With the foreign policy choices that worked unfavourably for women in Afghanistan, we saw once again that there is a need for a feminist foreign policy that would prioritise women’s rights and needs and serves gender equality: “Feminist foreign policy is less about ‘saving’ women who might not have been asked than ensuring their voice is always heard.”
Jessica Abrahams / Prospect Magazine
Twenty years ago, weeks after being stricken by the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan. It looked very much like a war of vengeance—US troops would sometimes write messages such as “love from NYPD” on the deadly shells before they dropped them. But at least parts of the Bush administration, amplified by New Labour politicians and sections of the British commentariat, embraced another justification: the liberation of Afghan women. The war on terror, as first lady Laura Bush put it, was also “a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”
The case was clear. In the summary of the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, then a leading liberal voice for the war, the Taliban ran a country “with girls’ schools shut, women forbidden to work, sent home and locked indoors,” manifesting a “pathological loathing of women.” As many in the west saw it, she wrote, “the burka was the battle flag” of the invasion. Toynbee visited the capital, Kabul, a year after the defeat of the Taliban and—while already worrying about the west failing in its commitment—took heart from the women she saw as newly empowered to leave their homes, “their joy at escape” and the “sheer enthusiasm” of girls returning to school. There is absolutely no doubt that some Afghan women, especially in urban areas like Kabul, benefited enormously from the overthrow of the Taliban.
But for others, in rural areas, life never changed much—except for the trauma of another, seemingly interminable conflict, which left many Afghans insecure and untold women widowed. (Today the country is believed to have one of the highest rates of widowhood in the world.) By the time an end to the international fighting eventually came into view, women’s rights were abandoned and not included in the deal that the US signed with the Taliban last year. Female representatives were barely present in the subsequent negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government. This summer, women reported widespread sexual violence as the militant group swept across the country once more, reversing any gains that had been made. In August, as province after province fell into Taliban hands, the ultimate symbols of feminist advance in the country—its female judges, civil society leaders and politicians—were scrambling for their lives, fleeing an advancing force that they reasonably feared would kill them.
Toynbee has since candidly written that she should never have swallowed the “saving women” line—it was dangerous, she has now concluded, because neither the will nor the capacity was ever really there. Students of colonialism saw the trouble coming far earlier on. Back in the 1980s, the feminist thinker Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was highlighting the dubious implications of “white men saving brown women from brown men.” On some readings, the west simply failed in its bid to “liberate” Afghan women; on others, it was never serious about the endeavour, using it only as a feminist gloss for its selfish needs and ambitions. Either way, it might seem like the lesson is that the entanglement of feminism and foreign policy is doomed. And yet at precisely this moment, the two things are in fact coming together as never before—and just possibly in ways that could prevent, rather than encourage, reruns of the Afghan disaster.
Parallel worlds?
Even before this tragedy, some would have argued that international relations and gender politics have nothing to do with each other and should be kept apart. But in a world where societies treat men and women differently, women will always have particular interests and perspectives, including on how their own society interacts with the rest of the world. In most societies, women continue to shoulder overwhelming responsibility for children. Even disregarding outdated notions of needing to protect “women and children,” both groups tend to stand in very different relation to war than the men, who are more likely to be doing the fighting. Civilians will always make up the majority in societies caught up in war, but that doesn’t mean their interests will prevail. Traditional foreign policy is all about military and economic strength, as well as states using these resources to coerce others to protect their interests. While there have been some efforts to empower women within military high commands and negotiating chambers, for some feminist thinkers the whole established framework—with its focus on brute force, dominance and competition—valorises traditional concepts of masculinity. Opinions may differ on that, but the framework is nevertheless one in which the voices of soldiers and industrialists inevitably carry the most weight. This arguably warps the way that states think about their interests: they might wage war in the name of “national security,” for example, while the reality is it tends to make most people less secure.
Some say there is another way. There is growing momentum behind the idea of “feminist foreign policy”—an approach now formally backed by seven countries. For advocates, this has less to do with “saving” women than ensuring their voice is heard. In its purest form, a feminist foreign policy would not only promote better conditions for women, but also change how foreign policy is done to prioritise collaboration over coercion, and human security over narrow national security: pandemics and climate change, which threaten human lives and well-being, would come to be understood as security threats just as much as hostile rival states. The hope is that these changes might ultimately create a more peaceful, equitable and sustainable world for all.
In 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to formally adopt a feminist foreign policy; since then it has gathered a motley crew of followers in the form of Canada, France, Spain, Mexico, Luxembourg and, more recently and interestingly, Libya. There is also growing curiosity from bigger powers—voices in both the United States Congress and the European parliament are advocating the approach.
The pinkwash peril
Over several decades, there have been increasingly frequent efforts to put gender equality on the international agenda. Witness a growing stack of multilateral agreements and resolutions—including the landmark Beijing declaration on gender equality after the UN World Conference on Women in 1995; various resolutions committing to include women in peace processes; and the establishment of UN Women, a multilateral agency dedicated to gender equality, in 2010. Sweden was an enthusiastic advocate of such efforts, before going further in 2014 and declaring itself to be “the first feminist government in the world”—a position that would extend to its foreign policy.
Feminism was—and remains—a controversial word. “When you invoke a feminist lens, you’re really looking at power dynamics,” explains Marissa Conway, co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. It’s about “figuring out how to, in a very practical way, rebalance these power inequalities so that those who have typically been excluded and been subject to bearing the consequences of these policies are now actually the ones informing the development of policy.”
For a while, no other country seemed keen to follow Sweden’s lead. But in 2017, under the leadership of self-proclaimed feminist Justin Trudeau, Canada dipped a toe in the water by adopting a “feminist international assistance policy,” meaning that all its foreign aid programming “should be developed and implemented in ways that improve gender equality and empower women and girls.” Target areas include sexual and reproductive health, tackling forced marriage, securing access to the formal economy and involvement in decision-making.
As Canada began broadening its mission, other states began to follow. This July, Mexico and France co-hosted the first World Conference on Women in 25 years (the UN considered holding one in 2015 but the resolution didn’t pass). There, Libya’s first female foreign minister, Najla Mangoush—appointed as part of a UN-backed unity government tasked with overseeing democratic elections in the country by the end of the year—announced that the conflict-stricken state would embrace feminist foreign policy as part of its stabilisation plans.
This is not just gesture politics—getting women involved boosts the chance of successful conflict resolution. Recent research from UN Women and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) found that peace deals where women played a substantial role in the talks were a third more likely to last at least 15 years—Liberia is one case study. As Leymah Gbowee, one of the women who led Liberia’s peace movement, has argued: “It is not that women are naturally more peaceful than men; rather they are committed participants in peace processes that affect the entire spectrum of a society. If a peace process is left in the hands of military men or warlords whose expertise is war, we shouldn’t be surprised if the result denies the needs of average citizens.” Historically, however, such involvement has been a rarity. Between 1992 and 2019, about 70 per cent of the world’s peace processes did not include any women mediators or signatories, according to the CFR.
But a great deal is still hazy. Canada has not yet released the white paper exploring how the feminist lens it has applied to international assistance can be widened. Of the seven declared feminist foreign policy states, only three—Sweden, Mexico and Spain—have published their policies. Closer to home, the SNP’s manifesto boast that—despite Scotland’s extremely limited autonomy in international affairs—it will soon be “joining a small number of countries across the world, to adopt a feminist foreign policy,” has thus far found expression in just two initiatives. One is a fund of £500,000 (the price of one flat in Edinburgh’s New Town) aimed at empowering women and girls in Malawi, Zambia and Rwanda; and training women to participate in peace-building and conflict resolution.
The great fear is that, without more direction, feminist foreign policy could descend into a hollow branding exercise—in the words of Lyric Thompson of the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), that there will be “an inclination by countries to show up on International Women’s Day, say that they have ‘feminist foreign policies,’ and change nothing.” Worse, established foreign policy agendas could be “pinkwashed”—with more military adventures, for example, justified as being about liberating women who haven’t been consulted. Although many Mexican feminists were pleased to see their country release a comprehensive plan for joining the movement, they are also painfully aware of the disconnect between a proclaimed pro-women foreign policy and their country’s approach to questions of women’s rights at home—including a perceived disregard for gender-based violence and a lack of action on abortion rights.
“There’s just this history of not putting our money and other tools where our mouths are on gender equality,” says Thompson. “So then, when you kind of up the level of ambition and expectation for this agenda by using the word ‘feminist,’ which itself is a political act… the worry is if this is just more of the same behaviour, where we say these issues are important but we actually don’t change our behaviour, then that is incredibly damaging.”
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