Description
While countries of the postcolonial Global South are increasingly adopting Feminist Foreign Policies (FFP), recent scholarship (Haastrup 2020) also shows that the FFP label might not be the only indicator of having ‘feminist’ foreign policies. Situated within these debates, this paper examines whether the adoption of postcolonial feminist principles can be identified within the foreign policy of India—a Global South, postcolonial nation that doesn’t espouse an FFP. Specifically, the paper investigates whether there are postcolonial feminist ideas at work in India’s foreign policy articulations in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Through a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar 2014) of India’s statements within the UNSC during its tenure in 2021-22, the paper argues that India’s UNSC foreign policy has postcolonial and feminist underpinnings that work separately, but not together. While the former plays out in terms of being critical of Western nations or calling for Global South solidarity, the latter is an essentialist and reductionist understanding of feminism, in line with feminist security studies’ critique on the portrayal of women’s victimhood in discourses of conflict. The paper also argues that in the context of India, such framings of women are informed by ontological insecurities, and postcolonial and masculine anxieties. From this criticism, room for a more transformative postcolonial feminist approach to Indian FP can be imagined.
