Toward Feminist Foreign Policy Analysis

Abstract

Feminist analysis of nearly every policy area, from reproductive rights to family law and policy to violence against women and workplace regulation, is now a robust field, with extensive theoretical and empirical work adopting a variety of epistemological and methodological approaches, from postmodern to the positivist (Bacchi 2010 ; Mazur 2002). Yet most analyses of public policy do not extend to foreign policy, which tends to be seen a separate field. Much of the work on gender in international relations has also tended to focus elsewhere, on how gender structures political violence, on how war (as distinct from foreign policy) is gendered, how norms shape gendered relations in various nations and how gender inequality in various nations shapes state behavior (Caprioli 2003). These approaches tend to bracket the study of foreign policy, treating the state as a “black box”, mostly failing to interrogate the process, effects, causes or outputs of foreign policy decision-making in either a comparative or case-specific manner (Foreign Policy Analysis defined by the ISA). As women, and women’s empowerment, are a growing and explicit focus of foreign policy objectives as well as a growing number of foreign policy actors worldwide, feminist political scientists must bring gender as a category to bear on these processes, revealing the ways that gender has always been fundamental to foreign policy, even if the goals, discourse and shape of foreign policy changes. Feminist political scientists need to critically analyze the impact of gender on the process, effects, causes, or outputs of foreign policy decision-making. This panel aims to start a conversation about how to fill this gap by showing how gender deepens our understanding of foreign policy and by taking gender from margin to center in the study of foreign policy. What would our study of foreign policy look like if we started from feminist questions and theories? As the papers in this collection reveal, this is a very complex question. There are multiple types of feminisms (liberal feminism, radical feminism, Third World feminism, postmodern feminism, transnational feminism, etc.), though a unifying tenet might be the aim to advance the interests of women and girls, or to counter the denigration of women and the feminine and the privileging of men and the masculine. There are also multiple approaches to understanding foreign policy (strategic, liberal internationalism, Marxist, radical etc.), with a variety of degrees of compatibility with feminist analysis. A deeper investigation is needed to improve our understanding of the complex relationship between foreign policy and gender, particularly one that takes feminist theory seriously. This collection of articles by political scientists focuses on the impact of gender on the process, effects, causes and/or outputs of foreign policy. One article takes a broader comparative approach (Alwan and Weldon), two examine issues in American foreign policy and gender (Angevine; Kelly-Thompson and Hoffman) using very different methods, and one examines connections between domestic and foreign policy in Jordan (Forester). We hope that these articles encourage and foster further feminist analysis of the dynamics between gender and foreign policy in other countries. From a comparative approach, Weldon and Alwan’s article attempts the challenging task of conceptually defining and measuring feminist foreign policy, creating multiple indicators to access the actions of nation-states in terms of women’s participation as state foreign policy actors as well as the prioritization of women’s human rights worldwide. Focusing on the US legislative process, Angevine’s article reveals the pervasive influence of domestic antifeminist abortion politics on all American. Kelly Thompson and Hoffman examine how gendered arguments impact war support, using an experimental design to examine how gendered rationales for military intervention impact support for the use of force in public opinion in the US for a hypothetical conflict in Somalia. Last, Forester examines the way securitization of the policy agenda affects domestic agendas on women’s rights.Taken together, these pieces illustrate a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of feminist foreign policy, thereby illuminating several directions for future research into this intriguing but understudied field.

Title	Details
What is Feminist Policy? An Exploratory Evaluation of Foreign Policy in OECD Countries	View Paper Details
Aborting Global Women’s Rights: The Impact of Antifeminism on American Foreign Policy	View Paper Details
Gendered Rationales and Support for Military Intervention	View Paper Details
Aggression Abroad, Progress at Home: Understanding the Interplay Between Foreign Policy and Domestic Feminist Policy Campaigns in Jordan	View Paper Details