Description
This paper forms the historical chapter of a doctoral dissertation examining the adaptive dynamics of Feminist Foreign Policies (FFP). Grounded in feminist institutionalism (Mackay 2010; Holmes 2020) and feminist historical approaches to international relations, it traces the longue durée processes through which gender norms and equality practices became embedded within the machinery of Canadian foreign policy since the Second World War, creating the institutional preconditions for the articulation of a FFP under Justin Trudeau.
Responding to recent calls to theorize FFPs through a more systematic conception of the state (Aran, Brummer & Smith 2025), the chapter asks: how did Canada’s foreign policy institutions evolve to produce the normative and bureaucratic conditions that rendered a feminist turn both thinkable and actionable? It reconstructs how equality frameworks and gender mainstreaming mechanisms (developed across diplomacy, development, trade, and defence) were progressively consolidated into enduring administrative norms. By tracing how these practices enabled “insider feminists” to leverage institutional openings, the paper foregrounds the historical and structural dimensions of feminist policy agency.
Based on process-tracing analysis, over thirty elite interviews, and forthcoming archival research in Ottawa (December 2025), the chapter contributes to feminist IR, foreign policy analysis, and public policy scholarship by historicising the institutional genealogies of Canada’s feminist turn, theorising feminist statehood, and identifying the concrete instruments through which feminist actors sustain gender equality commitments within state practice.
