Introduction

In the past decade, feminist and pro-gender foreign policies have emerged across a range of countries as an ethical alternative to traditional foreign policy practices driven mainly by security and national interests. Rather than reproducing narrow definitions of these security interests, which tend to sediment prevalent global inequalities, feminist-informed foreign policies seek to further equality, justice and collective security through a transformation of the global gender order (Aggestam and True, 2020). Despite the growth of war and conflict in global politics, scholarship on gender and feminist approaches to foreign policy has rarely addressed the increasing militarism and militarization of state foreign policies. To address this gap, we ask where and how defence is addressed in feminist-informed foreign policies. The chapter calls for greater attentiveness to feminist scholarship on war as experience, just war theory, pacifism and self-defence to develop a more robust ethical content of pro-gender and feminist foreign policies. We argue that the lack of examination of military and defence policy in existing pro-gender and feminist foreign policies is a silence echoed in feminist scholarship.

We posit that defence is a core part of most states’ foreign policies,1 including those states which have adopted pro-gender and feminist approaches to foreign policy. Defence refers to activities focused on the protection of the state from external attack, whereby a range of institutional and material capabilities (the armed forces and the military) are employed to defend the nation against war. Importantly, defence

is distinct from security, which can be defined more broadly and holistically to focus beyond (just) the state, to include the individual and thus can include a range of issues, such as the environment. It is therefore possible to see why defence with its support for realpolitik can come into tension with feminism, which seeks to challenge such state-centred approaches. (Wright, 2024 )

This chapter analyses the relationship between feminist and pro-gender foreign policy on the one hand, and military and defence on the other by engaging with feminist ideas on just war, war as experience, pacifism and self-defence (Ruddick, 1995; Hutchings, 2019). We argue that for foreign policy to be transformative, it must also encompass the broad compass of a state's foreign policy concerns, including defence.