“Foreign or From Below? Negotiating Norms and Hierarchies of Feminist Foreign Policy in Colombia”

This paper examines how the emerging international gender norm FFP (Feminist Foreign Policy) has travelled to Colombia across global hierarchies and been re-shaped by Colombian feminist actors within and beyond the state. Using semi-structured elite-level actor interviews combined with public sources, it traces how policymakers navigate international hierarchies when transferring FFP to Colombia, the most recent Latin American state to adopt FFP, a norm pioneered by Europe and Canada. Through a critical constructivist framework informed by feminist IR theory, this study analyses how Western diplomats mobilised deeper structural hierarchies to socialise Colombia into adopting FFP. However, Colombian grassroots feminists, who transitioned into formal state roles in Colombia’s first left-wing government, strategically leveraged these same hierarchies to channel FFP into the new government’s agenda. Rather than passively copying a Western norm, they reconfigured the norm from below, transforming FFP into a tool for Colombia´s local feminist movement, becoming unrecognisable to the norm’s initial Western proponents. Colombian policymakers removed the “foreign” as it was constituted by Western countries, making FFP a tool that promotes feminist policies with the opportunities of the international, including sponsoring from Western states and international status concerns that appeal to various levels of government even if they are not necessarily in favour of the feminist movement. FFP thus became a tool that initiated Colombia’s first, highly participative Women, Peace, and Security National Action Plan, involving women from Colombia’s marginalised territories usually neglected by the state. Feminists within Colombia’s Foreign Ministry further turned FFP into a tool that prevented openly anti-feminist individuals from taking ambassador postings. The paper highlights how Colombia’s “re-make” of FFP is based on an epistemology that views the national territory not within geographically demarcated borders but seeks to focus on what interviewees called “territorial diplomacy”, engaging women in Colombia’s rural areas and diaspora women outside traditional state borders. The transfer of FFP to Colombia brought forward postcolonial re-considerations on what the “foreign” means and whom it can include, while spurring reflections on gender equality problems in the West, inspired by Colombia’s intersectional viewpoints, gradually deconstructing the illusion of Western states as progressive protectors of women.