Power

Power is a critical concept in IR and central to all feminist work, including feminist approaches to foreign policy. Unpacking the discourse and practice of foreign policy, feminists demonstrate how foreign policy is deeply gendered. Yet, feminist IR and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) rarely engage in conversation. While both mainstream and critical FPA conceptualise power differently, gender remains a blind spot. If feminists understand power differently, the question arises whether feminist foreign policies also rest on alternative understandings of, and approaches to, power. This chapter investigates how ‘power’ is “put into discourse” in feminist foreign policy documents. It asks what conceptualisations of power (and what feminisms) are articulated and with what effects. Despite the mutability of the concept, power and especially empowerment is predominantly re-rooted through a neoliberal economic logic, eclipsing other, potentially more transformative variants, thus offering little hope of bringing into being a more liveable, just, and peaceful world.