Feminist Foreign Policy during War and Peace: Feminist Reflections with Prof. Cynthia Enloe and Dr. Soumita Basu
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Full series: Feminist Foreign Policy: Shaping Global Discourses
Transcript
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Hello there, you're listening to a podcast on feminist foreign policy produced for the Heinrich Böll Stiftung regional office in New Delhi. My name is Tishya Khillare and I'm a researcher based in New Delhi working on gender, security and feminist international relations. In this podcast, I speak with Professor Cynthia Enloe, research professor at the Clark University in Massachusetts, and Dr. Soumita Basu, Associate Professor of International Relations at the South Asian University in New Delhi.
Professor Enloe, is a feminist theorist and writer, well known for her work on gender and militarism, and feminist International Relations. She's the author of several well-known books, like Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Dr. Soumita Basu, is a highly published academic working on gender, international security and the United Nations. She's recently co-edited the book, New Directions in Women Peace and Security, and has previously served as a senior guest professor at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology, University of Würzburg, Germany.
In this podcast, we explore some dilemmas and tensions inherent in the making and advocacy of feminist foreign policy from a Global south and Global east perspective.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Thank you so much for joining me today, Professor Enloe and Dr. Basu. This is truly an honour for me to have both of you as guests on this podcast. Professor Enloe, I want to begin by discussing a topic that is on everybody's mind, which is the Ukraine Russia war. It's a war that is being fought in the age of feminist foreign policy and there are some countries with feminist foreign policies that are actively involved in Ukraine's defence efforts, for instance, Germany that is providing weapons to Ukraine. But there seems to be and perhaps has always been some amount of discomfort in feminist quarters towards such a militaristic stand. I want to ask you, what would a feminist response to the world look like? And is it unfeminist to support the Ukrainian war effort?
Professor Cynthia Enloe
Thank you. First of all, it's wonderful to be here with Soumita and Tishya with you and I'm delighted to be speaking to all your listeners. I've been myself having to really think hard, I think the Ukrainian war, every war should make us think hard. They're terrible things-wars, and Ukrainian war has made I think many feminists in many parts of the world, including in Ukraine, have to think very, very hard about the relationship between militarism, feminism, and States. And in my conversations, I've been very lucky, I've talked to a number of Ukrainian feminists, meaning I've been taught by them, not just me blah blahing, it’s them teaching me about Ukraine, and about Ukrainian feminism, which is alive and well. There's a strong Ukrainian feminist movement. And there has been for decades now. And what they generally say to me, I mean, all Ukrainian feminists are not the same. Just like all Indian feminists are not the same. There are lively debates amongst feminists in every country. But what generally, Ukrainian feminists and I've spoken to, who do a lot of work against violence against women who do a lot of work on peacebuilding and building civil society, so they really think about what peace looks like. What they've said to me is this is a war of self-defence. This is a war against an imperial aggressor. And they sort of shake their fingers at me and they're right and say, many of you in other countries have not really thought about colonialism, as perpetrated by the Russian government.
Most of us who study colonialism, and who are conscious of colonialism have spent zero time they say, and they're right, studying the ways in which Russian colonialism has worked. And as a result, most of us don't know what an imperial aggressor looks like when the imperial aggressor is Russia. And what does one do to defend oneself? And what the Ukrainian feminists have said to me, and it's been so helpful, and it’s made really made me think, which is always helpful. They've said, to say that we are absolutely committed to rolling back the Russian imperial aggression is not to say that we have given in 100% to militarism. That's not how militarism works, because you're doing all you can to survive as a sovereign nation-Ukraine, doesn't mean that you give into all militarized ideas. At the same time, as you're fighting this war of self-defence, you make sure that soldiers aren't privileged, you make sure that anybody's violence against women is challenged, and perpetrators held accountable, as the same time that you're fighting a war of self-defence, you think about rebuilding the country and city by city and village by village, with gender equity. So, their warning to all the rest of us is just because we as feminist support actively, with big risks, the war of self defence against Russian imperial aggression, doesn't mean we've given in to all forms of militarism and it means, we watch it carefully in all its forms, and we resist it every place where it doesn't defend Ukrainian sovereignty.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Thank you so much for that answer. Professor Enloe, I have to say it's very well put. And that's pretty much been my experience also of speaking with some Ukrainian feminist activist, journalists, politicians, and certainly feminist scholars who work on feminist foreign policy, they advocate very strongly against adopting a black and white approach towards militarism and feminist foreign policy. Dr. Basu, I want to pose the same question to you, but I also want to know your opinion about the situation back home. We don't have a feminist foreign policy as yet in India, but in the context of South Asia being one of the most militarized regions in the world, What can feminists’ engagement with India's foreign and defence policy especially look like?
Dr. Soumita Basu:
Thank you, Tishya. And yeah, to begin with, I absolutely agree with what Professor Enloe Cynthia has been saying about the Ukrainian efforts. And I think we should all be careful about kind of pronouncing from our comfortable offices or homes, that it's kind of non-feminist to support a war effort that's essentially defending themselves from unwarranted use of force. These sort of difficult policies of sort of security imperatives on the one hand and feminist ideas, they manifest in different ways, including in South Asia, as you mentioned. As far as India is concerned, it's been very interesting to follow the conversations on feminist foreign policy, but as you know, it has had several names in India, gender sensitive, gender-balanced foreign policy, mainstreaming gender and foreign policy, and of course, Kubernein initiative uses the term inclusive foreign policy. But specifically, with regard to your question, what I've also been struck by is the bottom-up approach developed by some of the civil society organizations in India. So, Center for Social Research highlights the need to bring in the perspectives of the world's most marginalized, and Kirthi Jayakumar from the Gender Security Project takes note, and I really liked this quotation, even though I'm not using the whole thing. I would encourage your listeners to go and read her writings on these subjects. And so, she says, and I quote, indigenous women in the global south have been doing feminist foreign policy for years, even generations, end quote, I mean, you could call it now it's called feminist foreign policy, but we see those ideas and practices, they've been there for a long time. What we find is that these kinds of normative ideas actually align with India stated, what India has been calling human centric foreign policy, and we saw this mentioned during the lunar mission, and certainly with this idea of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam which has been turned into the motto of ‘One Earth, One Family, One Future’ during India's G20 presidency, as well that's very much in keeping with sort of transnational feminist solidarity and ideas of global justice. But what we need to do as feminists is to kind of use all the expertise that we have from our research and experiences to then translate what this human centric point policy, what it actually looks like in practice, so basically turning the rhetoric into concrete policy. So, these are some of the ways in which we could look at well let's use the Indian Government’s term of a human centric foreign policy. I'm okay with it as long as the gender dimension of it is absolutely part of it.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Thank you so much, Dr. Basu for that answer and especially for bringing out an important point which is that feminist reflection on a lot of these issues that form the core of feminist foreign policy is not new, and has been going on since several decades, there is a rich history, vibrant history of debates, feminist debate in global south countries that is decades old on a lot of these issues. I want to turn to Professor Enloe with a related question, which is that as we see more and more governments adopting feminist foreign policies, and some of them are engaging with civil society organizations in their respective countries, on what should feminist foreign policy for that country look like? But do you see any differences emerging in what civil society advocates of feminist foreign policy imagine it doing and what the makers of feminist foreign policy want it to do?
Professor Cynthia Enloe
Thank you, thank you very much. I think if not unique, at least one of the distinctive characteristics of the processing of making feminist foreign policy and evaluating it, and then relaunching it and refining it, is the entry of civil society groups. I mean, there's always lobbying, I mean, that's not new in foreign, any kind of foreign policy, whether it has to do with mining investment, or whatever. But I think in making and trying to make and reassess as Soumita said, the actual operation of feminist foreign policy, the transparency, and the participation of civil society groups that do gender equity work is crucial. This is feminist groups that do housing politics, feminist groups that do health care politics, feminist groups that do child welfare politics, because these groups, these civil society groups all over the world, country by country, and certainly in India, they are the ones who've developed gender analytical skills. I'm gonna say that again, for your listeners, gender analytical skills. It is not enough, and we all know this one, and probably your listeners all know it, but we'll say it again, it is not enough to be nice to make feminist foreign policy. It is not enough to have daughters that you care about, I've heard too many senior men say I have daughters, so, I know. No, you don't. That you have to have skills, and gender analytical skills. That is the skills it takes to do gender equity analysis of our new housing development, to do gender equity analysis of a proposed agricultural aid program. Those are skills, they have to be taught, and a lot… and they have to be learned and they have to be practiced, and they have to be refined. And it is civil society groups that over decades, in India, and in other places, as well have taught themselves and been taught how to do gender analysis of budgets, most people in civil services and in foreign diplomatic corps have not a clue about how to do a gender analysis of a proposed budget, whether it be for aid or for security, or for border control. They couldn't do a gender analytical study of a budget. Well, if you can't do a gender analytical study for a budget, you can't do anything. Budgets are everything. So, I would say that that one of the great values of making sure and constantly assessing whether it's true, you know, walking the walk, not just talking to talk about whether feminist civil society activist groups that work in particular policy areas, and have these gender analytical skills- are they inside the discussion rooms when budgets are being assessed? When programs are being proposed? Are they there? Are they not? And my guess is they usually aren't there. So, gender analytical skills have to be taught. They have to be taught starting in university and certainly in graduate school and in any foreign service training program. And they usually aren't. And that means you cannot get feminist foreign policy because you don't have, we and you, certainly we in the US but others too, we don't have the skills, and then you just get talking to talk but no clue about how to walk the walk.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
I completely agree. I mean, the importance of gender analytical skills as you put it, it really rests with the civil society and that kind of engagement and conversation is so important. Dr. Basu, we've seen some conversations with the civil society taking place with respect to feminist foreign policy in countries like Germany, I think Canada is also going through several rounds of conversations. What is your take, do you see any contrast between what the civil society has to say? And what gets translated into these frameworks, these documents that come out from Governments?
Dr. Soumita Basu:
Yes, certainly there are differences, because each type of organization is also working with the specific imperatives that they have, and it's not just that the governments have their imperative civil society organizations also with increasing sort of ngo-ization, or professionalization of these bodies, they also have certain imperatives. So, I think yeah, what finally gets translated into that policy document that we can then download from a government website is a reflection of all these various convergences and divergences. The contradiction is not just between civil society, you know, what the civil society wants and what the government wants. But across various contexts, we see that there are differences within civil society organizations, as well, and within government agencies. And there are all these intersecting connections, I mean, I get reminded of Cynthia's reference to Jackson Pollock painting in that wonderful, wonderful, early chapter, and so everything then starts looking like that. So, it's very hard to pinpoint that this came from civil society, and this came from the government, because these all come through, I mean, compromise is a sort of negative word, but let's say negotiation of different ways of, you know, thinking how a potential feminist foreign policy can be realized.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Thank you. I think that brings me to another contradiction, which I think results from a similar kind of black and white thinking when it comes to feminist foreign policy, which is that some people criticize governments for adopting a feminist foreign policy without having set their house in order when it comes to various aspects of gender equality. You know, Mexico, for instance, is a country that has been struggling with extreme forms of violence for many decades against women, and has a feminist foreign policy. So the argument there being made is that you know, well you have a feminist foreign policy that hopefully you will use to pursue feminist goals outside of your country, but what about the situation inside your country? Right? So how do you see Dr. Basu, this relationship between the domestic and the international playing out when it comes to feminist foreign policy? Do countries need to have their house in order? Does there need to be a linear progression from domestic to international? Or can countries work on both of these aspects simultaneously? And in fact, do these aspects speak to each other?
Dr. Soumita Basu:
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we can think of this in linear terms that, you know, one has to happen before the next one does, because then we are kind of reproducing this binary of international and domestic. And it's not just the international and domestic, we see this happening simultaneously across sort of different thematic areas of foreign policy, right. And these can appear to be contradictory. For example, you know, you can pitch trade expansion against environmental protection, you can put security against human rights. And all of this is in the name of national interest, right, very sort of contradictory ideas of what needs to be done. And there's, of course gender dimension to all of this. So, I mean, the first thing is that as scholars and citizens, we then need to be paying attention to who benefits from particular iterations of foreign policy. So that aspect of whose agenda becomes kind of quite important. But also, I would say that the government's also recognize this to some extent, and I'll take a quick example relating to my own work on India's engagement with women peace and security agenda at the Security Council. And I think your listeners would have a general understanding of India's stance in the Security Council. And it stays clear of domestic issues usually, but it has in the open debates referred to women's political participation in the country, especially at the Panchayat level. So unsurprisingly, when the achievements these are highlighted, you know, when it comes to internal concerns, then all the countries are very careful about sort of managing what can or cannot be discussed at the International Forum. So again, I mean, this will need to be understood in sort of specific empirical context because all of this is happening simultaneously.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Professor Enloe your take on this, how can governments ensure that their domestic as well as external aspects are balanced and what is the role of civil society when it comes to such a situation? Are there things that they need to be vigilant about?
Professor Cynthia Enloe
So, I think it's how a government frames it if the Mexican government, and we're about to have presidential elections and legislative elections in Mexico, so things will change. I'll come back to that in a minute. If one genuinely, authentically, seriously, all of those can be measured pursues a feminist foreign policy, it can be used, in fact, to strengthen the internal efforts to reduce violence against women, to narrow pay equity, to improve women's likelihood of dignity at work. That is, if one's genuine about one's feminist foreign policy, it means that it's a single state, and if that state really maps out what a feminist foreign policy looks like, and genuinely put some muscle behind it- ‘feminist muscle’, it can strengthen law enforcement, health ministry, education ministry, are efforts to receive better outcomes for women internally. If a government pursues feminist foreign policy externally, while neglecting the conditions of women internally, they lose all credibility. And no government wants to pursue a foreign policy that is the object of ridicule, it's so riddled with hypocrisy. So there's real incentive, I just want to come back because I may not get to it, or I may not think of it, and that is political parties matter. It does matter which party is in power, whether it be in Canada, or in Mexico, or in Germany, or in India, or any other government, or any other political system where there are efforts made to increase the weight of feminist foreign policy in the States policy, political parties’ matter. That means that elections are more than we oftentimes give weight to when we talk about feminist foreign policy, but that's domestic, that's domestic voters, making choices about which governments are fairer, which governments are more effective, which governments will provide more genuine security. And that's where the domestic actually guides the foreign policy, as Soumita has said, we better think about the interaction between the domestic and the foreign, or we'll never be able to sustain feminist foreign policy.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Thank you. I'm going to sneak in one question, since you were mentioning political parties. I’m wondering you know, in the case of Sweden, of course, there was a center-right party voted into power and then we saw the rollback of feminist foreign policy happening there. But I'm sure all of us understand that, that's not a singular case, and is likely to happen elsewhere as well. How important do you think political consensus building is for starting work on feminist foreign policy?
Dr. Soumita Basu:
Well, the question came from Professor Enloe's response, and I think I've been following feminist foreign policy for some time now. And it's interesting to see how much of feminist foreign policy actually relies on what the government, the regime at the helm, what they decide what that feminist foreign policy is going to look like. And therefore, ultimately, it's really important, as you said, that there is a consensus, both at domestically and at the international level in terms of normatively as well, in terms of what we need to carry forward ideas of gender justice, gender equality, and so on, because that is what will bolster ideas about feminist foreign policy in different parts of the world. So we need to come at that point where, you know, governments can come and go, but basic ideas about, you know, what a foreign policy that is responsive to the interests of its citizens, what it should look like. And so Absolutely, we need that consensus both at the domestic and the international level. I mean, one more point, which is that we have to be very careful that the consensus is not like closed off, because that needs to be constantly discussed, there are going to be different ideas about what that consensus should look like, as well. So it's a kind of always work in progress.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
That brings me to my last question, Dr. Basu, I'd like you to come in on it first. We've seen in the past in the case of women peace and security, but also now in the case of feminist foreign policy, that it's often accused of being a Western import and Professor Enloe had earlier mentioned the credibility challenge for governments when they're launching and implementing their feminist foreign policies. But you know, the feminist advocates back home in global south countries also face this created credibility challenge, right? Is feminist foreign policy of a Western import? How can advocates of feminist foreign policy in the global south establish ownership of feminist foreign policy?
Dr. Soumita Basu:
we have such a vibrant feminist movement, not only in India, but in much of South Asia. So, to suggest that these ideas are being imported from the West, it's awfully problematic and convenient. And so if anything, I mean, we do own it. I mean, these ideas are based on solid experiences from the ground. I mean, even with the women peace and security agenda, we know that South Asian feminists, although there is a lot of difference in their stance on the WPS agenda, their experiences were very much part of the evolution of the agenda itself. And so with I mean, I'll go back to my reference to Kirthi Jayakumar, and say that, you know, these feminist ideas about foreign policy, I mean, we've been, it might not have been called that, but feminists advocates in the region have looked into different ways of conducting international affairs, and that is foreign policy, particularly within the South Asian context as well. So, I think that needs to be kind of put on the table pretty clearly that this is ours. And I mean, I suppose the issue is calling it feminist and somehow, whenever you use the F word, it just seemed to be a western idea that, you know, whoever actually works on this way to recognize identifies themselves as feminists, we know that it's a very ground-up set of ideas.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Professor Enloe, your thoughts on this artificially created credibility challenge for global south and Global east feminists when it comes to feminist foreign policy?
Professor Cynthia Enloe
It's insulting to local activist to say that they're not developing in India, in Pakistan, in Sri Lanka, throughout what is now referred to as the Global South. It's insulting for those, by those people who claim that something, whatever it is, and it's usually progressive, it's usually for progressive change, it's usually for justice, it's usually for equity. That's what they're really against.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Well, that makes for an even stronger case for feminist civil society to be more actively engaged on conversations not only on feminist foreign policy, but also on foreign policy, and bring the gender analysis that we were talking about to the table. That brings us to the end of this conversation. Thank you so much, Professor Enloe and Dr. Basu for joining me for this very enlightening conversation. It has been a privilege to speak with you both today. Thank you so much.
Dr. Soumita Basu:
Thank you so much Tishya
Professor Cynthia Enloe
Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.
Dr. Tishya Khillare:
Thank you.