Zeynep Alemdar, the co-founder of the Women in Foreign Policy Initiative, based in Turkey which fights against the male-dominated approach shaping foreign policy in the world, evaluated the potential of feminist foreign policy for peace and the recent international developments.
What does Women in Foreign Policy (WFP) Initiative based in Turkey aim for? Why are women’s voices not heard in the world? What is meant by feminist foreign policy? How is the level of of gender equality in Turkish academia?
Seeking answers to these questions, journalist Mühdan Sağlam spoke with Prof. Zeynep Alemdar, cofounder of Women in Foreign Policy (WFP) Initiative and a faculty member at Okan University.
An excerpt from the interview published in Artı Gerçek:
You are one of the founders of the Women in Foreign Policy Initiative. Who are these women, what do they want, what are their goals?
The Women in Foreign Policy Initiative (WFI) was founded in 2014 by three women who had studied foreign policy and international relations, and worked in different fields ranging from security to peace studies and in different institutions such as think tanks and academia. The situation was like this: we were three women who were experts in their fields, but men were always speaking at the meetings and our voices were never heard.
Partly because we were young and partly because we were women, our voices were not heard. We thought that young women coming after us should not experience the same difficulties. The three of us, Rana Birden, Christina Bache and myself, started to think and talk about this initiative in 2014.
These meetings were actually a very small round table, in other words, they were meetings for 25 people. We started to invite important people from our own network. Here, we brought together women who we could call role models especially for young women. This is how Women in Foreign Policy started.
We currently have 108 members. We have a whatsapp group where we share our own news among ourselves, try to build solidarity. In addition, there is an almanac that we publish every year, it will be our fourth this year. At the same time, we publish DPK policy notes once a month. All of these are available on our website.
The Initiative also advocates for feminist foreign policy. What is feminist foreign policy?
The feminist foreign policy approach, or the feminist approach to international relations and international security, acts on the premise that we cannot explain the current problems of the world we live in with the concepts we have learnt. Feminist international relations was pioneered by prominent women academics in the world after the 1980s, but it came to Turkey much later. There are one or two articles in Turkish that are not directly related to feminist foreign policy but may be considered in relation with international relations. For example, there is an important literature that links gender to nationalism, citizenship and the military, but these are mostly related to sociology and political science. One of the aims of our Initiative is to bring feminist foreign policy for the agenda in Turkey.
Why do we want to that? Because firstly, we know that the question of “Where are the women in international relations?”, has not been answered yet. Women are absent both as subjects, actors and writers. As women working in international relations, I think we have also found a way to popularize our own writings on women in foreign policy, to share them and to be aware of each other.
Last week, the budget of the Ministry of Defence was passed by the Turkish Parliament and doubled compared to the previous year. As the founder of Women in Foreign Policy and as an academic of international relations, how do you interpret this?
I don’t have a positive feeling about this, but there is something like this, I mean, we know that military expenditures all over the world, especially in our region, have increased very excessively. There is Russia’s entry into Ukraine, the endless war in Syria, conflicts in the Middle East and Africa that we do not hear much about. So, on the one hand, while we say that feminist foreign policy is possible, on the other hand, the world is unfortunately returning to the conflictual period written by male realist politicians.
The increase in military expenditures should be understood within this system, but of course more humane policies can be integrated. For example, there is a study conducted in the USA in 2010. According to this study, if the money invested in US international interventions after the September 11 attacks had been invested in education, health and the economy, employment in these fields would have increased by 120-140 per cent. Therefore, the increase in military spending is to the detriment of women. There is a huge deficit, especially in the area of social policies.