The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist
Kristina Lunz (translated by Nicola Barfoot), Polity, £25
Why do we need a feminist foreign policy? Because, as Kristina Lunz, the co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, explains, in the fields of foreign and security policy ‘we cannot go on with business as usual’. And so, in her own words, Lunz intends her work ‘to be a contribution to the feminist movement within international relations’.
With that in mind, this English translation of the German original – published in 2022 – tries to set the agenda for feminist foreign policy, or FFP, in the domain of foreign policy as well as interlocking areas such as human rights, global health policy, climate change and disarmament. Up to a point, she succeeds.
Those readers not au fait with FFP need not worry. Lunz has a chapter that explains the most important concepts and provides a history of the feminist movement, starting with the First International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, and ending with protests in Iran after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in September 2022 following her arrest by the state’s morality police.
Along the way she discusses the countries – Canada, France, Mexico, Luxembourg, Spain, Chile, Scotland and Germany – that followed Sweden’s lead in adopting an FFP in 2014. Her research is impeccable and the writing style accessible.
There is much that Lunz does well. She addresses a broad range of policy issues that could benefit from a feminist approach, including climate justice, global health and disarmament, and dives deep into each.
On global health for instance, as a doctoral student in this field, I found her analysis succinct and current, particularly in highlighting the colonial roots of global health and the continued structural inequities of health systems, glaringly brought to light during the Covid pandemic.
The book is most engaging when Lunz weaves in her personal perspectives, particularly the travails of setting up her think tank. She recounts how, as a government adviser, she saw ‘how readily lucrative contracts were awarded to law firms, while civil society groups were treated with the greatest scepticism.’ It was, as she writes, ‘an eye-opener’.
While Lunz is adept at addressing why a particular issue should be a feminist concern, she has not been clear how FFP could bring about the world it envisions. For instance, she writes that feminism is not a matter of fighting for a seat at the table; she wants to ‘destroy the table and build a new one’.
Indeed, she includes the observation of academic Toni Haastrup that, once it has achieved socio-political revolution and created new institutions, FFP will be rendered obsolete. As a former diplomat, I wanted details on how the table will be destroyed and how it will be replaced.
Lunz also mentions several times that feminists in foreign and security policy are ‘very good at distinguishing between short-term, medium-term and long-term goals’. For instance, those caught in an unjust war need to be able to defend themselves in the short term, she argues. But on the complex process of building parallel systems and sustainable solutions for the medium and long term, Lunz has few proposals.
To my mind, Lunz also oversimplifies the tension between feminism and militarism. The original, German edition of her book was published on 24 February, 2022 – the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Lunz subsequently came under fire for what was perceived as a pacifist approach within Germany, an episode Lunz recounts with candour in her preface to the English edition.
Jesse Bump and I have written about this in our criticism of FFP as a concept. Military capacity building, weapons stockpiling, other acts of deterrence or even self-defence in the face of attack tend to be conflated in the eyes of FFP proponents with aggressive dominance. In Germany, feminist Alice Schwarzer’s open letter to Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned that responsibility for nuclear conflict lay not only with the aggressor but also with those who resisted the aggressor’s demands.
Thus, some advocates for FFP would not allow a country to respond militarily, even if attacked. Lunz does not go that far. But for FFP to work, do we not need a roadmap for how to get to a point where the future world is completely arms-free? Nevertheless, The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist comes at a critical time. A year ago, Sweden abandoned its FFP after a change of government.