Feminist Foreign Policy and the Pandemic: challenges and seizing opportunities

The study of international politics has for most of its established existence been engaged with questions of security centred on war and conflict, and with questions of distribution of power, across the world. Despite extensive endeavours made by feminist scholars in the study of international politics, the field continues to predominantly engage with the first set of questions. Thus, unsurprisingly, the study of foreign policy and its associated analyses has continued to follow the parochial trends. With the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic, we have increasingly assisted how the discourses linked to political leadership continue to follow a gendered and gendering pattern. On the ground, several studies have started to indicate how the pandemic, and its collateral effects, are disproportionally affecting the livelihoods of women. From the workplace to the private sphere, women appear to be getting the burden of a phenomenon which consequences are represented well beyond the health/medical spheres. Yet, as this paper aims to discuss, the ongoing pandemic and its aftermath, constitute a unique turning point to further the implementation of a feminist foreign policy. Feminist IR scholars have already established that FFP increases women’s rights and representation, whilst furthering change in the renegotiation of gendered structural hierarchies of power. Moreover, as the paper will discuss, and aims to be a contribution to, the ongoing pandemic is a privileged locus to further the inclusion of an ‘ethics of care’ in international politics and policies, as well as intersectional modes of analysis as foreign policy tool kits.