Introduction

Power is a critical concept in International Relations (IR) and central to all feminist work, including feminist approaches to foreign policy. Feminists demonstrate that the conduct of foreign policy is a hyper-masculine performance where states pursue national security and economic gains through ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power. This, in turn, constrains pro-gender norms (Aggestam and True, 2020) and alternative approaches to foreign policy that centre, for example, care, welfare and redistribution (Achilleos-Sarll, 2018; Robinson, 2021a). Unpacking the conduct, practice and effects of foreign policy, feminists demonstrate how foreign policy is deeply gendered all the way down. Despite these critical insights, feminist IR and foreign policy analysis (FPA) rarely engage in conversation (for exceptions, see Hudson and Leidl, 2015; Aggestam and True, 2020). While both mainstream and critical strands of FPA conceptualize power differently, the former more concerned with power understood as the material capabilities of states while the latter proposing a more variegated understanding, drawing into the analysis power as relational, ideational and normative, gender remains a blind spot for both (Hudson, 2005; Achilleos-Sarll, 2018; Aggestam and True, 2020). However, for feminist scholars gender is ‘intrinsic to the meaning of power itself’ (Aggestam and True, 2020: 154), seen as a ‘primary way of signifying relationships of power’ (Scott, 1988: 1067). This includes drawing attention to ‘how power operates in areas where most non-feminists deny there's any power at work’ (Enloe, 2013), as well as emphasizing that power is always relationally produced (Tickner, 1995; Sylvester, 1994). Feminism is therefore both a critique and reconceptualization of power.

If feminists understand power qualitatively differently to mainstream approaches, then the question arises whether feminist foreign policies also rest on alternative understandings of, and approaches to, power and thereafter foreign policy. This chapter therefore investigates how the concept of ‘power’ is ‘put into discourse’ (Shepherd, 2008) in feminist foreign policy. I ask what conceptualizations of power (and by extension what feminisms) are articulated within the discourse of feminist foreign policies and what are the constitutive political effects thereof. While feminists have assiduously unpacked the feminist-informed documents that have been produced by states since Sweden launched its avowedly ‘feminist’ foreign policy in late 2014 (for example, Thomson, 2020; Parisi, 2020), and often point to frequent mentions to power, and particularly empowerment, within these policies, seldom is the concept of power and its multiple strands the primary focus of analysis.