Description
This paper aims to investigate the inherent tension between adopting a feminist Foreign policy (FFP) and the Continued acceptance and reliance upon militaristic solutions in traditional foreign policy and IR more generally. As purely ‘theorized,’ untainted by the compromises of politics, a FFP would introduce a fundamental shift—an epistemological if not ontological challenge to what is included in foreign policy and how states govern their international relations. While early FFP practitioners relied upon the ‘3rs’, rights, representations, and resources, feminist scholars have argued to push FFP further and to move it past a very neo-liberal framing as positive change. Therefore, scholarship argues for an FFP that challenges the gendered, classed, and racialized hierarchies upon which the international system has been built. It fundamentally rejects militarised solutions and would seek to make social change that moves humanity away from violence and militarism. Yet, reality does not often reflect Theory. As more states adopt an FFP, these policies are arguably siloed in deeply gendered ways and do not do the ontological transformation that a ‘truer’ ffp would demand. One of the biggest challenges to the wholesale, as opposed to siloed, adoption of a FFp remains a state’s commitment to military solutions and the continued existence of militarist ideas as valid and necessary. This raises a question around ‘Authenticity,’ which has been defined as the level of coherence between internal and external state policies (B-R, Duncanson, and Gentry 2022), but which should be expanded to evaluate the coherence between the adoption of FFP and other pieces of a state’s foreign policy. We employ an abolitionist approach in conducting our study.
