Feminist foreign policy is undertheorized---only analyzing specific contexts via a pluralistic lens effectuates change.

In 2014, Sweden became the first country to establish a “feminist” foreign policy framework.163 It was followed by Canada in 2017,164 and Mexico, the most recent adoptee, in 2020.165 As a new frontier in the gender-and-national security (or “gendering national security”) journey, these feminist foreign policies demand examination.

In articulating the contributions women make to peacebuilding — or how a women-focused policy agenda will lead to less aggressive, militarized, or oppressive and exclusionary outcomes — both the Canadian and Scandinavian frameworks are undergirded by the enduring narrative of women as inherently peaceful, conciliatory, and exclusively community-oriented. This implies that women’s interests are uniform, and consistent with the “common good.” The feminist agendas are largely concerned with traditional interventions in women’s lived experiences: sexual and gender-based violence, reproductive and maternal health, education, and so forth. Seeking to address challenges in these areas is an admirable, necessary goal. However, there is not just a conceptual glass ceiling governing our understanding of a woman’s place in policy and the place of women’s issues on the national security agenda. Rather, the endeavor itself resembles a glass doll house — a prettier rendering of the pink ghettos that maintains much of the same intellectual architecture of previous, failed approaches to gender-informed policymaking.

The effort to promote feminist foreign policy unintentionally lionizes an archetypical femininity that plays into essentialist gender tropes, erases the diversity of women’s lived experiences within existing foreign policies, and provides little evidence as to how it is substantively better than a traditionally masculine foreign policy approach when it comes to meeting complex 21st-century threats.

These dynamics can also be found within state bodies and processes focused on domestic issues. Pursuing an agenda that promotes shallow, stereotyped conceptions of women’s roles in peace and security processes has the potential to reinforce problematic systems of power, however well-meaning the original intent. Thin conceptions of gender inclusion obscure how empowered (or elite) women can take advantage of identity-neutral institutions and policies for their own benefit, rather than moving to substantively change the livelihoods of marginalized women or the governance challenges that necessitated the policy in the first place.

In Iraq, implementing the internationally endorsed quota system provided an opportunity for political elites to further capture the state apparatus while generating political capital and positive perception from external actors.166 In considering post-conflict Rwanda, Jennie E. Burnet notes that “the increased political participation of women … represents a paradox in the short-term: as their participation has increased, women’s ability to influence policymaking has decreased.”167 Despite high levels of women’s participation,168 Rwanda has all the markings of a predatory, authoritarian regime.169 Given these examples, the assumption that women’s inclusion changes the outcomes or nature of a policy process or governance system is sorely tested.

The post-conflict dynamics in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, illuminate the peril of pursuing parity in the place of substance, while simultaneously illustrating the ease with which this thin approach to gendered and inclusive policy satisfies the metrics and indicators of progress.170 In 2010, Bougainville was in the lead-up to its third election following a devastating internal conflict. Election monitors were dispatched to conduct qualitative assessments of the impact of the newly instituted quota system on women’s political participation.171 Though the peace convention of 2001 created space for women in government,172 and there had been progress in increasing the number of women involved in governance, civil society and non-government organization practitioners feared that the next cycle would see an overall decrease in women’s political participation. Why? UNSCR 1325 makes no requirements of the types of women included in the representative sample, or how to practically change the processes of decision-making to prevent backsliding or proactively enforce changes in the post-conflict social order. Upon entering political service, the women of Bougainville encountered a systematic stripping of substantive power and the siloing of their political activities and speech into areas consistent with “women’s” interests.173 In this and many other cases, progress via rhetorical or parity-based inclusion often masquerades as a step forward, when it has the practical result of serving as a well-intentioned obstacle to substantive women’s inclusion.

Ironically, terrorist groups and other nonstate actors have occasionally been more adept than U.S. policymakers at leveraging women’s contributions to advance their objectives.174 One need only acknowledge the ease with which groups like ISIL and far-right extremists leverage relative deprivation to convince women that they could either transgress social norms or be the upholders of an ideal archetypal womanhood through their participation. In the Islamic State, women served as morality police and enforcers of the group’s interpretation of appropriate gender roles.175 Western countries — from France to the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom — have seen women identify with far-right ethnonationalist movements defending normative conceptions of women’s natural freedom and economic autonomy (the tenets of liberal feminism) but reclassed into a racial, religious archetype.176

In order to combat these threats, policy personnel need to be literate in the complex, intersecting identities that shape individual responses. They should be aware of the implications of intersectional identities for policy formulation and implementation. Most importantly, they need to be conscious of the social contexts they seek to change. Otherwise, they risk compromising the comparative advantages women can bring to the security conversation by sidelining their core concerns and potentially driving them into the arms of adversaries.