Gendering South Africa's Foreign Policy: Toward a Feminist Approach?

Abstract

South Africa's leadership has sought ethical foreign policy since the advent of democracy. This foreign policy outlook focuses on the African continent and includes certain articulations of pro-gender justice norms. In this article, I reflect on the extent to which South Africa's foreign policy embraces these norms as part of its foreign apparatus and practices. It takes at its starting point the nascent literature on feminist foreign policy applied to South Africa, which shares similarities to countries in the Global North that claim a feminist orientation to foreign policy. Moreover, it takes account of gender dynamics at the domestic level and how they are manifested in foreign policy discourses and practices, particularly in the understanding and implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. Utilizing qualitative content analysis, this article provides context and meaning for how gender concerns have evolved in South Africa's foreign policy, including the role of certain norm entrepreneurs in shaping the gender narrative. The article concludes that the domestic context is important to shaping and limiting how a country can enact feminist foreign policy. Importantly, the South African case provides a Global South dimension to the nascent scholarship.

Feminist Security Studies in Europe: Beyond Western Academics’ Club

“…Researchers who study feminist foreign policy highlight not only the lack of gender lens in foreign policy analysis (e.g. Haastrup 2020), but also engage with the English School (e.g. Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond 2016) or postcolonial approaches (e.g.…”

Feminist Foreign Policy Studies in Europe

“…Equally, developing work on feminist foreign policy has had a strong Swedish bent, 2 reflecting its origins as a policy agenda Bergman-Rosamond, 2016, 2019;Bergman-Rosamond, 2020). However, there is also interest from the UK (Haastrup, 2020;Thomson, 2019b), and strong research connections between European and Australian academics (Aggestam and True, 2020). The implications of this dominance of Anglophone work and its location primarily in Western Europe are considered further in the final section.…”

“…Aggestam and True (2020) propose a framework for conducting a gendered analysis of foreign policy which allows for comparative research between states' polices. Work within Europe which looks to foreign policy elsewhere argues that it runs the risk of seeing gender only as the sex binary of man/woman (Haastrup, 2020) and that, echoing the discussion of enlargement above, there is a disjoint between the language on gender in foreign policy versus the reality of the domestic situation (Ibid;Thomson, 2019bThomson, , 2022. In a more theoretical vein, Achilleos-Sarll (2018) argues for a necessary conversation between postcolonialism and feminism in order to invigorate foreign policy analysis and highlight the way that foreign policy "should be re-conceptualised as gendered, sexualised and racialised" (45) in all contexts.…”

An Assessment of Women’s Participation in South Africa’s Foreign Policy Decision-Making and Execution

“…Past policies and practices, such as political parties' leadership representation, deliberately benefited men, particularly white ones. The dominant ideology of masculinity and male dominance has become a global problem that defies the socio-political and economic aspects of liberal democratic states (Haastrup, 2020;Mathur-Helm, 2005). This socio-cultural ideology identifies women as inferior to men in both classes and assigns them the status of minors in both the public and private spheres of existence (National Gender Policy Framework, 2003).…”

“…However, on the contrary, the role of women's participation both in the ministry and in the legislature continues to be contrasted with the participation of men (Haastrup, 2020). Perhaps the weakness in the concise paradigm is the promotion of gender equality to limit women to pure objects and the fact that gender quotas are an easy way to change feelings without improving their circumstances (Robinson & Gottlieb, 2021).…”