Women, Gender, and Politics

N02(b) - Feminist Foreign Policy

Date: Jun 2 | Time: 10:15am to 11:45am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Jeremi Dolecki (Northwestern University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Susan Franceschet (University of Calgary)

Bridging Divides Through Inclusive Diplomacy; Lessons and Prospects of a Feminist Foreign Policy for Pakistan: Zoya Shaffay (Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore), Iram Khalid (University of the Punjab)
Abstract: Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) presents a transformative framework that redefines diplomacy through empathy, equality, and inclusion. Swaying from traditional, FFP prioritizes human security, justice, and cooperative engagement as the foundations of international relations. Rooted in the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995) and UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, the concept gained momentum when Sweden introduced the first formal FFP in 2014, followed by other states to adopt similar gender-responsive frameworks. The study revolves around a key question; ‘how can global experiences with Feminist Foreign Policy apprise Pakistan’s pursuit of an inclusive, gender-conscious foreign policy approach? Through a qualitative research design, both primary data (semi-structured interviews with diplomats, scholars, and policy practitioners, an online survey) and secondary data were used to analyze the evolution, principles, and outcomes of FFP across diverse geopolitical contexts and Pakistan’s navigation with its foreign policy approach. The theoretical construct builds upon feminist international relations and critical diplomacy scholarship, aiding to ongoing debates on how gender perspectives restructure state behavior and soft power narratives. The research offers originality by situating the global discourse within Pakistan’s socio-political and cultural context, where structural and cultural barriers continue to restrict women’s influence in foreign policy and political landscape. The study concludes that fostering a national discourse on gender equality as a tool of peace and diplomacy is vital before formal policy adoption. Ultimately, it proposes that embedding feminist principles in Pakistan’s foreign policy could enhance its global image by promoting equitable sustainable engagement.

Feminism and the United Nations From Beijing to Beijing+30: Abigail Bakan (University of Toronto), Yasmeen Abu-Laban (University of Alberta)
Abstract: 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women along with the original adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action. While women’s rights are impacted by numerous political debates on the global stage, in 2025 these issues take centre stage through a formal review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action at the United Nations (UN) in New York. Utilizing government documents, secondary accounts and original interviews with UN officials, this paper will situate an analysis of “Beijing +30” within the context of 1995’s “Beijing.” The UN Fourth World Conference on Women, a formative global conference that took place in Beijing, China in 1995, is critical to understanding women’s rights in the context of the UN as well as in many countries around the world. The foundational Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action was adopted by 189 countries and has since served as a touchstone for movements insisting that women’s rights are human rights. While the Beijing Declaration has been widely celebrated, it has also been criticized for its limitations, particularly when viewed with an intersectional lens (see Kimberlé Crenshaw). Squarely positioned in a gendered binary of female/male, the Beijing Platform and subsequent review documents have been the subject of substantive challenge. The analysis is suggestive of the unique role of the UN in global feminist and human rights discourses. The study is the result of funded research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Gendered Neo-Imperialism in West Asia: From Iran’s Ayatollahs’ Gendered Repression to the Taliban’s Gender Apartheid: Soma Bidarpour (University of Ottawa)
Abstract: One of the most persistent strategies of Western neo-imperialism in West Asia has been the manipulation of women’s rights—first claiming to defend them, then abandoning them when convenient—turning a basic social right into a political tool. This tactic allows Western imperial powers, specifically the US, to first display indifference and then justify intervention under the colonial pretext of rescuing brown women. This article examines how these neo-imperial strategies have created an ontological division between state and people in the region in the long term, with a focus on Iran and Afghanistan. It argues that Western neo-imperial policies in both countries are deeply gendered and, as a result, highlights a key distinction between state-led resistance against this kind of neo-imperialism, which is reactionary and self-preserving, and people-led resistance, which embodies a double struggle against nested colonial legacies—both internal, represented by the state’s religiously gendered system, and external, imposed through Western imperial policies. The article analyzes Iranian women’s movements’ experiences during the rise of the Ayatollahs and the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement, illustrating how Western abandonment and selective engagement strategically reinforced neo-imperial influence in Iran. Further, Afghanistan stands as a living experience of the outcome of extreme gendered neo-imperialism, a gender necropolitical system, where a gender apartheid system subjects women’s bodies to systematic erasure and death. In both contexts, internal state-led colonialism produces oppression against women, but awareness of external neo-imperial pressures is also crucial. This distinction between statist and civic resistance has constituted a profound ontological divide, shaping these regions’ contemporary political and social fault lines. Also, this article concludes that the fact of entanglement of neo-imperial intervention to women’s rights, in both countries, demonstrates that women’s resistance against doubly-sword colonialism historically emerges as a determining factor in the feasibility of success in genuinely decolonizing these nations.

The Afterlives of Feminist Foreign Policy: Derridean Hauntology and Exhuming 2010s International Liberal Feminism: Leah Schmidt (University of Cambridge), Chloe Sanyu (University of Cambridge)
Abstract: This paper interrogates the failures and afterlives of 2010s Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) frameworks, newly generative in the 2025 global rollback of reproductive rights, anti-DEI politics, and shuttered gender and development funding. Employing a Derridean lens of hauntology, this paper argues that FFP endures as an “institutional ghost” haunting contemporary gendered diplomacy long after its formal abandonment by the states that once advanced it. In Derrida’s words, “the spectre does not belong to the order of knowledge but to the order of justice” (1994), what policy has been buried will always demand an ethical reckoning. This paper asks: (1) What ghost-traces of liberal internationalism, colonial governance, and patriarchal universalism persisted within FFP discourse despite its reformist lexicon? (2) How did the formal policy renunciations (Sweden 2022; Luxembourg 2023; Canada and the UK’s partial retreat) produce FFP’s spectral returns of citation, nostalgia, and institutional echo? (3) How might a hauntological reading of FFP illuminate more radical feminist futurities for international policy? Using a methodology of Fairclough’s “Critical Discourse Analysis” of FFP statements, ministerial speeches, and NGO reports from Sweden, Canada, the UK, and France, the paper traces how FFP’s initial optimism decayed. Preliminary findings demonstrate that FFP’s emancipatory rhetoric remains haunted by its dependence on the “Western Liberal Order”; thus, FFP is not a closed tomb but a case study of liberal feminism’s endurance as a haunted terrain, (re)animated by unfulfilled promises and futures that remain, in Derrida’s words, à venir: always still to come.