Drawing on policy documents and expert interviews, this article investigateshow feminist foreign policies (FFPs) are shaped by and shape gender anddevelopment. Gender and development refers to gender equality projectscarried out by donors, international organizations, and non-governmentalorganizations within the context of uneven development of capitalism acrosstime and space. The article shows that five logics operate in relation togender and development in FFPs: neoliberal, colonialist, liberal, intersectional,and anti-colonial logics. It demonstrates that while FFPs of Canada, France,and Luxembourg tend to reproduce certain colonialist logics, FFPs of othercountries introduce intersectional (Mexico, Spain, Chile, and the Netherlands)and anti-colonial (Germany) perspectives. The article further reveals thatwhile going beyond the colonialist logics of gender and development, FFPdiscourse and practice do not challenge its neoliberal logics. It shows thatFFPs continue to emphasize how the work on gender equality can contributeto economic growth, instead of focusing on how gender equality can matterin its own right and how economic growth can contribute to genderinequality. The article concludes that FFPs are shaped by the modus operandiof gender and development rather than transforming it.

This article situates Henrik Vigh’s concept of ‘chronic crisis’ in social disaster research andhumanitarian studies in order to explore how child survivors experience and address theprolonged consequences of disasters. The rationale for mobilising the concept of chroniccrisis is that it opens up possibilities for exploring the dynamics and multidimensionality ofdisasters and humanitarian responses to them. Using the example of nuclear disasters, thearticle looks at the enduring humanitarian initiatives of Italian non-governmental organisationsin recuperating Chernobyl and Fukushima children in Italy. It focuses on the opportunities,challenges and outcomes of these recuperative programmes, and underscores the non-linearityof survivor agency. The article argues that chronic crisis in nuclear disasters can simultaneouslycontribute to deterioration and ruination of survivors’ lives, catharsis, and hope. It is furtherargued that humanitarianism can shape chronic crisis either by exacerbating the alreadyprecariousconditions of human existence (through social discrimination and prejudice), orby alleviating survivor suffering (through social and cultural support).

Combing scholarship on decolonial feminism and feminist degrowth, this article offers a critique of neoliberal feminism in Feminist Foreign Policies (FFPs). Drawing on twenty-six expert interviews from nineteen countries of the Global South and seven policy documents of FFP states from the Global North, the article explores four critiques of FFPs: ‘monologue instead of dialogue’, ‘liberal democracy instead of popular democracy’, ‘liberal feminism instead of intersectional feminism’, and ‘profit instead of nature’. These critiques show that FFPs fail to build egalitarian rather than hierarchical relations between states, treat nature as a source of human life rather than as a commodity, acknowledge gender as only one of many other inequalities, and address cross-border inequalities through a global public authority. The article argues that FFP shortcomings present barriers to decolonizing the existing political, economic, social, and cultural structures of the state and the international system. 

This article explores the silenced population groups in FFPs and how silencing them sustains global gendered and racialized hierarchies among states due to the separation of state policies on ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic.’ It zooms into two groups of disadvantaged women in/from the global periphery – immigrant/refugee women selling sex and egg donors/surrogate mothers – to show how they are intimately connected to male sex buyers, male sex tourists, female egg receivers, intended parents, and reproductive tourists from FFP states. The article argues that silencing the interconnections of these groups sustains global hierarchies of ‘good’ FFP states from the global core helping ‘bad’ states in the global periphery. On case studies of Sweden and Germany (for commercial sex) and Spain and Mexico (for assisted reproduction), the article demonstrates that regardless of differences in their domestic policies on these matters, all four states silence these groups of people in their FFPs. It is argued that omitting these people (i) creates an impression that sexual and reproductive violence mostly happens abroad and is perpetrated by men in/from the global periphery; (ii) sustains the discourse that infertility is mostly a problem of the privileged, and mostly in the global core.

This article looks at how six states that adopted feminist foreign policies (FFPs) – Sweden, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Mexico and Spain – relate to each other, using an analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with diplomats and public officials from the six states. It connects the literature on social hierarchies in world politics with scholarship on identities in foreign policy and on masculinities in global politics, concluding that FFPs do not create solidarity but instead lead adopting states to engage in competition with each other. The article develops a concept of hegemonic feminisation to argue that competition between FFP states becomes possible because these states symbolically rank and evaluate each other based on their perceived performance on gender equality. More specifically, it is demonstrated that ranking and evaluation takes place through references to each state’s progress on gender equality before and after the adoption of FFP and to geographies of progress at home and abroad. The article argues that while this stratification of states leads to the emergence of multiple versions of hegemonic feminisation, these versions reproduce the civilisational distinctions between the Global North and the Global South. It concludes with the implications of hegemonic feminisation for the possibility of states becoming feminist.