Description
Over the last eleven years, we have witnessed the rise and subsequent fall of feminist foreign policy (FFP). Initially heralded as a progressive answer to global power politics, FFP has failed to deliver on its promise to transform foreign policy’s deeply unequal constituent norms, practices, and subjectivities. But why is that so? Drawing on the first ethnography of feminist foreign policymaking, this article provides an answer by interrogating German diplomats’ quotidian practices in the Federal Foreign Office. It shows that diplomats presumed that feminism – and therefore FFP – was not naturally intelligible to three key foreign policy audiences: the German public (too conservative), the ‘Global South’ (not progressive enough), and diplomats themselves. To the latter, FFP constrained diplomatic relations with non-feminist actors and restricted male diplomats’ careers due to its emphasis on women’s representation. Yet, FFP had to be made palatable to all three groups to ensure policy implementation. Diplomats responded to this conundrum by producing FFP as ‘accessible’, with a focus on accessibility to men. This entailed depoliticising and co-opting feminist concepts such as intersectionality. Accessibility became a “brick wall” (Ahmed 2012) to more radical notions of feminism, while giving the outward appearance of progress. Hence, FFP could not possibly be transformative.
