Feminist Foreign Policy

Description

Feminist IR plays an important role in revealing the complicated connections between gender and politics. As demonstrated through feminist foreign policies (“FFP”), feminist IR works to illuminate theoretical innovation and at the same time hold conceptional translations accountable. In contemporary politics the contentious worlds of foreign affairs and feminism have become “connected” through the establishment and proliferation of FFP. As a continuation of the “gender mainstreaming” process and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda, FFP have come to represent a new standard of “progress” and “modernity” in liberal democratic states. The adoption of gender informed foreign policy frameworks has become a new source of recognition and legitimisation within the international community, thereby establishing a new domain in which states can demonstrate their superiority and position within the global political hierarchy. This occurs at the cost of the “Other”: the individuals and communities positioned as the “beneficiaries” of these political practices. Consequently, what occurs through the adoption and deployment of FFP is the commodification and exploitation of marginalised communities through the use of "smart economics" and "state feminism". The aim of this project is to consider how feminist foreign policies have produced a new form of “feminist” state politics, and how these nationalised feminist politics are produced through "othering" and exclusion. Adopting a critical transnational feminist IR approach, this presentation will consider how gender equality and feminism are being used as proxies for strategic political intervention, and the reproduction of biologicalessentialism in gendered development practices. It is only by adopting a feminist IR approach that the seemingly "ethical" and "progressive" connections between states and marginalised communities can be questioned and re-evaluated as a manifestation of neo-colonial practices.