Feminists to the Fore, by Bill Wanlund
The high-visibility election earlier this year of Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico’s first female president, followed by Kamala Harris’s nomination to be U.S. President, rekindled interest in some circles in the subject of Feminist Foreign Policy [FFP]. More of a philosophical framework than a structured set of rules, FFP is based on values of equality, inclusion and other principles at the heart of U.S. public diplomacy.
In my column for PDCA members, Worth Noting, I first discussed FFP in November 2022, and readers will find my blog post “Feminist Foreign Policy, a Second Look”, here. More recently, I explored the concept further by way of an interview with Lyric Thompson, Founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, which describes itself as “a shared space for feminists working across government, civil society and philanthropy to collectively strategize and advance feminist approaches to foreign policy.”
Here’s a transcript of our conversation, edited for brevity.
Worth Noting: Why should a country adopt a feminist foreign policy?
Lyric Thompson: A feminist foreign policy is our best hope for a policy oriented around the core goals of “People Peace Planet,” which emphasize international norms and standards, human rights, peace, environmental integrity, and certainly equity and equality. It’s an acknowledgment that foreign policy has often been a tool of military and economic competition and domination. A feminist analysis is one that looks more at some of the intersecting streams of identity that might disenfranchise females, black and brown people, stateless people, people without certain migratory status, queer folk, etc., who are those whose interests are not being represented by [traditional] foreign policy goals.Interestingly, a lot of the work that we did on this in terms of framing an agenda for feminist foreign policy, and certainly for what it might look like for the U.S., happened in the pandemic, which was a moment of recognition that borders don't constrain threats, and that we're all in this together. But we're all not starting from the same starting line. We’re trying to use the tools of foreign policy to even the hills and valleys out a bit. Climate change, of course, is another of those threats that has also been effectively pushing the foreign policy community to think more about shared goals as national interest.
WN - Some of the early boosters of the FFP concept -- Sweden comes immediately to mind -- have stepped back as their governments changed. What's your take on the outlook for the FFP movement and how do you make it stick?
LT - There are a couple of ways to look at that. One is that if Sweden had been the only country to declare a feminist foreign policy, then its abandoning the mantle would have been existential.
But a lot has changed in the decade since the Swedes adopted the world's first explicitly feminist foreign policy. It’s no longer a niche Nordic thing, and the strength of feminist foreign policy as a concept has benefited tremendously as its cohort has grown and diversified. Now there are governments in all UN regions working on feminist foreign policies. So, if you think about feminist foreign policy in the way that its proponents do, it would have been worse for Sweden to be the only one, or for it just to be a European thing. The theory of change, and the hope that I have, for feminist foreign policy is that the diversification and growth of this cohort could be what we need to break up some of the regional blocks that have constrained progress on our issues.
WN - When Sweden scrapped its FFP, new Foreign Minister Tobias Billström, said, “Gender equality is a core value for Sweden and this government, but we will not conduct a feminist foreign policy.”
LT - I’ve had the opportunity to interview Swedes in the two years since they stepped away. There’s a sense that a lot of the work does continue, and I think there’s some relief that they’ve continued to prioritize sets of rights that have been highly politicized in other contexts, like abortion, like LGBTQ rights. That’s a win. But, if you discuss feminist foreign policy, as the Council on Foreign Relations did in a recent report, as an important level of ambition on those issues, then it’s also fair to say that Sweden is no longer trying to lead the pack.
The other way to answer that question is more pessimistic, that the Swedish case was not an isolated event. There is a growing and well-resourced anti-gender, anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-you-name-it movement that is capturing elections and pushing outcomes and policy to the far right. Sweden was the canary in the coal mine, as the first to give us feminist foreign policy as official state policy, and also the first to abandon it. And it’s not alone. We also lost Argentina last year, and I think that that leadership model is even more aggressive and pugilistic, coming into office explicitly to undo and to destroy, and taking that iconic chainsaw that [Argentine President Javier] Milei took to government, eliminating nine ministries, starting with the [Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity]. I think that perfectly encapsulates the challenge at hand.
WN - When you're promoting FFP, how do people respond?
LT - People respond positively to the norms and values and the exhilarating opportunity to retool a foreign policy agenda and conceptualize national interest around democratic norms: Fundamental human rights and freedoms. Peace and shared progress. People respond really positively to the growth and the diversification [of the movement]. These folks have bravely articulated a bold vision in a label that makes you stop and say, “What's going on there? That's not foreign policy as usual.”
What some audiences respond less well to Is not the contents but the container: Whether or not to use the “F word.” As advocates and messengers and people who care about outcomes, we should call things whatever advances the discourse and opens doors, not close them. So, I think it's fine if a policymaker looks at feminist foreign policy goals and says, “I like those, let's do it, but let’s just call it ‘foreign policy,’” or whatever verbiage they need [to get it done].
WN - Can you see a time when the U.S. might have a feminist foreign policy?
LT - That conversation in the U.S. has happened -- is happening -- including on the 7th floor [of the State Department]. I think it tracks over time very much with the U.S. political context. When it happened in Sweden in 2014, even the authors of the policy there will tell you the global reception to that was giggles. Like, nobody took it seriously. The best-case-scenario reaction was, “Well, of course, that's Sweden, but we can't all be Sweden.”
But as the cohort has diversified, and more of our friends and allies have joined, the conversation has progressed to the level of, “What are you actually calling for each of our [foreign affairs] implementing agencies to do? And in that regard, there is a coalition in Washington that’s pushing the U.S. to adopt a feminist foreign policy. We've done annual report cards on how the Biden-Harris Administration has done on those recommendations, and it turns out it has taken at least half. The folks who are leading that work in the interagency group at the White House — State, USAID, and to a lesser extent Millennium Challenge and the Defense Department — definitely knew that this was wrapped in the language of a feminist foreign policy.
The political people in charge of trying to win elections, I think, have been remiss in not embracing the [FFP] label, although at an international meeting this summer I did hear the U.S. representative congratulate feminist foreign policy countries. She worded it very carefully, but basically endorsed FFP as a discipline and an approach. My sense has always been that this would be a much longer-term enterprise for the United States. And it certainly wouldn't be a first-term objective, even for a President who might be aligned in interest but also would have to juggle many more constituencies and concerns than we in the FFP coalition do.
WN - Public diplomacy officers overseas focus on sets of global, regional, and local policy priorities, none of which, I bet, uses “feminist” as an adjective. However, U.S. global policy does include “[promoting] the rights and empowerment of women and girls through U.S. foreign policy” and “[empowering] women and girls in U.S. diplomacy, partnerships, and programs,” goals which are consistent with some FFP objectives. Is there an opportunity for cooperation?
LT - What PD and other Foreign Service Officers can do now is educate themselves on what feminist foreign policy is, and the remarkable coalition of our partners and allies who have embraced this work and are trying to do foreign policy differently. To the extent that they are able they can offer that as a positive example, and one that is in line with American norms and values, is helpful.
Eventually, if the U.S. wants to attempt to implement a feminist foreign policy, then our message to other countries should stress how we want to learn with, and from, counterparts in the world who've been doing it longer. We want to avoid giving the impression that this is an area where the U.S. is leading. I know for a fact that several of our allies and partners still feel like the U.S. hegemon is sucking up all the oxygen in the room and trying to assert some dominance in an area where we just haven't been leading.
I think coming to this humbly and in a sense of bridge-building, learning and common values, shared values and goals, would be wonderful for American public diplomacy. Think about the growing number of our neighbors, friends, and allies who are doing FFP. It's a very cool constellation of countries, and it's an exciting moment. The U.S. has a lot to learn and a lot to contribute.
[In her two-decade career, Lyric Thompson has advocated on women’s rights issues at the United Nations, G7/G20, White House, the U.S. State Department, USAID, and the Department of Defense. She is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University, where she teaches a graduate-level course on women’s rights advocacy, and a member of the Secretary of State's International Security Advisory Board. Click here for a fuller bio.]
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Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears occasionally n the PDCA Update and the PDCA Blog; it seeks to address topics of interest to PDCA members.