Description
Since the adoption of a feminist foreign policy (FFP) in December 2021, the German Foreign Office (FFO) has worked on developing the policy, publishing a guideline document in March 2023. This process has opened up opportunities for civil society engagement in foreign policy production as FFP has traditionally been understood as inclusive of different actors. While this has tended to strengthen the intersection of civil society and diplomacy, the production of FFP is also steeped in racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies of knowledge production (Achilleos-Sarll et al. 2023). This raises the questions of who and whose feminisms have been incorporated in the production of FFP (Morton et al. 2020), and to what extent FFP reproduces dominant ways of knowing and making foreign policy. Drawing on extensive participant observation in the FFO and the author’s own experience participating in the German FFP development process, this paper argues that the production of FFP maintained hierarchies of knowledge production by upholding exclusive notions of expertise, privileging thematic over experiential knowledge, and policing the boundaries of what is recognisable as feminism in the institutional discourse. Civil society input was institutionally captured (Eastwood 2006) and more radical understandings of feminism depoliticised.
