Introduction

Any discussion of ‘gender perspectives on X’ or ‘feminist approaches to Y’ must acknowledge and respond to the extreme precarity of the historical moment in which we live; to fail to do so is suicidal, and ecocidal. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022), we have only until 2025 to end the rise of greenhouse gas emissions, and only until 2030 to halve them, if we are to have a chance of avoiding the most catastrophic effects of climate disruption. Even in 2023, we’ve already seen climate breakdown feedback loops intensifying faster than climate scientists had modelled or predicted (for example, the collapse of Atlantic currents, see Readfearn, 2023; Spratt, 2023; Zhong, 2023). At the same time, ecosystem decline proceeds at a staggering pace – a million species are now threatened with extinction, due not only to the climate crisis, but to the ways humans have also destroyed natural habitats, polluted air, land and water, and over-exploited nature's animal and plant life. Sir Robert Watson, Chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), warns that ‘[t] he health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide’ (IPBES, 2019).

For this careening towards catastrophe to continue unabated, all that needs to happen is for all of us – including feminists – to just go on doing what we have done before, doing the work we have always done, in the ways that we have always done it. It is wildly irresponsible to let that happen.

Foreign policy, as it is conceptualized and practised, is a prime example of the ‘doing-things-as-we-have-always-done-them’ that has now become disastrously inadequate to and inappropriate for our tenuous historical present and our even more tenuous future. It is a policy realm whose centre, around which all else spins, is national self-interest. Even though states’ foreign policies may commit to a vision of a better, fairer, more peaceful world, their principal aim is always to advance their national security and prosperity through military strength and economic growth.