Feminist foreign policy: an analysis of Swedish cooperation

Abstract

The announcement of Sweden’s adherence to a feminist perspective on its foreign policy contributed to the gender agenda debate being broadened internationally. Therefore, it is considered important to analyze, from the South, how feminist foreign policy (FFP) has modified the discourses on traditional practices in foreign policy.

In order to carry out this study, the Swedish International Cooperation agenda was selected as a case to be examined. This research takes into account that the debate on gender and development has been articulated at least since the 1970s, and several contributions have underlined the need to question the power patterns involving the cooperation policies of the countries from North to South (Aguinaga et al, 2011). Moreover, over the years countless alternatives to traditional and hierarchical practices of cooperation have been articulated by feminist women in both the South and the global North.

Given that Sweden adopted, as part of the feminist paradigm, the habit of carrying out a review of its policies, this study is developed from an analysis of Swedish rhetoric in the document on FFP policy practices released in 2017. Taking into account the narrative of seven themes, the extent to which there has been an insertion of the debates developed by Southern Feminisms in discourses on practices is debated.

In the first part of this article, a theoretical review is carried out on the debate around the construction of feminist solidarity in international politics (Mohanty, 2003; 2008). It is understood that the category of women was included in the cooperation programs and policies through the process of homogenization of differences; that is, it was based on a universal assumption about feminist demands, without including the perspectives of the states receiving policies. Thus, a process of naturalization and generalization on the discursive performance and international practice on North-South cooperation was established. This has resulted in an elaboration on women of the North and South in opposite directions, in which there is an idea that one has to teach the other how to achieve gender equality. The argument of this study is that an FFP pursues the goal of building a shared relationship, in which cooperation is an interaction without hierarchies between the states involved; that is, there is a feminist solidarity in the construction of policies.

In other words, it seeks to identify the differences around gender issues and the category of women, adding them to political perspectives and thus developing more universal international approaches. While this should be an objective pursued by a FFP, and while there has also been discussion of what happens in traditional cooperation practices and discourses, northern countries tend to homogenize differences between women.  This is done in line with neoliberal feminist perspectives, and does not include analyses of the patriarchal structure that promotes gender coloniality and generates subinclusive and superinclusive policies (Crenshaw, 2002).

In the second part of the article, the Swedish context that contributed to the elaboration of a paradigmatic feminist policy is presented. The country’s women’s social movements have had the capacity to articulate with the state over the years, which has accessed the welfare state and encouraged governments to assume discourses and policies that provide gender equality. The basis of this action is the formulation of the Swedish welfare state, which has elaborated domestically movement towards gender equality, and included social feminist demands in the formulation of public policies. In 2014, this perspective was formally placed in international politics and, consequently, in the country’s agendas, such as international development cooperation. With regard to this context of progress, the Swedish 2017 document was analyzed, seeking to identify elements that would point to a reproduction of the traditional perspective of cooperation in the country’s rhetoric on the effectiveness of cooperation. This is where the actors of the North are the majority in the agreements, and where there is no discursive representation of the demands of the collectives of the South nor the processes of joint construction with the receiving countries.

In the study, it was possible to verify, like Nylund (2017), that the feminist foreign policy of Sweden produces totally feminist discourses, but also post-colonial rhetoric. In the feminist sense, we highlight the articulation capacity of feminism between the Swedish state and the feminist movements of the country in order to recognize, as in Llistar (2009), that when a country has the capacity to absorb the demands of social collectives in its international agendas -in the case of cooperation- it can be said that it is a cooperation of solidarity with low selfish interests. On the other hand, when we argue that Sweden has postcolonial discourses, we mean that, although it points out in its FFP manual that it seeks to develop a horizontal and intersectional policy, with the inclusion of local participation, in its rhetoric about the practice of cooperation the country does not emphasize joint actions with receiving countries. A narrative was also observed that values the performance of the state itself as a donor and its traditional partners in the North, such as development banks and private actors. Nevertheless, it does not present the integration of the critical vision of the southern feminisms on this classic performance of international cooperation.

In this way, it is argued that one side of feminist solidarity is missing. This means that, although there is recognition of the advance of Swedish feminisms in favoring the development of an FFP, the valorization and presentation of the performance of the southern actors is still lacking in the rhetoric in the results. So that, once again, they are not described as passive actors of cooperation, but that their different and critical perspectives contribute to the presentation of a more plural and universal discourse.

Finally, this article concludes that the development of critical analyses from the global South contributes to FFP being articulated in pursuit of the goal of feminist solidarity. We do not propose this analysis as a way to deny the advances established by Swedish politics, but to integrate the other part of feminist solidarity: including the vision of the South in the formulation of the agenda.