Description
Ever since its emergence, women have been holding various roles in diplomacy and foreign policy. In the wake of the Second World War, especially, women‘s positions as ‘diplomatic wives’, on the one hand, were central to national or (post-)imperial foreign policy interests. On the other, as non-diplomatic staff, women were tasked with specific gendered and racialized roles within a foreign country’s diplomatic institutions. Aside from diplomacies, these institutions included cultural and economic actors, like language centers, schools or private corporations. This paper asks about women’s experience in the everyday of such informal foreign policy spaces of former imperial powers.
Given its centuries-long presence on the Indian subcontinent and its imperial past, this paper takes German diplomatic presence in India as an example. It zooms in on the German school, the cultural Goethe Institute and Siemens AG. Based on photo-elicitation interviews conducted across Germany and in Delhi, it asks what complex or maybe even contradictory roles German and Indian women had in these spaces and how they navigated German foreign policy presence in postcolonial Delhi. Second, it juxtaposes these interviews with findings from previously conducted archival research in the German Federal Foreign Office on the selected institutions. Drawing on feminist postcolonial theory, the paper, then, demonstrates how cultural and economic institutions were both central realms of foreign policy and sites of social reproduction to which, in the context of post-empire, women were crucial. Contributing to feminist scholarship in foreign policy, this paper provides a historical analysis that centers on women in 20th century male-dominated foreign policies. In addition, it adds to studies on the under-researched German involvement in empire and its aftermath in India in the 20th century.
