Feminist Civil Society Organizations at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs – A Troubled Alliance

In 2014, when the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström declared that Sweden, as the first country in the world, would pursue a Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) (retracted by the consecutive government in 2022), the civil servants at the MFA and the hundreds of diplomats posted abroad had a very vague understanding of what feminism meant in external relations. This bold declaration placed demands on the Swedish MFA, as policy needed to be developed, diplomats trained, etc. This paper examines what role feminist civil society organizations (CSOs) played in these processes and the patterns of inclusion/exclusion of civil society in the Swedish FFP. In what ways and at what stages of policymaking were various feminist CSOs involved in the knowledge production for FFP? How was their policy advocacy and policy advice adapted to the notoriously impenetrable domain of foreign policy and diplomacy? Hence, the paper makes a contribution to the emerging scholarship on the intersection between CSOs and foreign policy/diplomacy, seeking to theoretically conceptualize these relations. On the other hand, it also contributes to the literature on feminist alliances within and without public administration, studying both the demand for policy advice on feminism at the MFA and the supply of such policy advice from feminist CSOs, as well as the relations between them.