Description
Germany is one of the newest additions to the group of states pursuing a feminist foreign policy (FFP). Having adopted the term in December 2021, the German government is now working on developing the policy. This process has not only raised many questions about what an FFP would mean but also brought an oft-neglected group of knowledge producers to the fore: Foreign Office (FO) staff, now tasked with developing, implementing, and doing feminist foreign policy. As they engage in this knowledge production, FO staff not only navigate different institutional and international social relations that structure ways of knowing and producing (feminist) foreign policy. They also actively (re)produce these relations by contributing their own knowledge of what feminism is and how it should be practiced (or, indeed, if it should be practiced at all). This paper uses institutional ethnography to explore how feminism materialises (or doesn’t) in the FO’s everyday. Making visible the power relations that enable FO staff to speak, practice, and know feminism, it studies how feminist foreign policy comes to happen as it does and to what extent it reproduces and/or maintains dominant ways of knowing and making foreign policy.
