Swedish Foreign Policy Feminisms: Women, Social Democracy and Capitalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article outlines the historical distinctiveness of the feminist foreign policy (FFP) Sweden has pursued since 2014. To highlight the particularity of the current FFP, we make use of two methodological moves: de-framing and counterpoint. De-framing helps us highlight the importance for the current FFP of a moment in the beginning of the 1990s, when a feminism naturalising capitalist arrangements came to ascendency both transnationally and in Sweden. Counterpoint entails juxtaposing the present FFP with a decidedly different Swedish FFP project from the late 1960s and 1970s – the project of the prominent Social Democrat Birgitta Dahl to gain official Swedish support for socialist and progressive governments and national liberation movements with an eye to how such support would also serve the cause of women’s liberation. The comparative historical perspective the article brings, allows us to understand why Swedish feminist foreign policy has never been as explicitly and strongly articulated as it is today while its transformative vision of justice and equality on a global scale has become strikingly weak and narrow.