Twenty years ago, weeks after being stricken by the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan. It looked very much like a war of vengeance—US troops would sometimes write messages such as “love from NYPD” on the deadly shells before they dropped them. But at least parts of the Bush administration, amplified by New Labour politicians and sections of the British commentariat, embraced another justification: the liberation of Afghan women. The war on terror, as first lady Laura Bush put it, was also “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”
The case was clear. In the summary of the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, then a leading liberal voice for the war, the Taliban ran a country “with girls’ schools shut, women forbidden to work, sent home and locked indoors,” manifesting a “pathological loathing of women.” As many in the west saw it, she wrote, “the burka was the battle flag” of the invasion. Toynbee visited the capital, Kabul, a year after the defeat of the Taliban and—while already worrying about the west failing in its commitment—took heart from the women she saw as newly empowered to leave their homes, “their joy at escape” and the “sheer enthusiasm” of girls returning to school. There is absolutely no doubt that some Afghan women, especially in urban areas like Kabul, benefited enormously from the overthrow of the Taliban.
But for others, in rural areas, life never changed much—except for the trauma of another, seemingly interminable conflict, which left many Afghans insecure and untold women widowed. (Today the country is believed to have one of the highest rates of widowhood in the world.) By the time an end to the international fighting eventually came into view, women’s rights were abandoned and not included in the deal that the US signed with the Taliban last year. Female representatives were barely present in the subsequent negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government. This summer, women reported widespread sexual violence as the militant group swept across the country once more, reversing any gains that had been made. In August, as province after province fell into Taliban hands, the ultimate symbols of feminist advance in the country—its female judges, civil society leaders and politicians—were scrambling for their lives, fleeing an advancing force that they reasonably feared would kill them.
Toynbee has since candidly written that she should never have swallowed the “saving women” line—it was dangerous, she has now concluded, because neither the will nor the capacity was ever really there. Students of colonialism saw the trouble coming far earlier on. Back in the 1980s, the feminist thinker Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was highlighting the dubious implications of “white men saving brown women from brown men.” On some readings, the west simply failed in its bid to “liberate” Afghan women; on others, it was never serious about the endeavour, using it only as a feminist gloss for its selfish needs and ambitions. Either way, it might seem like the lesson is that the entanglement of feminism and foreign policy is doomed. And yet at precisely this moment, the two things are in fact coming together as never before—and just possibly in ways that could prevent, rather than encourage, reruns of the Afghan disaster.
Parallel worlds?
Even before this tragedy, some would have argued that international relations and gender politics have nothing to do with each other and should be kept apart. But in a world where societies treat men and women differently, women will always have particular interests and perspectives, including on how their own society interacts with the rest of the world. In most societies, women continue to shoulder overwhelming responsibility for children. Even disregarding outdated notions of needing to protect “women and children,” both groups tend to stand in very different relation to war than the men, who are more likely to be doing the fighting. Civilians will always make up the majority in societies caught up in war, but that doesn’t mean their interests will prevail. Traditional foreign policy is all about military and economic strength, as well as states using these resources to coerce others to protect their interests. While there have been some efforts to empower women within military high commands and negotiating chambers, for some feminist thinkers the whole established framework—with its focus on brute force, dominance and competition—valorises traditional concepts of masculinity. Opinions may differ on that, but the framework is nevertheless one in which the voices of soldiers and industrialists inevitably carry the most weight. This arguably warps the way that states think about their interests: they might wage war in the name of “national security,” for example, while the reality is it tends to make most people less secure.
Some say there is another way. There is growing momentum behind the idea of “feminist foreign policy”—an approach now formally backed by seven countries. For advocates, this has less to do with “saving” women than ensuring their voice is heard. In its purest form, a feminist foreign policy would not only promote better conditions for women, but also change how foreign policy is done to prioritise collaboration over coercion, and human security over narrow national security: pandemics and climate change, which threaten human lives and well-being, would come to be understood as security threats just as much as hostile rival states. The hope is that these changes might ultimately create a more peaceful, equitable and sustainable world for all.
In 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to formally adopt a feminist foreign policy; since then it has gathered a motley crew of followers in the form of Canada, France, Spain, Mexico, Luxembourg and, more recently and interestingly, Libya. There is also growing curiosity from bigger powers—voices in both the United States Congress and the European parliament are advocating the approach.
Within the United Kingdom, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP has pledged to adopt a feminist foreign policy during the course of the current Scottish parliament. But cynics, who see the initiative as virtue signalling, will quickly point out that foreign policy is “reserved” to Westminster. And enthusiasts have to concede that for all the growing talk about the idea around the world there is, as yet, relatively little action. So what are the prospects of bringing it to life?
The pinkwash peril
Over several decades, there have been increasingly frequent efforts to put gender equality on the international agenda. Witness a growing stack of multilateral agreements and resolutions—including the landmark Beijing declaration on gender equality after the UN World Conference on Women in 1995; various resolutions committing to include women in peace processes; and the establishment of UN Women, a multilateral agency dedicated to gender equality, in 2010. Sweden was an enthusiastic advocate of such efforts, before going further in 2014 and declaring itself to be “the first feminist government in the world”—a position that would extend to its foreign policy.
Feminism was—and remains—a controversial word. “When you invoke a feminist lens, you’re really looking at power dynamics,” explains Marissa Conway, co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. It’s about “figuring out how to, in a very practical way, rebalance these power inequalities so that those who have typically been excluded and been subject to bearing the consequences of these policies are now actually the ones informing the development of policy.”
For a while, no other country seemed keen to follow Sweden’s lead. But in 2017, under the leadership of self-proclaimed feminist Justin Trudeau, Canada dipped a toe in the water by adopting a “feminist international assistance policy,” meaning that all its foreign aid programming “should be developed and implemented in ways that improve gender equality and empower women and girls.” Target areas include sexual and reproductive health, tackling forced marriage, securing access to the formal economy and involvement in decision-making.
As Canada began broadening its mission, other states began to follow. This July, Mexico and France co-hosted the first World Conference on Women in 25 years (the UN considered holding one in 2015 but the resolution didn’t pass). There, Libya’s first female foreign minister, Najla Mangoush—appointed as part of a UN-backed unity government tasked with overseeing democratic elections in the country by the end of the year—announced that the conflict-stricken state would embrace feminist foreign policy as part of its stabilisation plans.
This is not just gesture politics—getting women involved boosts the chance of successful conflict resolution. Recent research from UN Women and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) found that peace deals where women played a substantial role in the talks were a third more likely to last at least 15 years—Liberia is one case study. As Leymah Gbowee, one of the women who led Liberia’s peace movement, has argued: “It is not that women are naturally more peaceful than men; rather they are committed participants in peace processes that affect the entire spectrum of a society. If a peace process is left in the hands of military men or warlords whose expertise is war, we shouldn’t be surprised if the result denies the needs of average citizens.” Historically, however, such involvement has been a rarity. Between 1992 and 2019, about 70 per cent of the world’s peace processes did not include any women mediators or signatories, according to the CFR.
But a great deal is still hazy. Canada has not yet released the white paper exploring how the feminist lens it has applied to international assistance can be widened. Of the seven declared feminist foreign policy states, only three—Sweden, Mexico and Spain—have published their policies. Closer to home, the SNP’s manifesto boast that—despite Scotland’s extremely limited autonomy in international affairs—it will soon be “joining a small number of countries across the world, to adopt a feminist foreign policy,” has thus far found expression in just two initiatives. One is a fund of £500,000 (the price of one flat in Edinburgh’s New Town) aimed at empowering women and girls in Malawi, Zambia and Rwanda; and training women to participate in peace-building and conflict resolution.
“Feminist foreign policy is less about ‘saving’ women who might not have been asked than ensuring their voice is always heard”
The great fear is that, without more direction, feminist foreign policy could descend into a hollow branding exercise—in the words of Lyric Thompson of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), that there will be “an inclination by countries to show up on International Women’s Day, say that they have ‘feminist foreign policies,’ and change nothing.” Worse, established foreign policy agendas could be “pinkwashed”—with more military adventures, for example, justified as being about liberating women who haven’t been consulted. Although many Mexican feminists were pleased to see their country release a comprehensive plan for joining the movement, they are also painfully aware of the disconnect between a proclaimed pro-women foreign policy and their country’s approach to questions of women’s rights at home—including a perceived disregard for gender-based violence and a lack of action on abortion rights.
“There’s just this history of not putting our money and other tools where our mouths are on gender equality,” says Thompson. “So then, when you kind of up the level of ambition and expectation for this agenda by using the word ‘feminist,’ which itself is a political act… the worry is if this is just more of the same behaviour, where we say these issues are important but we actually don’t change our behaviour, then that is incredibly damaging.”
Daily grind
But there is also an opportunity to leverage the momentum behind feminist foreign policy to create real change. A growing ecosystem of researchers and advocacy groups—including the newly launched Global Partner Network for Feminist Foreign Policy—is striving to apply decades of academic feminist thinking about international relations to pressing practical challenges—and hold governments’ feet to the fire.
At the state level, Sweden remains the exemplar. According to its policy guide, “we systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout our foreign policy agenda.” This was a natural departure for Sweden seeing as it already implemented an approach in which the different needs of women and men had to be considered at every stage of policy; there is a parallel with some of the “impact assessments” required under Britain’s domestic equality law. While a “right” for something “to be considered” in official thinking offers few solid guarantees, it can be a valuable check against the worst forms of abuse and neglect. According to Ann Bernes, Sweden’s ambassador for gender equality who co-ordinates the brief, feminist foreign policy then goes a step further by moving gender equality up the agenda from being one more “competing” priority to being “the absolute core and DNA of… everything we do,” and furthermore seeks—where possible—to institutionalise the ideal in multilateral spaces such as the UN.
The substantive policy is structured around what Sweden calls “the three Rs”—rights, representation and resources. This means that in all its work, the foreign service aims to promote women’s “full enjoyment of human rights”; their “participation and influence in decision-making processes”; and to ensure that resources are allocated with an eye on gender equality.
Bernes points with pride to Sweden’s spell in one of the non-permanent UN Security Council seats in 2017-2018, insisting it edged a gender perspective “into the daily work of the council.” They pushed, for example, for women, peace and security references to be included in council resolutions and presidential statements; for more women to be included in peace and political processes; and to improve female representation among Security Council “briefers”—the experts invited to address the council. In the past, men often monopolised the invites, excluding women and local civil society representatives—the people who, Bernes says, could actually tell the council “what the conflict meant in the lives of those actors.” When Sweden took its turn as council president in July 2018, an equal number of men and women were invited to brief the council for the first time in its history, including several civil society representatives. Around the same time, the council took the still-rare step of adopting sexual and gender-based violence as a standalone criterion for targeted sanctions.
“The question is how can military decisions get made in a way that values the principles of people, peace, planet”
Sweden’s state feminism was seen in action again at the start of the pandemic. “There was,” Bernes explains, “a total lack of gender perspective, really nothing on it when these discussions [at the UN] in New York and Geneva started. So Sweden was often alone and first with raising the fact that the response and the rebuilding had to be founded… [on] gender equality.” It highlighted how, for example, lockdowns would impede access to reproductive healthcare, and directed its aid to deal with that. (By contrast, at the beginning of the pandemic the US—then under Trump—wanted to declassify sexual and reproductive health services as “essential” for the purposes of the global humanitarian response.)
Sweden also re-committed to spending 1 per cent of its gross national income on aid, which is often the most readily available lever for feminist foreign policy to pull on. The country hit 1.14 per cent amid the global emergency last year, making it the most generous donor in the world. Like Canada, it spends the vast majority of that on work that somehow targets gender equality. In contrast, Boris Johnson used the “costs of Covid” as an excuse to cut Britain’s previous target of 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent. That included a massive cut to aid funding for Afghanistan, a decision that was likely to hurt programmes benefitting women and girls such as those ensuring access to education—and this was before the unravelling of the US-backed Afghan government.
The world as it is
Yet, even in Sweden, the granular implementation of these policies might seem unimpressive when placed next to the grand rhetorical ambitions. While references to women in Security Council resolutions did indeed increase during Sweden’s 2017-2018 spell at the table, the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security describes many of these references as “superficial.” As for Security Council briefers, despite that fleeting moment of equality, there were twice as many male briefers as female last year.
To a large degree, that reflects the barriers that need to be overcome—the feminist ideal is “being filtered through a very patriarchal space,” says the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy’s Conway. But it’s also important to acknowledge that Sweden’s foreign policy, like most foreign policies, is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions. It faces criticisms, particularly, over its role as an arms exporter, including to countries with a poor record on women’s rights. Stockholm brokered a peace deal between Yemen’s warring parties in 2018, while at the same time Swedish-made weapons were used in the devastating conflict. It recently made the biggest investment in its armed forces in decades, in the face of rising tensions with Russia, which some see as a sign it is falling back on traditional concepts of security—and they say the country’s effort to increase the representation of women in the military misses the point here.
After the fall of Kabul, Sweden was also criticised for reportedly abandoning its local embassy staff—a development that many saw as at odds with its feminist stance, although the foreign minister Ann Linde insisted they were trying to evacuate them—while Canada faced backlash for wavering over whether it would recognise the theocratic Taliban government. Feminism can’t instantly banish all the thorny old dilemmas of international relations.
But some, such as Delphine O, a member of the French National Assembly who helped develop President Macron’s foreign policy and who also served as the country’s ambassador for the recent World Conference on Women, insist that even “hardcore realists”—those who see nation states as solely motivated by self-interest—can promote gender equality. She recently argued that this social goal is not only “right and good” in itself, but also helps “a country advancing its own national and international interests,” in terms of conventional goals like security.
Perhaps so, but more radical feminists prefer to pursue a wholesale interrogation of the idea of power—who has it, who doesn’t, and how things might be equalised. In the face of grim current news, they might point out that the Afghan disaster, including the original American sponsoring of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen that eventually spawned the misogynist Taliban, was the product of a Cold War power play. And in terms of reform, they would prefer, for example, a democratic overhaul of the Security Council, tilting things away from the ultra-realist order which means that the five original nuclear powers are the only ones to enjoy permanent seats. Ultimately, they want nuclear capabilities dismantled, not rewarded.
There are, then, differences among realist and radical advocates here. But all those serious about a feminist foreign policy can generally agree on three basic ingredients. Firstly, representation. Ensuring more women are in foreign policymaking roles doesn’t automatically lead to change, but it is a verifiable step that can only help in terms of moving the thinking along—and equality can’t be achieved without it. Secondly, the integration of a gender perspective into every stage of the process of making policy—perhaps especially in the “hard power” realms of defence and trade, where conventionally women (and many others at the sharp end) are overlooked—and ensuring they are consulted. Finally, relentless monitoring and evaluation—gauging progress on specific measures, and fixed timetables—to track what’s working, and hold governments to their word.
As long as these things are done, even the most ardent activists will be keen to avoid being paralysed by idealism—and the trap of making perfect progress the enemy of all progress. “You’re trying to negotiate this tension between the world as it is currently lived… [and] the principles that you’re trying to advance in your feminist foreign policy,” says ICRW’s Thompson. For example, although feminist foreign policies might champion demilitarisation, “the question isn’t ‘should the military exist?’ because that isn’t a useful question in our current context. The question is how can military decisions get made differently through a process that values the principles and goals of people, peace, planet.” That would likely include adopting a military posture that is primarily defensive, holding full and informed democratic debates about the goals of any intervention, and consulting with the people who are going to be impacted.
Here, perhaps, we have a clue as to what went wrong when the Afghan campaign kicked off 20 years ago. Was that feminist foreign policy? Almost certainly not, if it didn’t start with the demands of Afghan women, and then consult and collaborate with them repeatedly throughout the twists and turns of state-building and alliance shifting and war. The test, says Thompson, would be to “go ask the Afghan feminists… and listen to what they say.”
