A Struggle for Hegemonic Feminisation in Six Feminist Foreign Policies Or, How Social Hierarchies Work in World Politics

Abstract

This article looks at how six states that adopted feminist foreign policies (FFPs) – Sweden, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Mexico and Spain – relate to each other, using an analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with diplomats and public officials from the six states. It connects the literature on social hierarchies in world politics with scholarship on identities in foreign policy and on masculinities in global politics, concluding that FFPs do not create solidarity but instead lead adopting states to engage in competition with each other. The article develops a concept of hegemonic feminisation to argue that competition between FFP states becomes possible because these states symbolically rank and evaluate each other based on their perceived performance on gender equality. More specifically, it is demonstrated that ranking and evaluation takes place through references to each state’s progress on gender equality before and after the adoption of FFP and to geographies of progress at home and abroad. The article argues that while this stratification of states leads to the emergence of multiple versions of hegemonic feminisation, these versions reproduce the civilisational distinctions between the Global North and the Global South. It concludes with the implications of hegemonic feminisation for the possibility of states becoming feminist.