, consulting Merriam-Webster dictionary, which in 2017
determined its word of the year to be feminism owing to the largest spike
in searches of the word following the Women’s March on Washington.6
It denes feminism as “the theory of the political, economic, and social
equality of the sexes,” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights
and interests.” As such, a composite denition of the two concepts taken
together could be:
Feminist foreign policy: the policy of a sovereign state in its
interaction with other sovereign states based on the theory
of political, economic, and social equality of the sexes,
delivered to advance women’s rights and interests.
78 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
Spring/Summer 2019
at is a starting point for debate, but hardly responsive to interest in
enshrining a focus not just on women, but on gender equality more broadly.
Here Sweden’s rights, resources, and representation framework can help
us. In a July 2018 New York Times op-ed, Margot Wallström stated, “…it’s
as simple as that: feminism, or gender equality, is about making sure that
women have the same rights, representation, and resources as men.”7
Borrowing from Wallström’s framework, we propose the following
working denition of feminist foreign policy:
The policy of a state that denes its interactions with other
states and movements in a manner that prioritizes gender
equality and enshrines the human rights of women and other
traditionally marginalized groups, allocates signicant
resources to achieve that vision, undertakes robust and public
analysis to document the impacts of its implementation, and
seeks through its implementation and reection, to disrupt
male-dominated power structures across all of its levers of
inuence (aid, trade, defense, and diplomacy), informed by
the voices of feminist activists, groups and movements.
Having suggested the above working denition, we will now examine
historical precedents that shaped feminist foreign policy, and to the extent
possible, investigate the nature of their impact.
P P: H I L
G F F P
A feminist foreign policy that meets our proposed denition is a tall
order. Nonetheless, the concept has antecedents in a number of international
agreements and foreign policies that have attempted to bring a gendered
lens to the eld.
First and foremost, gender equality is enshrined in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and
following the brutal Second World War to articulate a universal, fundamental
body of rights held by all people, to form a global alliance to defend those
rights and, it was hoped, to prevent another bloody global conict. e
Universal Declaration of Human Rights holds that, “All human beings are
born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that “everyone is entitled to
all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction
of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, … birth or other
s t a t u s .” 8
Twenty-ve years later came the development and widespread adoption
77 THOMPSON & CLEMENT
Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
of a specic international standard on women’s human rights: CEDAW,
which was adopted by the UN in 1979.9 Another generation passed before a
series of new standards were developed in the early nineties: groundbreaking
content on gender-based violence and women’s human rights as articulated
in the Vienna Declaration and Platform for Action in 1993; new standards
the next year with respect to sexual and reproductive health and rights in
the Cairo Program of Action; and, nally, the pivotal Beijing Declaration
and Platform for Action in 1995, where First Lady Hilary Clinton famously
declared that human rights were women’s rights. Although these new
standards together have advanced progress toward a common understanding
of and commitment to women’s human rights, they are, sadly, still a topic of
enormous debate and there is substantial risk of backsliding.
With the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR
1325) on Women, Peace, and Security in October 2000, feminist foreign
policy had a watershed moment. For the rst time, the women’s rights agenda
was positioned solidly within the realms of national and global security.10
Prior to UNSCR 1325, the scholarly eld of international relations received
signicant critique for supporting a worldview in which all the critical players
are men playing typically masculine roles: statesmen, soldiers, despots, and
terrorists. In this framework, the role of women was reduced to abstract
concepts like “the mother country” and, if women were mentioned at all, it
was as potential victims who need protecting.11 UNSCR 1325 changed that,
and, to date, 79 countries have adopted national action plans on women,
peace, and security.12
On the development side, the rights and roles of women became a topic
of interest to the eld somewhat earlier than in the realms of diplomacy
and national security. As early as the 1960s, there was a recognition that
not all approaches benet all recipients equally or function equally well if
gender is not considered. e approach, now called Women in Development
(WID), is driven by the idea that women not only face unique challenges
compared to male counterparts, simply by virtue of being women, but also
that these specic challenges require tailored responses that take gender into
account. While well intentioned, these early responses oen had unintended
consequences, as they implemented interventions with women without fully
considering or mitigating the broader societal impact those interventions
would have or their gendered implications. For example, women’s economic
empowerment programs that gave women access to nancial capital but
ignored social norms, which dictated that men were breadwinners and heads
of household, could result in spikes in domestic or intimate partner violence
as those power structures were disrupted.13 Many feminist academics also
80 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
Spring/Summer 2019
argued that in addition to these unintended consequences, a WID theory
or approach all-too-oen resulted in the instrumentalization of women that
prioritized the broad development outcomes of empowering women rather
than their individual human rights.14 A related feminist critique of the WID
approach is a disproportionate emphasis on women’s role as mothers or
homemakers as opposed to investing in the name of equality overall.
In the 1980s, a movement to not only address gender inequality but to
also address some of the critiques to a WID theory took shape. is new
approach was called Gender and Development (GAD), and began to shape
the way that countries give, receive, budget for, and implement foreign
assistance.15 e approach seeks not only to improve outcomes for women,
but also to promote broader social equity and inclusion by intervening in
ways that respond to gendered roles within households, communities, and
societies. GAD approaches place an emphasis on developing individual
capacity within a framework of gendered social norms.
is shi was signicant and predated the beginning of a similar pivot
for approaches in the rest of foreign policy. In the ensuing years, a number of
countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Canada,
Australia, and the Netherlands, have published development policies that
are grounded in this approach; although few have fully incorporated a non-
binary approach to gender and gendered social norms. More work needs to
be done to include a focus on LGBTQ people, or the ways in which gender
norms can impact men and boys, in this broader approach to gender.
If we are to map the evolution of this discipline as starting with roots
in the human rights and women in development movements, evolving
gradually to embrace broader concepts of gender equality and inclusion, one
could imagine the next frontier as the advent of the feminist foreign policy.
F W A: W F F P D
Absent a universal denition of what a feminist foreign policy is,
the question becomes what do the few examples of existing policies actually
do? All are relatively new, with Sweden’s eorts beginning in 2014, followed
by Canada’s Feminist Foreign Assistance Policy eorts in 2017, and a
rebranding of an existing gender policy in France as feminist foreign policy
in 2019.16 It is worth noting that in both Australia and the United Kingdom,
individual political parties have pledged to adopt feminist foreign policies,
so depending on the outcome of future elections we may someday have
additional policies to examine in our review. For now, these three countries
provide a case study through which we can begin to assess current eorts to
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Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
dene and deliver feminist foreign policies globally.
Sweden
Sweden published the world’s rst (and by our denition, only) feminist
foreign policy in 2014. is policy includes aid, trade, development, and
diplomacy within the scope of its framework. In fact, the Swedish feminist
approach to policy is broader still, extending to both foreign and domestic
policy. According to the Swedish Government, “…gender equality is
central to the Government’s priorities – in decision-making and resource
allocation….e Government’s most important tool for implementing
feminist policy is gender mainstreaming, of which gender-responsive
budgeting is an important component”17 Here we see the emphasis on
resources as paramount for the Swedish model, although unlike Canada and
France, the Swedish Government did not commit to earmarking a certain
percentage of its aid to gender equality. e decision to extend the focus of
the Swedish Government’s feminism to policies impacting people both at
home and abroad is an important one that is worthy of greater exploration
than we have room to accommodate in the scope of this article.
Within its feminist foreign policy framework, the Swedish policy covers
three domains: (1) foreign and security policy; (2) development cooperation;
and (3) trade and promotion policy. With regard to gender, the policy sees
gender equality as both a priority objective and a tool to advance other
foreign policy priorities. e FFP seeks to apply “a systematic gender equality
perspective throughout foreign policy… gender equality is an objective in
itself, but it is also essential for achieving the Government’s other overall
objectives, such as peace, security, and sustainable development.”18
e Swedish approach is hence the most comprehensive, extending to
all domains of foreign policy and seeking to advance gender equality for
its own sake, as well as in service to other foreign policy priorities. It is also
the oldest of the policies and, although still relatively new, has at least one
publication outlining examples of the policy’s accomplishments in the rst
three years since it was introduced. e document predated elections and
as such reads as more propagandistic than independent evaluation, but it
is at least an eort to publicly document impact. e precise dollar amount
invested in implementing the agenda is unclear, apart from 200 million Krona
(approximately $22 million USD)19 that were committed towards the “She
Decides” initiative. While signicant, it is unclear what amount of funding
beyond “She Decides” and the new gender strategy went to implementing
the feminist foreign policy between 2014 and 2018.20 “She Decides” is a
82 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
Spring/Summer 2019
direct response to the U.S. reinstatement of the so-called Mexico City Policy,
which prohibits U.S. foreign assistance from supporting organizations that
provide access to safe abortion or even information about abortion, even in
countries where the practice is legal and even if they provide those services
or information using sources other than U.S. funding, and which some
have accused of forcing grassroots organizations to choose between US and
Nordic funding to survive.21
Financial aspects notwithstanding, there is no overarching mechanism
to monitor the implementation of the policy’s goals, objectives and activities.
While there are specic metrics to track progress against many of the goals
in the Feminist Foreign Policy under other strategies, such as Sweden’s
“National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security or the Strategy for
2016-2020” or Sweden’s “Development Cooperation for Global Gender
Equality and Women’s and Girls’ Rights for 2018-2022”, for example, the
policy itself lacks a monitoring and evaluation mechanism and the four year
report on progress appears to have been based on voluntary, rather than
mandated, reporting. As with the two examples just mentioned, comparison
across strategies is made somewhat more dicult due to the periods of
reporting. e women, peace and security strategy, for example, will have
much richer data aer three years of implementation in 2019, whereas the
gender equality strategy will have only been in eect for one year, making
comparison under dierent goals unreliable as a metric for the country’s
commitment to that objective.
Canada
For several years following the Swedish debut, there was not much of an
answer to Wallström’s radical rst step. Indeed, rather than a rush of copycat
policies by other progressive governments, quite the opposite was true: in
interviews Wallström has recounted that her approach was initially met with
giggles.22 is is perhaps not surprising given that this was the world’s rst
feminist foreign policy and a radical disruption of the status quo.
At last, Canada responded with the June 2017 launch of a Feminist
International Assistance Policy (FIAP).23 Like the Swedish policy before
it, the policy couched itself in a commitment to rights, and espoused its
launch with a budget proposal that put new resources on the table for
Ocial Development Assistance (ODA), passing the “resources” test by
bringing overall aid levels up from a 50-year low – albeit not signicantly
– and embracing a benchmark of 95 percent of its foreign assistance budget
for gender equality as a primary or secondary goal. Canadian Prime
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Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
Minister Justin Trudeau, a self-proclaimed feminist, has also modeled the
representation piece, with a female foreign minister, a female development
minister, and the most diverse cabinet in Canadian history.24 Unlike Sweden,
Canada fell short of embracing the full scope of foreign policy within its
feminist approach, limiting its focus exclusively to its foreign assistance. is
is an issue we will take up again later in the piece.
e Canadian model is much more limited, tackling solely international
assistance and couching its prioritization of gender equality primarily in the
service of broader economic and security goals. According to the Government
of Canada, “Canada is adopting a Feminist International Assistance Policy
that seeks to eradicate poverty and build a more peaceful, more inclusive
and more prosperous world. Canada rmly believes that promoting gender
equality and empowering women and girls is the most eective approach
to achieving this goal.”25 Canada does prioritize resourcing, perhaps even
more so than Sweden. e accompanying budget Canada unveiled with the
FIAP ensures that 15 percent of all bilateral and development assistance
specically target gender equality, and an additional 80 percent of ODA will
include gender equality as a secondary goal by 2022. is is a signicant hike
from just 2.4 percent from 2015 to 2016 and 6.5 percent from 2016 to 2017
on the gender principle marker, and 68 percent and 75 percent on gender
secondary marker for the same years.26
e Feminist International Assistance Policy is organized thematically
and includes six priority areas: (1) gender equality and women’s and girls’
empowerment; (2) human dignity, which is an umbrella term that includes
access to health care, education, nutrition, and the timely delivery of
humanitarian assistance; (3) women’s economic empowerment, including
access and control over resources and services; (4) climate action; (5)
women’s political participation; and (6) women, peace, and security. Canada
is the only country of the three to have a focus on the environment, and
this focus is not only as a stand-alone goal but included throughout in
discussions and examples of Canada’s work in other areas – for example
food and nutrition or child marriage – which are a result of the destabilizing
impacts and natural disasters due to climate change.
While Canada’s policy is more limited in scope than Sweden’s, dealing
only with foreign assistance, it is more ambitious in the scale of resourcing
it has committed to the topic, with its pledge to commit 95 percent of ODA
to gender equality. Canada does not have an accountability framework
or a mandate to evaluate progress annually, although their Minister of
International Development promises in the strategy that she will “continue
to engage with Canadians and our stakeholders, because the launch of this
84 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
Spring/Summer 2019
policy is not the end of the process but rather a rst step in a longer journey
to achieving the best international assistance results.”27 It also includes a
more detailed series of thematic priorities under its feminist approach. We
will explore commonalities and critiques in the following section.
France
France recently updated a gender in foreign assistance policy that it
launched at the Commission on the Status of Women in 2018, declaring
that “France is back and so is feminism” and pledging half of its foreign
assistance be devoted to achieving gender equality by 2022.28 A year later,
on International Women’s Day of March 2019, France went a step further
and declared that gender policy to be France’s Feminist Foreign Policy.29 A
little over a month later, the government announced that it would champion
feminist foreign policy as a core focus of its G7 presidency in 2019 as well,
signaling evangelical intent with regard to the model.
For France, feminist foreign policy – and feminist diplomacy before it –
is meant to cover all externally-facing action, including diplomacy with all
countries France engages with, not just emerging economies or aid recipients.
e stated aim is to include gender “in all French diplomatic priorities
and all political, economic, so diplomacy, cultural, educational and
development cooperation actions,” an approach that French had previously
referred to as “feminist diplomacy.”30 ere is, however, a heavy focus on
aid in the practical application of France’s FFP, and much of the thematic
priorities that we can identify are elucidated in their International Strategy
on Gender Equality (rst promulgated in 2007, the version that was updated
and launched last year covers 2018-2022). According to the strategy, “gender
equality is a top priority of the president’s mandate. It will be a principal
and cross-cutting theme; it will underpin all of France’s external action and
specic measures will be undertaken to promote it.”31 Unlike the Swedish and
Canadian strategies, France’s strategy is accompanied by an accountability
framework against which progress is to be tracked. Not only does it have
stated objectives and metrics, but France goes one step further and mandates
annual evaluation of progress against the strategy. For example, the strategy
sets out to increase bilateral and programmable ODA that contributes to
gender equality from a baseline of 30 percent in 2018 to a total of 50 percent
in 2022, with benchmark targets for each year.32 While it could be argued
that some of the French goals and metrics for measurement could be more
ambitious, it is notable that they are alone in their transparency.
It is in the International Strategy on Gender Equality that the French
articulate a number of their thematic priorities with regard to gender;
Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
83 THOMPSON & CLEMENT
Spring/Summer 2019
it contains ve thematic pillars and three priority actions. ematically,
the pillars are similar to Canada’s, with a special emphasis on sexual and
reproductive health. ey include: (1) healthcare for women and girls,
including comprehensive family planning, access to sexual and reproductive
health, and reduced maternal mortality rates; (2) access to education,
including access to and improvement of comprehensive sexuality education;
(3) raising the legal age of marriage to age 18; (4) vocational training and
employment opportunities; and (5) improvements to infrastructure that
enable access to remote rural areas. e stated aim is to mainstream gender
in all external actions and to place women’s empowerment and gender
equality at the heart of their international agenda.33
e three priority actions are of particular interest. According to the
strategy, France will prioritize approaches that are (1) comprehensive, (2)
rights-based, and (3) gender-based. e comprehensive approach extends
the scope of its focus on gender to apply beyond development, explicitly
stating that gender should be included in diplomatic priorities, including
a commitment to gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Aairs and
International Development – a feminist diplomacy if you will. e rights-
based approach ensures that human rights principles, norms, and rules are
integrated into humanitarian and development policies and processes on
policies regarding violence against women. And the gender-based approach,
or gender mainstreaming, attempts to ensure that “a gender equality
perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the
actors normally involved in policy making”34
Common Threads
Although none of the policies are exactly alike, there are a number of
commonalities among the three approaches. First, all contain a core focus
on structuring development assistance to advance more gender-equitable
societies, seeking to do this both as a goal in and of itself, and also as a means
to advance other development priorities.
Second, all share a commitment to the Women, Peace and Security
agenda. All three countries have National Action Plans outlining their
eorts to implement UNSCR 1325, and all four policies cite Resolution 1325
as foundational to their approach to feminist foreign policy or assistance.
All three of the strategies include an emphasis on healthcare and various
levels of reproductive health and/or sexual, reproductive health and rights.
Given that this is a body of human rights that is perhaps most under attack,
this is of particular importance. Sweden notes that they will ensure that
LGBTQ individuals are equally able to enjoy their sexual reproductive
86 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
health and rights. Sweden was one of the rst donors to “She Decides,”
demonstrating its commitment to meeting the global need for commodities
and services related to sexual reproductive health and rights Launched in
February 2017 as a response to the reinstatement of the so-called Mexico
City Policy by the President of the United States, “She Decides” is a multi-
stakeholder partnership, which Canada and France also joined. e Swedish
commitment articulates support for access to safe abortion, comprehensive
sexuality education, contraceptives, and STI screenings; Canada promised
to double its commitment to sexual and reproductive health and rights in
three years’ time. France’s strategy includes an emphasis on encouraging
universal access to quality healthcare and for sexual and reproductive health
and rights but makes no nancial commitments in the strategy itself to this
end. Instead, they will monitor progress against increased partnerships with
civil society and the private sector and “encourage sectoral dialogue on
gender.”35
All three countries also include a focus on women’s economic
empowerment. Sweden France, and Canada all have areas of focus on
preventing and responding to gender-based violence Canada alone focuses
on the environment and climate action. Each of these areas of emphasis
are articulated with clear justications and ample evidence as to why these
thematic priorities are essential to a feminist approach.
C E P
As we have begun to consider the substance of feminist foreign policy
in our research and expert consultations, at least three key elements have
emerged that form a basis upon which we can evaluate the strength of
feminist foreign policies: (1) resourcing, (2) comprehensiveness, and (3)
coherence.
e rst is straightforward and based one of the only quantitative
indicators we have: level of investment. As has been said by Sweden from the
very beginning, resourcing is core to this agenda. Conversely, when such an
ambitious agenda is accompanied by insucient funds, it rings hollow. Here
both Sweden and Canada score well; both are among the nine Development
Assistance Committee (DAC) countries whose spending on gender equality
has reached or exceeded 50 percent of ODA (joined by Ireland, Iceland, the
Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Belgium, and Italy, perhaps prime candidates
to consider the penning of feminist foreign assistance policies moving
forward). Whether or not Sweden has embraced a precise benchmark, it
is in the top spot, with nearly 90 percent of its ODA dedicated to gender
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85 THOMPSON & CLEMENT
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equality as of the latest available data (2016-17). Canada is fourth in this
ranking, beaten out by Ireland and Iceland.36
Far behind the pack, France hovers around 30 percent (below the DAC
average of about 40 percent), although with the adoption of its gender and
international assistance policy, France has committed to reach the 50 percent
threshold by 2022.37
OECD analysis of spending on gender equality is an imperfect metric
for the resourcing element of feminist foreign policy, but the most readily
available. Most analysis focuses on the overall spending for gender equality
as either a principal or signicant objective; we propose that moving
forward, it should focus more on countries’ spending on gender equality
as a principle objective, which, at only four percent on average, is the area
where progress is most lacking.
Second, comprehensiveness. Even when policies focus on gender
equality, much of the literature critiquing existing feminist foreign policies
points to a lack of attention to intersectional forms of discrimination and
marginalization such as race, ethnicity, disability, class, or refugee status,
among others. Taken with historical issues such as the legacy of military
intervention and colonization, the intersectional lens becomes more
important. Sweden and France were both colonizers, each with brutal
legacies across the globe, which continue to play a role in how and where
they leverage diplomacy and foreign assistance abroad. France, for example,
continues to focus most of their foreign assistance in Africa in the areas
which were former colonies, and has a large military presence and many
business interests in the region. France ranks second in European Union
country exports to Africa (totaling 5.6 billion euros, or approximately 6.3
billion US dollars in the most recent year available).38 e French military
presence in Africa has mixed reviews; including the 2017 accusation
by the Rwandan government that French military was complicit in the
1994 Rwandan genocide.39 Still, in recent years, it has been reported that
Francophone Africa remits more money to France than France contributes
to the region through foreign assistance.40 President Macron has directly
acknowledged France’s colonial past: when campaigning for President of
France in February of 2017, he visited Algeria and stated that colonialism
was a part of French history, a crime against humanity and truly barbaric.
He said: “We must face up to this part of our history and apologize to those
who were at the receiving end,” but this was not well-received back in
France and the then-nominee changed his proposal to align more closely
with traditional policies with the continent.41 Since taking oce, however,
he appointed a panel of experts to investigate France’s role in the Rwandan
88 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
genocide,42 and pledged $ 2.8 billion US dollars in business investments on
the continent by 2022, benetting an estimated 10,000 enterprises.43
Sweden has similarly faced criticism. e decision of 11 female Swedish
foreign ministers to wear headscarves in Iran in 2017 was fraught back
home. Of the 15 ministers present on the trip, 11 were women, and faced a
tough choice: Iranian women are required to wear loose-tting clothing and
cover their hair in public, and international visitors to Iran are required by
law to dress modestly while in the country.44 e decision to interpret this
law in the form of a headscarf was critiqued both by those in Sweden and by
human rights activists in Iran. Sweden has also faced backlash for their arms
sales to countries with records of human rights abuses, including Yemen
and Saudi Arabia, and the disconnect between promoting human rights and
providing human rights abusers with weapons of war.45
Canada, on the other hand, is haunted less by colonialism and more
by a domestic legacy of abuse – and recently, ocially declared genocide–
waged against some indigenous populations.46 In June of 2019, Canada’s
Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau acknowledged the ndings of e Canadian
National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,
and that the murders and disappearances of Indigenous women and girls
across Canada in recent decades amount to an act of “genocide.”47 e
report highlighted that “Colonialist structures and violence, racism, sexism,
homophobia and transphobia” that led to this genocide.48 He stopped
short, however, of acknowledging the full history of Canada’s treatment of
Indigenous peoples as a cultural genocide. is history includes forcibly
removing children from their families to place them in remote schools from
which they could not escape and where they were oen denied medical
treatment – in an attempt to destroy their cultures and over the course of
decades.49 Canada has also come under re for its support for Canadian
extractives industries that have decimated local ecosystems and indigenous
populations, including reports of targeting women’s rights defenders.
According to watchdog groups, Canada supported over $24 billion Canadian
dollars in the extractive business sector in 2017 via Export Development
Canada, their export credit agency, which seeks to reduce risks for Canadian
businesses looking to grow globally.50
To put it more directly: some question whether feminist foreign policies
are just the latest postcolonial export of northern countries – well intentioned
perhaps, but ultimately equally uninformed by the voices and perspectives
of those on the receiving end. is is particularly true for development
assistance. Annika Bergman Rosamond, a docent at Lund University in
Sweden, observes that “postcolonial feminists are also cautious in their
Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
87 THOMPSON & CLEMENT
Spring/Summer 2019
interpretation of feminist universalisms because they argue that such accounts
of moral duty undermine the distinct experiences and stories told by non-
western women.”51 “Nothing about us, without us,” as the adage holds. Even
in progressive human rights discussions, women and particularly women
of multiply-marginalized identities are oen not included in the discourse
that developed and shaped policies about them. While well-intentioned,
such approaches can perpetuate, rather than dismantle, inequalities and
systems of oppression. Sweden in particular has been critiqued for being
anti-immigrant and Islamophobic, at least according to some critics.
Finally, coherence. One of the loudest critiques of both Sweden’s and
Canada’s eorts to promulgate feminist foreign policies has been their
simultaneous arms trade with non-democratic countries notorious for
women’s human rights abuses. In 2018, Sweden’s military exports rose by
2 percent, with many of these exports going to non-democratic counties
accused of extensive human rights abuses,52 including the United Arab
Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Brazil. Following its publication
of its Feminist International Assistance Policy, Canada was the recipient of
similar accusations of hypocrisy due to its arms deals with Saudi Arabia.53
C: T I F F P
Although its roots are deep, with historical precedents dating as far back
as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, feminist foreign policy is
still an emerging discipline. As a result, it is dicult to fully measure its
impact. A considerable step forward will be dening feminist foreign policy
consistently, and, if we can add another “r” to Sweden’s rights, resources,
and representation frame – research – investing in and publishing progress
evaluations to document that impact will be critical.
is will also help feminist foreign policies to weather the inevitable
ebbs and ows of political cycles. In September 2018, Sweden held general
elections and the party of Margot Wallström, the Social Democratic Party,
lost. e Sweden Democrats, a party described as anti-immigration and in
whom critics see echoes of Nazism, made signicant gains, spelling trouble
for the continued implementation of Sweden’s feminist approach.54 e new
coalition government is still forming, but the vote eectively reduced the
power of the more centrist and le-leaning parties and boosted far-right and
populist ideology.55
Similarly, Canada will hold elections later this year (2019), and
Canadian ocials are already moderating the use of feminist language in
public appearances. e linguistic and branding issues associated with this
90 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
work are another topic for another paper but suce it to say, the question of
interrogating and documenting impact of these policies is urgently needed,
for this and a host of other reasons. Australia was one candidate for feminist
foreign policy – at least one political party was assembling a vision for what
an Australian FFP might look like – but recent elections favoring more
conservative government leave the fate of an Australian FFP unlikely in the
near term.
However, 2020 may well be a banner year for the renement,
improvement and expansion of feminist foreign policy. Next year will play
host to a number of important women’s rights anniversaries – the Fourth
World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, the twentieth anniversary
of UNSCR 1325, most importantly – and champion governments are likely to
embrace this growing trend, particularly with the global celebrations of the
former being held in France. A growing number of feminist academics and
activists are pushing for progressive visions of feminist foreign policy, and
their recommendations include going beyond gender parity in government
or in peace negotiations, but including intersections with climate, conict,
and greater levels of funding and accountability.56
is means foreign policy that is not only by women or for women, but
goes further, taking a nonbinary, gendered lens that recognizes and seeks
to correct for historical, patriarchal, and oen racist, and/or neocolonialist
imbalances of power as they play out on the world stage. Further, our vision
of feminist foreign policy is not limited to a single lever of international
relations – “feminist diplomacy” or “feminist international assistance” or the
like, nor, certainly, is any single assistance program or initiative a feminist
foreign policy. Rather, for us feminist foreign policy is a complete, consistent
and coherent approach to a body of work encompassing all auspices of
foreign policy and international relations. If done right, the approach will
include aid, trade and defense, in addition to diplomacy, using all the tools
in the foreign policy tool box to advance a more equitable world. And most
importantly, it will be informed by and amplifying the voices of the rights-
holders it seeks to celebrate and support. is is good news for people of all
genders: feminism is an agenda everyone can promote, an agenda that seeks
equity for all, not the dominance of one over another.
Lyric Thompson is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the International Cen-
ter for Research on Women.
Rachel Clement is a Policy Advocate for U.S. foreign policy at the International
Center for Research on Women.
Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
89 THOMPSON & CLEMENT
Spring/Summer 2019
.
92 IS THE FUTURE OF FOREIGN POLICY FEMINIST?
Notes
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Seton Hall Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations
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94 DIPLOMACY: THE FUTURE IS FEMALE
