Gendering Foreign Policy Making: Feminist Foreign Policy Networks in Mexico and Germany

This research project aims to investigate, broadly speaking, what has driven the official adoption of a feminist foreign policy in Germany and in Mexico. Starting from a gendering process of the Foreign Policy Analysis discipline and from developments in the Feminist IR academic debate, it wants to mainly use a Feminist Institutionalism (FI) framework as a bridge between the two disciplines to give more space to the agency of critical and less-traditional actors, who, rephrasing the work of Achilleos-Sars, do not reflect the mainstream idea that the mainstream idea that the political landscape in the Foreign Affairs sphere is defined by competing masculinities and by the agency of only male political and military leaders. The concept of ‘feminist foreign policy networks’ is inspired by the works of feminist institutionalists on formal and informal institutions, on feminist triangles, strategic partnerships, triangles of empowerment and velvet triangles, and it is used to investigate ‘the rise, embeddedness, and continuity of, as well as resistance, to pro-gender norms in foreign policy and similar contexts’ (as put by True and Aggestam, 2020). In particular, the analysis wants to be threefold. First, it wants to investigate what are the gendered formal and informal norms, rules and practices produced and reproduced in Germany and Mexican FP institutions. Secondly, it wants to analyze the creation of the feminist foreign policy networks and identify who were the critical (feminist and non-feminist) actors involved in the work of the networks. Lastly, the strategies used by these latter to engender the FP domain will be analyzed, in combination with the resistance these actors faced in the process. A critical and intersectional perspective will be used for the last part of the research to analyze who were the dominant critical actors (but also the dominant discourses) and the marginalized voices in the FFP network in both national contexts. At the time of the conference, preliminary findings on the German case study will be presented.