Read the European Journal of Politics and Gender's top 5 most downloaded articles published in 2022.
European Journal of Politics and Gender Most Read Articles
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This article interrogates the digital storytelling of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy. Drawing on scholarship on state feminism and digital diplomacy, it shows how digital platforms offer opportunities to reproduce narratives of state feminism through storytelling. We propose that digital diplomacy is used to advance feminist foreign policy through emotional sense-making that requires the telling of personal stories. The article provides a narrative analysis of the stories of women and girls that symbolise and embody feminist foreign policy, and the way in which they are communicated by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The article concludes by noting that the digital storytelling of feminist foreign policy allows the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to communicate to a wider digital audience. These stories, however, run the risk of obscuring the feminist ambitions of feminist foreign policy by insufficiently considering the gendered injustices that undergird the global gender order and by bringing together seemingly incompatible stories of feminist exceptionalism and success.
Existing scholarship points to gender patterns in diplomacy. This study examines such gender patterns in new ways, expecting women to be less likely to be ambassadors in states with more economic clout and in conflict-affected states, but more likely to serve as ambassadors in more gender-equal states. Most importantly, we examine whether these gender differences diminish over time. New data on ambassador appointments for Denmark, Sweden, the UK and the US spanning the period 1970–2015 reveal that whereas there are no gender differences with respect to postings to gender-equal states or states with domestic conflict, women are indeed less likely to be ambassadors in economically significant states and in states in inter-state conflict. Crucially, these patterns are not diminishing over time. This study opens up for future investigation into underlying mechanisms that explain the persistence of some gender patterns and the absence of others.
This article examines the incorporation of intersectional perspectives – using intersectionality as theory and method – into the Women, Peace and Security agenda. We conduct a content analysis of the ten Women, Peace and Security resolutions and 98 current Women, Peace and Security national action plans. The analysis shows that intersectionality has been integrated into the Women, Peace and Security agenda to only a limited extent, despite more recent trends towards referencing the term in policy documents. Even where intersectionality or intersectional concerns are referenced, these tend to reinforce hegemonic categorisations based on sex difference. We therefore argue that policy and practice ought to incorporate intersectionality in its view of both power and identities, as well as in its organising frameworks, and thereby take into consideration how intersecting systems of power affect lived experiences for groups and individuals, their access to justice, and their ability to exercise agency.
