In the aftermath of the Cold War, a feminist approach to international relations became popular among some academic circles. Two of the movements founding scholars, Cynthia Enloe and Carol Cohn , proposed using a critical "feminist consciousness" when examining how countries do business with other countries. In an area dominated by men, it made sense to look at world affairs with an eye for masculine identities and their effect on politics and war.
Twenty-something years later and such theories have entered the mainstream. In fact, these ideas have ascended from the classrooms of political studies schools to the halls of government policy-making in more than one country.
It is Sweden that has most explicitly and officially taken on a ‘feminist foreign policy’. In 2015, foreign affairs minister Margot Wallström announced that, “striving toward gender equality is not only a goal in itself but also a precondition for achieving our wider foreign development, and security-policy objectives.” Subsequently, Wallström’s public criticism of Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women caused the Arab kingdom to withdraw its ambassador to Stockholm. An arms deal between the two countries was also cancelled, infuriating Sweden’s most powerful industrialists.
Wallström says her country is in a unique position to tackle problems and promote a feminist outlook in the search for peace and freedom in a grim world of aggression and oppression. Despite not being a member of NATO, Sweden is very involved in international affairs. It is one of Europe’s largest per capita donors of humanitarian foreign aid and has a prominent role within inter-governmental organisations such as the UN and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
One example of Sweden’s feminist approach, Wallström says, was fulfilling the need for woman to be heard, represented and protected during the OSCE’s monitoring mission in eastern Ukraine. She says crimes against women and girls in war zones are all too often ignored or looked over by governments.
Contemporary research has backed up Wallström’s views. Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist from Texas A&M University, said data indicates that “the very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated.”
Wallström, talking to Foreign Policy magazine last month, says Sweden will continue to stay firm in her opinions on the policies of other nations, citing Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Russia, and will not abandon her values for material interests. “[Russia] isn’t going away. Same with Turkey. We cannot move them,” Wallström said. “There is no military solution to all these things, we have to continue to insist on diplomacy to solve concrete problems.”