Feminism saves the world!: feminist foreign policy and the crisis of the liberal international order

The continuing impact of Trumpism on US politics; Brexit; populist radical right victories in Poland, Brazil, Hungary; and the failures of international law and security in the contexts of Syria, Ukraine and Israel-Palestine - the liberal ideas and institutions upon which much of the world is assumed to be founded is in crisis. Much international relations theory has considered this crisis, and its meanings. Yet the interactions this crisis has with ideas around gender have largely been overlooked. This paper addresses this oversight through a consideration of feminist foreign policy, a burgeoning policy framework which is now adopted by over a dozen countries across three continents. Firstly, it provides a gendered assessment of the crisis of the liberal international order (LIO), connecting mainstream IR literature with scholarship which is more focussed on gender. Secondly, it considers how feminist foreign policy discourse reiterates this gendered breakdown of the LIO but is also increasingly presented as a means to fix the problems underpinning this crisis. Through a discourse analysis of key policy documents and over 60 semi-structured in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, I show that two main ideas underpin FFP’s central understanding – 1) the idea of women and girls as ‘superwomen’; and 2) a reinvigorated sense of multilateralism. I conclude by showing that feminism’s uptake by global politics in this way is an attempt to save the LIO by reinforcing both the ideas an institutions upon which it stands. In doing so, this paper connects work on the crisis of the LIO within IR theory to an understanding of the centrality of gender to global politics.