Perm: do both. Feminist statecraft should repurpose force in the short term. Securitization isn’t exclusive with gender empowerment. Refuse incommensurability.

For there to be feminists in the apparatus of the state requires that there be a feminist reckoning with realpolitik. While it has been argued that feminism must, by definition, be anti-militarist, it is less clear how “state feminists”( Lovenduski 2005 ) should repurpose force in the short or medium term, not least if security policy can paradoxically create conditions for empowerment in the same moment that it safeguards national interests. FFP does not automatically challenge such corollaries of militarism as the arms trade ( Vucetic 2017 ), and gender may weigh as a reason to send weapons as well as humanitarian aid to radical statelets such as Kurdish Rojava, with its egalitarian constitution and dedicated feminist guerrillas. Even in more conventional geopolitical terms, external pressures may produce major policy shifts. At the time of writing, Ann Linde, Sweden’s foreign minister and a champion of FFP, had just overseen the admission of Sweden to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in response to the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, a significant reversal of her country’s historical nonalignment consensus (compare Linde 2022a and Linde 2022b ). Even this reluctant entry into the alliance reopens a major fault line within feminism over military blocs: civil society activists for an FFP, such as the WILPF, remain officially committed to the abolition of NATO ( Kirby and Shepherd 2023 , chapter 6).

For advocates, FFP remains ethical at its core, despite occasional necessary “deviations”( Aggestam, Bergman-Rosamond, and Kronsell 2019 , 24). Yet, the emerging forms of feminist statecraft can instead be read not as a clash between incommensurable theoretical paradigms or another “operator’s manual posing as [a theory]” (Rosenberg 1990 , 285) but as the seed of a new composite. For the moment, these encounters are sporadic, partial, and contradictory. However, as more governments take up the mantle, the confrontation will become more pitched and the merger more contentious for every aspect of the doctrine: from disputes over what consti- tutes feminism to the designation of the “foreign” outside to the criteria of grand strategy.