Karin Aggestam

In recent decades, there has been a global recognition of the co-constitutive relationship between gender justice and peaceful transformation of previously war-torn societies. This chapter investigates how “women-friendly states” have located their foreign policies within notions of gender equality and empowerment. It focuses on how feminist foreign policy is to all intents and purposes ethical and conducive to the transformation of conflict and peace. The case of Sweden is used as an empirical illustration being the first country to launch a feminist foreign policy and to actively advocate for the inclusion of more women in peacemaking. By way of conclusion, three remarks are made. First, core principles of feminist foreign policy and peace diplomacy are to be inclusive and dialogical. Second, feminist foreign policy stipulates a requirement to problematize essentialist notions of masculinity, femininity, and structural inequalities as a way to challenge traditional foreign policy practices. Third, the conduct of feminist-oriented foreign policy and transformative peace diplomacy has to be attentive to the ways gender interacts with other intersectional categories, such as class, ethnicity, and sexuality.