Detmer Kremer- Policy, Advocacy and Communications Coordinator (GAPS)

The Shaping Feminist Foreign Policy Conference hosted by the Dutch Government in November 2023 was marked by its sleek branding: banners, free water bottles, brochures, an app, TV screens, t-shirts, cut-outs for Instagram backdrops, lanyards and more all featured images of carefully selected diverse figures indicating a wide range of gender identities, ethnic backgrounds and abilities. It was also marked by pro-Palestine attendees demanding the then-Dutch Foreign Minister support a ceasefire, which amid this cascade of colourful branding proclaiming inclusion and solidarity, she was unable to do. She thanked the protesters for their voices and then hurried off stage, without acknowledging what the international courts clearly have identified as a plausible risk of genocide or how the Dutch government are said to be enabling it. It raised the question: what is next for feminist foreign policy (FFP)? 

This was the second conference to convene states and civil society around FFP – a project that seeks to bring feminism into the practice of policy. While there is no standard definition, it generally focuses on foreign and development policies. Sweden became the first state to adopt FFP in 2014. Although it has not been adopted universally, it has spread rapidly among states that wish to portray themselves as gender champions on the global stage – Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Mexico and Chile, for example. Over the last two years, many in the UK also started talking about FFP – noting especially feminist approaches adopted by the Scottish devolved government, and exploration by the Labour Party for a feminist development policy.  

Following these developments, in 2023 GAPS convened civil society and academia to ask what they believe FFP actually entails. This led to the Beyond Feminist Foreign Policy series, which explores what FFP could look like across different themes such as climate change, migration and disarmament. Its overarching findings were that FFP does not appear to be fulfilling its true potential, but that there could be merit in advancing it in conjunction with other agendas, such as Women, Peace and Security (WPS) to promote gender justice. Now, with a new government in the UK and a Foreign Secretary who, pre-election, pledged a feminist approach, we re-visit FFP. Me and my colleague, Eva Tabbasam, Director of GAPS, provided a detailed analysis of FFP in an upcoming essay, Taking the F Word Global,1 and this blog highlights key points from that essay on the positive and negative impacts of FFP.  

 If successfully harnessed, the current momentum and visibility of FFP can be used by civil society, states and other stakeholders to reinvigorate, evolve and link up existing gender architecture such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and WPS, which too often still operate in siloes. Of particular importance is that it can also allow for possible alliances between FFP states to enable coordinated and joined-up responses to the anti-gender movement. Maligned actors weaponising ‘gender ideology’ are well resourced and well connected and face distressingly little resistance. A coalition of self-proclaimed feminist states could support and resource a counter-movement.  

The inclusion within FFP of the need to address unequal power relations re-politicises a gender agenda that has been largely depoliticised, and resituates eradicating gender inequality as fundamental to a just and peaceful world. In an interview for the essay Taking the F Word Global, Somali feminist Hibaaq Osman shared that FFP is “bringing feminist principles into the heart of politics. People are used to women talking about soft things such as peace, but now we are talking about justice.” It enables the inclusion of issues central to inequality that are not traditionally covered by current state-driven definitions of WPS, and can complement WPS and push it further to tackle the root causes of violence.  

While it is important to understand, leverage and build on such developments, FFP has also been problematic and harmful: it has been difficult for states to ensure that the adoption of feminist policies is indeed feminist and applied consistently. In the Netherlands, two years after the adoption of FFP, there is still no policy, guidelines, thematic focus or an understanding of how FFP would be applied across Dutch policy. In Germany, the antimilitarist tenets of feminism have been ignored – German military expenditure almost doubled to 90 billion from 2019 to 2024; Germany remains the fourth-biggest exporter of arms globally; and it has increased and fast-tracked arms exports to Israel. FFP remains confined to foreign, development or diplomatic policy, or as Hibaaq Osman describes it, “a little thing in the corner”.

Many have celebrated the Global North states that have explicitly named colonialism in their FFP, most notably Germany. However, FFP states appear unable to confront colonial realities in practice and they enact punitive measures against those that attempt to do so. The obvious example here is Palestine, where FFP states like Germany and the Netherlands have been completely incapable of naming and confronting the ongoing Israeli settler colonial violence enacted with increasing brutality since 7 October 2023. Instead, Germany has withdrawn funding for women’s rights organisations standing in solidarity with Palestine – exacting colonial punishment by disciplining Global South women for not adhering to its own ideologies. The adoption of FFPs by states creates an authoritative state-sanctioned definition of feminism. Much of the visible state, academic and civil society discourse and advocacy around FFP remains predominately led by women who are white, heterosexual, cisgender, middle to upper class, from the Global North, and able-bodied. Civil society actors have already reported that states with FFPs are sometimes less likely to listen to them or to compromise, as these states now consider themselves as holding definitional authority on feminism. 

A final consideration is that the sleek branding that accompanies FFP risks it becoming a politicised battlefield for the anti-gender movement. For example, organisations in the Netherlands are concerned that following the Netherlands’ shift from right-wing to far-right in the 2023 elections, simmering anti-gender arguments from parties like the Freedom Party could gain traction. Such fears appear to have been realised by the appointment of Reinette Klever as Minister of Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, who subscribes to and sternly defends the harmful Replacement Theory. Without the institutional framework of WPS, FFP could therefore be an easy target for the anti-gender movement and even become conflated with agendas such as WPS, further eroding existing gender architecture.  

 It is tempting to say that to progress gender justice, all movement towards this goal must be accepted and that the argument against FFP appears largely semantic. However, when there are existing gender policy frameworks such as WPS that are already side-lined, isolated, underfunded and under attack, the words used – and who uses them – matters. It recalls Audre Lorde’s truism of not being able to dismantle the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools, cautioning against expecting liberation to come from the states that have created and depend on oppression. It also reminds us of Adrienne Maree Brown’s invitation to let pass away what may need to pass away, for it is only natural for things to pass if they have outlived their purpose, and to return to nourish the soil. FFP may have been that, a valuable experiment in what policy could be, but unable to confront the injustices when needed most. Feminism is a decolonial, anti-racist movement that defies the entire notion of state and border – seeing them as wounds – and it is within this radical imagery that its purpose lies. This calls for a two-pronged approach. Firstly, it is crucial to invest in and transform the tools we already have to make changes within a broken system, in order to respond to urgent needs and lay the groundwork for further change. This is where agendas like WPS are important; they are far from perfect but have decades of manoeuvring a profoundly patriarchal system to instil gender-based protections and to get a seat at the table. This must be paired with a feminist movement that refuses to be co-opted and defined by states and which rejects attempts to instrumentalise it to make the most violent, colonial states appear as ‘gender-just’. Feminism is not about a seat at the table, it is about making the table into firewood to gather around, warm our hands and imagine a world altogether just and fair.