1st Edition
Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times Critical Perspectives
Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times offers a unique and timely reflection of the critical debates around the institutionalisation of feminist and gender-focused ideas and norms into policy.
Many states and non-governmental organisations are increasingly invested in ‘feminist policymaking’ at the domestic and international levels. Yet, this liberal (feminist) agenda is also vastly disputed by critical, intersectional, and decolonial voices on the one hand, and by anti-gender movements around the world on the other hand. Indeed, while opposition to ‘gender ideology’ is mounting from reactionary, religious, and secular forces, feminist policymaking is also being challenged in important ways from within. Thus, this book situates feminist policymaking in a challenging and ‘turbulent’ global context. This book explores feminist policymaking in multiple areas of policy, examining various gender-focused programmes that states and international organisations have undertaken in the last decade, offering critical interventions and rethinking the relationship between feminism and policy. This book not only reflects on the advances of feminist policymaking globally but also critically assesses the intersectional challenges embedded within it and lying ahead. It moves the field forward by creating opportunities, based on lived experiences, for re-imagining the transformative potential of the nexus between feminism and policymaking. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing to the fore the voices of both academics and practitioners, this book is the product of an international collaboration, forging links and dialogue that are increasingly necessary to question some of the exclusionary, militaristic, and hierarchical assumptions of policymaking which is labelled as feminist.
Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times will be of interest to all scholars, students, and practitioners interested in the role of gender in policymaking and concerned with contestations around gender-focused projects.
Introduction: Feminist Policymaking in Turbulent Times: Critical Perspectives
Hannah Partis-Jennings and Clara Eroukhmanoff
PART 1: Methods, Metrics, and Impact of Feminist Policymaking
1. Advocating for Feminist Economic Policies: A Practitioner’s Story from the Frontline
Lila Caballero Sosa
2. From Havana to Bogota: The Indicators for Measuring the Implementation of the Gender Perspective of the Colombian Peace Agreement with the FARC Guerrilla
Lina M. Céspedes-Báez, Felipe Jaramillo Ruiz and Rebecca Nielsen
3. Female Victimhood and Political Agency: A Critical Perspective of International Gender Mainstreaming in the Tunisian Transitional Justice
Sélima Kebaïli
PART 2: Feminist Foreign Policy and the State
4. What is Feminist Foreign Policy? Interrogating a Developing Idea Across Five National Contexts
Jennifer Thomson
5. The Abandonment of Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Militarism and Gendered Nationalism
Annika Bergman Rosamond
6. Troubling French Feminist Diplomacy with the National Context
Clara Eroukhmanoff
7. Feminist Foreign Policy in India: Looking Inwards Matters
Dipti Tamang
PART 3: Feminist Policymaking and the International
8. Relationality and ‘the International’: Rethinking Feminist Foreign Policy
Fiona Robinson
9. Early Women Envoys of India: Looking for Blueprints of Feminist Foreign Policy
Khushi Singh Rathore
10. Towards a Feminist Defence Policy? Challenges for Feminist Foreign Policy
Katharine A. M. Wright
PART 4: Rethinking Feminist Policymaking
11. Abortion Storytelling as Feminist Policy(un)making
Hannah Partis-Jennings
12. A View into the Fray: Lived Testimony of Minorities in the UK Peace, Security, and Foreign Policymaking Fields
Aditi Gupta and Mélina Villeneuve
13. Feminist Demands for Equal Distribution of Power and Resources: The Case for Tax Justice as Central to Addressing the Elephant in the Room of Feminist Policymaking
Caroline Othim and Roos Saalbrink
14. Decolonising Feminist Policymaking: Interrogating Western and Liberal Feminisms’ Dominance in Feminist Policy Spaces
Sidonia Lucia Kula
Conclusion: Can ‘Feminist’ Policymaking Deliver a More Just World?
Toni Haastrup
Biography
Hannah Partis-Jennings is a lecturer in International Relations in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens University Belfast, UK. Her research and publications are located within feminist security studies and critical military studies with an additional focus on reproductive justice activism and storytelling as feminist political practice.
Clara Eroukhmanoff is a senior lecturer in International Relations in the School of Law and Social Sciences at London South Bank University, UK. Her current research lies at the intersection of feminist writing in International Relations, gender, and foreign policy, with a particular focus on French feminist diplomacy, US declinism, the remasculinisation of international politics and anti-genderism, and Trumpism.
