Introduction

Gender equality is increasingly accepted as a norm within states’ foreign policy and international actions. From the role of international mechanisms, such as United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, to adherence to international legal frameworks, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and involvement in multilateral agencies, gender equality is increasingly taken seriously by states in relation to their external role. Yet, at the same time, a growing backlash to these pro-gender norms has been developing. In both individual states (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018; Korolczuk, 2020a) and in transnational coalitions (Goetz, 2020; McEwen, 2023), liberal gendered rights are under attack. In response to the well-developed literature on gender norms in foreign policy (Aggestam and True, 2020; Haastrup, 2020), which tends to focus on liberal uptake, some scholars have explored the contemporary resistance to pro-gender norms (Sanders, 2018; Sanders and Jenkins, 2022) and how conservative actors are acting to fundamentally challenge or replace them (Bloomfield, 2016; Goetz, 2020; Schneiker, 2021).

The status of gender equality as a norm in foreign policy is therefore far from fixed. Gender as a normative power is at work in many diverse and often contradictory ways in foreign policy. On the one hand, gender is institutionalized in many states’ foreign policy work, and a central component of how they act and present themselves on the international stage; yet, on the other, gender equality measures are increasingly under attack and states are consciously adopting regressive positions on gender in their international work. Even when viewed within liberal states alone, the meaning of gender equality is not static, but rather changing and evolving – better understood as ‘content-in-motion’ and a norm in ‘flux’ (Krook and True, 2012; Zwingel, 2017), rather than a fixed thing. Furthermore, when referenced by states and key actors, gender equality is often a signifier that speaks to the ‘bundled norms’ of gender, democracy and liberal modernity (Towns, 2009; Donno et al, 2022) in global politics, not just an idea unto itself.

To capture the fluctuating state of gender equality in foreign policy, and the competing presentations of it in international politics, this chapter adopts the concept of ‘normative configuration’ from Pratt (2020). I consider this concept in relation to a range of key empirical examples from the national state level, across both progressive and illiberal policies around gender.