The Afterlives of Feminist Foreign Policy: Derridean Hauntology and Exhuming 2010s International Liberal Feminism

This paper interrogates the failures and afterlives of the 2010s Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) frameworks, rendered newly legible by the 2025 global rollbacks of reproductive rights, escalating anti-DEI policies, and shuttered gender funding. Employing a lens of Derridean hauntology, we argue that FFP endures as an “institutional ghost,” haunting contemporary gendered diplomacy and development frameworks, long after its formal abandonment by the states that once advanced it. Derrida writes that “the spectre does not belong to the order of knowledge but to the order of justice,” (1994) signalling that what has been buried will always demand an ethical reckoning. FFP now operates as an exhumed corpse: a policy framework initial birthed by liberal states seeking moral renewal while reanimating the same hierarchies of power - coloniality, racialised labour, and gendered militarism (Achilleos-Sarll; Cadesky) - that it claimed to challenge. The paper asks: (1) What ghost-traces of liberal internationalism, colonial governance, and patriarchal universalism persisted within FFP discourse despite its reformist lexicon? (2) How do policy renunciations (Sweden 2022; Luxembourg 2023; Canada and the UK’s partial retreat) constitute spectral returns of citation, nostalgia, and institutional echo? (3) How might a hauntological reading of FFP illuminate more radical feminist policy futurities? Methodologically, we apply Critical Discourse Analysis to co-produced FFP statements, ministerial speeches, and NGO reports from Sweden, Canada, the UK, and France (Zhukova et al.) to trace how initial FFP policy optimism decayed, how the “lost future” of the frameworks are re-invoked, and how différance sustains colonial residues. Preliminary findings demonstrate that FFP’s emancipatory rhetoric remains haunted by its dependence on the “Western Liberal Order”; thus, FFP is not a closed tomb but a case study of liberal feminism’s endurance as a haunted terrain, (re)animated by unfulfilled promises and futures that remain, in Derrida’s words, à venir: always still to come.