Seminar on Feminist Foreign Policy at the Faculty of Political Sciences

The speakers were Annika Bergman Rosamond, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science Lund University and Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at the University of Edinburgh, Department of Political Science and International Relations, Zorana Antonijević, Research Fellow at the Centre for International Security and Marie Jelenka Kirchner, PhD candidate at the Centre for Southeastern European Studies at the University of Graz, Associate Researcher at the Centre for Democracy “Societas Civilis” and chair of the working group on feminist foreign policy of the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom.

The first lecture was titled “Feminist Foreign Policy: Swedish Experience” and held by dr Annika Bergman Rosamond. She started the lecture by stressing the fact that foreign policy analysis has been gender-blind until recent times and that understanding the identities and roles of countries in the international systems has not been paired with understanding gender. There exist cases of states like Norway, which are in practice committed to gender issues in their foreign policy, but avoid giving it the title of feminist. She stated that the Women, peace, and security agenda of the UN is one of the core pillars of feminist foreign policies in the modern world.

Professor Bergman Rosamond continued by explaining the introduction and abandonment of feminist foreign policy in the case of Sweden. The Swedish coalition government of 2014 made Sweden the first country ever to adopt a feminist foreign policy, which was by changes in many policy areas. From then on state feminism has come to characterise Nordic countries in general. Sweden had self-identified as a moral superpower in that sense and effectively labelled other nations as less capable. The key practical points of Sweden‘s feminist foreign policy were the representation and participation of women in peacebuilding and peacemaking and the protection of women against sexual and gender-based violence. The country was most active in supporting the inclusion of women in peace processes in the global South.

In hindsight, the feminist foreign policy succeded in changing narratives but was not successful in increasing the amount of money allocated to the promotion of gender equality. The policy was abandoned in 2022, due to the formation of a new right-wing government in September and the focus of the foreign policy shifting toward Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine. The lasting influence of the Swedish FFP is that five NATO countries followed Sweden and adopted a feminist foreign policy.

The second lecture was titled “Feminist foreign policy ‘from below‘: framing, influence and challenges” and held by Zorana Antonijević. She approached feminist foreign policy from a perspective from below and through analysing the framing, influence, and challenges of feminist foreign policy. Antonijević started the lecture by recognizing that the state is the main actor of feminist foreign policy, which leads to the need for the whole society to engage in dealing with the problem of gender inequality. She raised the questions of who frames, who is excluded from framing, and what the problems of framing are, which position themselves as dominant issues in thinking about feminist foreign policy.

Empirical evidence has shown that feminist foreign policy has been effective in the sense of managing to increase funding for gender equality. However, only 5% of all the financial support goes directly to women‘s groups in the global South, the target group of feminist foreign policy. While talking about abortion rulings by the supreme courts of Mexico and the USA, Antonijević stressed the apparent contrast between the global North, which seems to be moving backward, and the global South, which seems to be moving forward. This kind of framing, however, can be misleading, since Mexico has the largest level of femicide in the world, with ten women losing their lives every day. Another point that was raised is that Germany adopted a feminist foreign policy in 2021 to address a worldwide crisis. Germany is the first country that has explicitly defined gender in its feminist foreign policy as all-inclusive, non-binary, and non-heteronormative.

Marie Jelenka Kirchner started the lecture titled “Feminist foreign policy: A way out of global policy-crisis” by highlighting the importance of the local context for understanding feminist foreign policy. She continued by explaining the construction of power structures in social systems by the patriarchy through the hierarchisation of values through the categories of hegemonic masculinity, subordinated masculinity, and femininity. Other systems, such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and the military-industrial complex, were also analysed. The impact of the modern environment of post-truth, which is filled with disinformation was also taken into consideration.

The duality of stability and crisis was analysed from a feminist perspective. Traditionally, stability is valued more than crisis. However, the definition of a crisis differs from person to person. Some groups, such as women or various minorities, would identify a crisis whereas others would not, due to their specific position in society.

While talking about the connection between gender and a crisis, Kirchner stated that, although crisis or war usually leads to the return to the original gender narratives, the war in Ukraine has had different effects on gender and the understanding of femininity. On one side, women are called to join the army to ‘nurture‘ the homeland, and on the other side, they are completely defeminized to ‘enable‘ them to serve in the armed forces. Kirchner pointed out that feminist foreign policy needs to strive to achieve justice and promote solidarity to resolve conflicts and achieve peace.