Description
Over the last two decades the European Union (EU) has sought to externalise its internal identity as a gender actor across a range of foreign policy practices. This move towards externalisation has been influenced in part by endogenous factors such as member states increasing commitments for feminist foreign policies. But this is also informed by exogenous pressures that push for the inclusion of global feminist principles such as those articulated within the WPS agenda. For the EU, attention to these pressures has increased the commitments to gender equality programmes and the inclusion of analytical concepts like intersectionality in development discourses. Prominent feminists within the EU external relations architecture, like MEP Hannah Neumann, contend that the inclusion of feminism makes for a materially different type of the international relations.
But does this attention to ‘gender’ make for feminist external relations? In other words, to what extent do recent development inform transformation of EU external relations? Further, what type of feminism informs EU external relations? Using the nexus of development and security in EU external relations as a starting point, the proposed paper considers how EU external relations practitioners understand the inclusion of gender perspectives in their work. The proposed paper will include on the close reading of key external relations framework documents in the last decade, an evaluation of key policy frameworks and narrative interviews with practitioners. Analytically, it draws on Feminist Institutionalism and practice approaches within International Relations. The aim is to develop a typology of feminisms that informs EU external relations work with a view to understanding, first, the broader implications of this practitioner knowledge; and second, the extent to which transformative change within the EU’s external relations regime is possible.
