Feminist Foreign Policy as a Case of Governance Feminism: Neoliberalism, Militarism, and Women as “Agents of Change”

Abstract

A growing number of Western states are positioning feminism as the path to a more peaceful and prosperous world. In this article, we examine Canada's feminist foreign policy agenda as an instance of governance feminism, whereby the normative commitment to gender equality is pursued by governing women's agency. We conduct a qualitative discursive analysis of eleven key policy documents spanning development, peace, and security and trade, unpacking how expanding roles for women are framed as the solution to both gender inequality and a range of global issues. Although feminist foreign policy could improve the lives of some, it largely adopts the universalizing conceits of liberal feminism, rendering it blind to diversity and inequality among women and gender-diverse persons within and beyond Canada. By focusing on guiding individual action, Canada's feminist policies distract from broader global politico-economic structures that “agents of change” confront while also sustaining global hierarchies and militarism.

Resumen

Existe un número creciente de estados occidentales, los cuales están posicionando el feminismo como el camino hacia un mundo más pacífico y próspero. En este artículo, estudiamos la agenda en materia de política exterior feminista de Canadá como una instancia de feminismo de gobernanza, en el que la agencia de las mujeres gobernantes persigue el compromiso normativo con la igualdad de género. Llevamos a cabo un análisis cualitativo discursivo de once documentos de política clave que abarcan el desarrollo, la paz y la seguridad y el comercio, y desentrañamos cómo la expansión de los roles de las mujeres se enmarca como la solución tanto a la desigualdad de género como a una serie de problemas globales. Aunque la política exterior feminista podría llegar mejorar la vida de algunas personas, adopta en gran medida los conceptos universalizadores del feminismo liberal, lo que lo invisibiliza la diversidad y la desigualdad entre las mujeres y las personas de género diverso dentro y fuera de Canadá. Las políticas feministas por parte de Canadá, debido a que se centran en guiar la acción individual, desvían la atención de las estructuras político económicas globales más amplias a las que se enfrentan los «agentes de cambio», al tiempo que sostienen las jerarquías globales y el militarismo.

Résumé

Un nombre croissant d’États occidentaux présentent le féminisme comme la condition d'avènement d'un monde plus pacifique et prospère. Dans cet article, nous examinons le programme de politique étrangère féministe du Canada tel un exemple de féminisme de gouvernance, qui permet à l'agence des gouvernantes de poursuivre l'engagement normatif à l’égalité des genres. Nous menons une analyse discursive qualitative de onze documents politiques clés couvrant le développement, la paix et la sécurité ainsi que le commerce, afin de décortiquer le cadrage de l’élargissement du rôle des femmes en tant que solution aux inégalités entre les genres ainsi qu’à un éventail d'autres problématiques mondiales. Bien que la politique étrangère féministe puisse améliorer la vie de certaines personnes, elle adopte largement le concept universalisant du féminisme libéral, ce qui lui cache la diversité et l'inégalité entre les femmes et les personnes de diverses identités de genre au Canada et au-delà. En se concentrant sur l'orientation des actions individuelles, les politiques féministes canadiennes détournent l'attention des structures politico-économiques mondiales plus larges auxquelles les « acteurs du changement » sont confrontés tout en entretenant le militarisme et les hiérarchies mondiales.

Feminist foreign policy, gender equality, discourse analysis

Política exterior feminista, igualdad de género, análisis del discurso

politique étrangère féministe, égalité des genres, analyse discursive

Introduction

Amid democratic backsliding and the spread of right-wing populism globally, some states are making a normative commitment to feminism in their foreign policies. Following Sweden's bold move in 2014, Canada alongside many other countries,¹ integrated feminist principles into their foreign policies. Despite the promise of this important phenomenon, Canada's feminist commitments are far from fulfilled by its foreign policy choices. For example, Canada opposes the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Broadhead and Howard 2019) and rhetorically condemns human rights abuses but continues to sell weapons to offending states (Vucetic 2017; Gallagher 2024). Canada invests in neoliberal development initiatives that offer little material change to those they are supposed to help (Parisi 2020). While these activities may demonstrate the political and institutional challenges of pursuing feminist goals, they also expose a disconnect between representation and reality, rhetoric, and action (Thompson and Clement 2019; Aggestram and True 2020). As feminist IR scholars have long emphasized the need to understand how gender “makes the world go round” (Enloe 1989; Peterson 1992; Whitworth 1997; Shepherd 2008), the study of feminist foreign policy is a valuable exercise in examining what happens when feminist knowledge enters mainstream governmental policy.

In this article, we analyze Canada's Feminist Foreign Policies (FFP) as a case of governance feminism that spans development, trade, and security, positioning Canada as a feminist actor in international affairs. Between 2017 and 2024, the Canadian government released a set of policy documents in each of these sectors in which feminism, gender equality, and the empowerment of women and girls were highlighted as normative goals. FFP is a strategy for governing Canada's foreign policy “ethically.” Indeed, the turn to feminism builds on Canada's previous “ethical foreign policy” turns, such as human security in the 1990s (Smith and Ajadi 2020). However, it is also a more expansive enterprise, which challenges the divide between domestic and international policy and changes that occur within state borders (the traditional domain of political science) and those which take place beyond them (international relations).

As a governmental strategy, Canada's FFP seeks to advance gender equality through what Michel Foucault (1991) termed the “conduct of conduct.” Strategies of liberal and, in this case, liberal feminist governance are concerned with diverse methods of influencing behavior in the “government of the state,” “the government of the self,” and in the “government of souls and lives” (Foucault 1991, p. 87). Studies in governmentality highlight the relationship between power and knowledge, focusing on how the representation of an issue, or the production of truth about it, enables specific methods of governing it (Foucault 1991, p. 102–104). We contend that feminist foreign policy is a strategic plan to shape the conduct of (mainly female) populations and individuals by working through their “desires, aspirations, interests and beliefs” (Dean 1999, p. 18). As Prugl (2015, p. 79) has argued, concerning diversity management and gender mainstreaming programs, “Women's difference is no longer limited to their reproductive capacities and the productivity of their bodies but is now recognized for its potential to deliver a range of ends, from profit and efficiency to growth and security. The institutional practices and strategic policy guidelines of feminist foreign policy seek to transform “disorderly” and “unproductive” states, communities, and peoples into orderly, productive subjects, and women are the central agents to make it happen.

While there is much to celebrate about the rise of feminist foreign policy, we are particularly interested in how it functions as a political rationality to harness women's agency. We argue that Canada's FFP envisions global gender inequality as a problem largely derived from the lack of opportunities, participation, and inclusion of women in economic, development, and security sectors from which they have been historically excluded. As a neoliberal project to guide women's productivity, FFP relies heavily on strategies of role equity to expand employment and business opportunities for some women, improve protections from and responsiveness to harassment and abuse, and partner with civil society to increase women's involvement in these sectors. Thus, women and girls are responsibilized as subjects whose agency can be harnessed to mitigate not only the problem of gender inequality but also to strengthen trade, development, and security.

The inclusion of feminist knowledge in governing institutions has been subject to critique in many contexts (Halley et al. 2018; Paterson and Scala 2020; Boer Cueva et al. 2023). Indeed, the term “governance feminism” (Halley 2006) highlights growing critical attention to “every form in which feminists and feminist ideas exert a governing will within human affairs…[including] efforts feminists have made to become incorporated into state, state-like, and state-affiliated power” (Halley et al. 2018 p. ix-x). Rather than challenging existing power structures, governance feminism “piggybacks on existing forms [of] power, intervening and participating in them” even while sometimes conflicting with them (Halley 2006, 340). In this vein, Canada's FFP, while having emancipatory goals, largely works within the remit of existing neoliberal and international security arrangements, treating gender equality as almost synonymous with women's agency and inclusion in institutions and policy practices. Many plans and proposals are fixated on a “neoliberal understanding of equality that emphasizes equal opportunities, self-reliance, and individual responsibility, thereby limiting how social justice might be achieved” (Paterson and Scala 2020, p. 50). As FFP is inspired by governance feminism, its main goal is to add women to existing exploitative supply chains and coercive security institutions in the hope that their presence will improve and transform them.

Our study involves a qualitative, discursive analysis of 11 key government documents that directly or indirectly contribute to Canada's feminist foreign policy (FFP) agenda and span the development, trade, and security sectors. The development policies include the Feminist International Assistance Policy (2017, updated in 2021), Global Affairs Canada A Canadian Approach to Innovative Financing for Sustainable Development (Canada 2019c), Global Affairs Canada Policy for Civil Society Partnerships for International Assistance—A Feminist Approach (Canada 2023b); trade policies include Canada's Trade Policy (2019 and 2023), Canada's Innovative Finance Programs (Canada 2022), and Trade and Gender in free trade agreements: the Canadian approach (2023); and defence policies include Strong, Secure and Engaged: Canada's National Defence Policy (2019) and the defence policy review Our North Strong and Free (2024). Finally, we included three policies related to all three areas, including Global Affairs Canada Policy on Gender Equality (Canada 2017c) and Canada's National Action Plan on Women Peace and Security (2017–2022) and Canada's National Action Plan on Women Peace and Security (2023–2029). Together, these documents capture Canada's FFP priorities, stretching from 2017 to 2024.

To analyze these documents, we employ a post-structural analysis. As post-structural analysts have demonstrated, foreign policy is the discursive politics of identity through which states and “the international” are constituted (Doty 1993; Campbell 1998; Shepherd 2015). Post-structuralism adopts a critical ethos to cast light on those who are marginalized in international affairs in both theory and practice by paying attention to the relationship between power and knowledge, interpretation, and the representation of actors by those in positions of (state) authority. Building on this work, we examine the discursive field of Canada's FFP regime as a case of governance feminism. By analyzing representations of women's agency concerning trade, development, and security, we expose some important limitations of FFP as a transformative project to expand gender equality and gender justice. Thus, we are interested in how feminist knowledge is made practical for governmental administration, how Canada discursively represents feminist policy commitments, and the politics that inform these representations (Hall 1997, p. 6).

Our method involved a two-phase process. The first step was a document analysis. This step has been referred to as a “descriptive reading” whereby the limits of the discourse are mapped and nodal points are identified (Shepherd 2008). Key nodal points (sometimes referred to as floating signifiers) we identified included “gender equality,” “women's rights,” “feminist,” “gender integration,” “sexual violence,” “poverty,” “human rights,” “agents of change,” “empower/empowerment,” “participation,” and “partnerships,” “diversification.” The second phase was an iterative discourse analysis, otherwise called a “dialogical reading” (Shepherd 2008), where we consider the “webs of meaning” (Jeffreys 2014, 588) that connect the key nodal points. In this stage, we revisited the documents to consider how the thematic objectives were conceptualized and operationalized across the policy areas and what connections and context make these nodal points intelligible. We considered what possibilities were closed off in the discourse (Dunn and Neuman 2016, p. 266) to identify shortcomings in Canada's FFP. To build our analysis, we traced the representation of women's agency and gender-focused strategies.

We begin by situating Canada's FFP in extant literature and historical context. In section two, we trace the representation of women as “agents of change” in policy narratives about economic opportunities, participation, and inclusive governance. Here we demonstrate that “agents of change” is a dominant nodal point in Canada's FFP discourse and situate it as an instance of (neoliberal) governance feminism. Although feminists have debated liberal states as agents of change for gender equality (Duriesmith 2018; Harrington 1992), we are interested in how the liberal state (of Canada) transfers the burden of change onto women. In section three we discuss some of the problems and assumptions embedded within women as “agents of change,” focusing on the limitations of adding more women to security institutions in the absence of cultural transformation and the volunteerism and elitism of some FFP proposals. In the final section, we engage with de-colonial scholarship to discuss how Canada's FFP perpetuates global hierarchies by refusing to confront the neo-colonial structures that sustain gendered exploitation and contribute to the normalization of coercion and militarism in Canada's peace and security architecture.

Canada and the Global Feminist Foreign Policy Landscape

Beginning in 2015, Canada launched a series of domestic initiatives akin to the pursuit of “state feminism” in Sweden and Norway (Aggestam and True 2020; Skjelsbæk and Tryggestad 2020). These included establishing gender parity in cabinet, increasing the appointment of female judges, departmentalizing and funding the status of women's portfolio, and implementing a national strategy to address gender-based violence. Then, in 2017, Canada became a norm leader (Davies and True 2017) in the emerging sensation of feminist foreign policy. In an address to Parliament in 2017, then-foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland declared that “we are safer and more prosperous…when more of the world shares Canadian values. These values include feminism and the promotion of the rights of women and girls” (Canada 2017a). As Chapnick (2019) argues, this was a watershed moment in which Canada's global persona took on a “feminist” thematic. As Freeland asserted a year later, “Canada's feminist foreign policy is founded on a simple objective: we seek to enable women and men, boys and girls around the world to have an equal voice and equal rights; to benefit from equal opportunities; and to live in equal safety and security" (Global Affairs Canada 2017, n.p.). By defining a new foreign policy identity, Canada produced a picture of itself, its values, and a vision of how the world ought to work. Indeed, Canada's normative turn towards feminism was a discursive shift through which it constituted a new (or rebranded) political identity in international affairs (see also Jezierska and Towns 2018).

However, to date, there has been no system-wide analysis of Canada's FFP. Analyses have focused on FFP in terms of Canada's Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) (Thompson and Clement 2019; Tiessen et al. 2020; Morton et al. 2020; Rao and Tiessen 2020; Aylward and Brown 2020; Parisi 2020) or have identified chasms between feminist rhetoric and actions in international trade and treaty choices (Vucetic 2017; Thomson 2020), but without delving into feminist policies themselves. Yet, there is evidence of “whole-of-government feminist foreign policy” beyond the FIAP. This is evident by the multiple gender chapters² that Canada has negotiated in bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, statements in the 2017 national defence policy and 2024 defence review, The Elsie Initiative, Canada's 2017–2022 (Canada 2017b) and 2023–2029 (Canada 2024a) national action plans on Women Peace, and Security (WPS) and the appointment of a WPS Ambassador (Jacqueline O'Neill) in 2019. Although the WPS agenda has stood alone as its own object of analysis (Kirby and Shepherd 2016; Basu 2016), there is value in thinking through how it contributes to wider foreign policy agendas. Furthermore, a multi-sector analysis responds to the government's own declarations that “Canada's foreign policy approach to international relations is feminist” (Global Affairs 2017), that “all of our efforts to advance our diplomatic, trade, security, and development priorities must take into account the needs of women and girls” (Global Affairs Canada 2018), that “women's rights are human rights” and that “these rights are at the core of our foreign policy” (Canada 2021). Thus, a holistic analysis of Canada's FFP agenda provides an important empirical contribution to the emerging literature on FFP in international affairs.

In addition to an empirical contribution, we seek to make a theoretical contribution to explorations of the normative politics of feminist foreign policy through a post-structuralist framework informed by governmentality studies. The normative shift towards feminist foreign policy has produced different state policy agendas, while nonetheless sharing some key features. Drawing on the framework introduced by Margot Wallström, Sweden's Foreign Policy Minister, who first proposed it, Thompson and Clement define Feminist Foreign Policy as:

The policy of a state that defines its interactions with other states and movements in a manner that prioritizes gender equality and enshrines the human rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups, allocates significant resources to achieve that vision, undertakes robust and public analysis to document the impacts of its implementation, and seeks through its implementation and reflection, to disrupt male-dominated power structures across all of its levers of influence (aid, trade, defense, and diplomacy), informed by the voices of feminist activists, groups and movements (2019, 78).

This definition expresses a normative commitment to gender equality and to challenging the power structures that privilege male dominance. Indeed, feminist scholars have debated how FFP can enrich theorizations of international ethics by exposing injustices such as gender discrimination, systemic inequalities, the lack of women's representation in key sectors and decision-making, and gender-based violence (Aggestam et al. 2019, p. 24). Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond (2016) argue for a normative reorientation of foreign policy around liberal cosmopolitan ideals, as exemplified by the English School. While we agree that FFP is a normative enterprise that can advance a set of ethical concerns, the ethical shift to feminist foreign policy may reproduce binaries such as universalism vs particularism and inside vs outside. Importantly, Robinson (2019, p. 3) argues that the positioning of FFP in terms of cosmopolitanism is a means of equating the ““the ethical” with the cosmopolitan outside.” This equation risks reproducing gendered and global relations of power and domination by reasserting the very universalism that upholds patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. It is important to consider this possibility because, as Rutazibwa (2014) argues, ethical claims have long advanced the idea of “civilizing” distant others. Furthermore, the contemporary international assistance agenda employs the language of autonomy and “self-liberation” while advancing ever more exacting interventions (Chandler 2003, p. 10).

Building on the work of other feminist scholars who have analyzed the FIAP, we theorize that Canada's FFP employs intersectionality rhetorically but not as a framework.³ This risks reproducing the universalizing conceits of liberal feminism and rendering it blind to diversity and inequality among women and gender-diverse persons (Morton et al. 2020; Parisi 2020; Rao and Tiessen 2020). Rather, as an instance of governance feminism, it seeks to harness women's agency to advance Canada's trade, security, and reputational position in the hierarchy of states. Following recent work, we contend that a transformative FFP must do more than harness women's agency. It must approach gender equality as a necessarily intersectional project (Achilleos-Sarll et al. 2022) to create policy that accounts for how power functions through racialization, sexuality, gender diversity, ability, and geography in the context of both colonial legacies (Nylund et al. 2023; Bergman Rosamond et al. 2023) and international hierarchies (Zhukova et al. 2023). Thus, although feminist IR theory can help to “expose the use of gendered binaries in constituting ethical obligation in foreign and security policy practice” (Aggestam et al. 2019), we are attentive to how FFP can be mobilized as a “feminist will to empower” (Canada 2021, 60) that seeks to guide and govern women in ways that may reproduce inequalities and Western power and authority.

In the next section, we unpack FFP's will to empower, focusing on how it conceives women as “agents of change.” As a liberal strategy of governance, FFP is advanced largely through role equity strategies structured around women as entrepreneurs of the self whose participation in the private and security sectors can create new areas of growth and change.

Positioning Women as “agents of change”

Canada's FFP has strived to achieve the normative goal of gender equality through initiatives that are aligned with liberal feminist objectives (Morton et al. 2020). Importantly, these objectives are framed in terms of the agential capacity of women individually or collectively to bring about the feminist agenda that the Canadian government normatively calls for. A frequent characterization is the claim that women and girls are “powerful agents of change” (Canada 2021, p. vi, 1, 2, 29, 55, 62, 75) in which women's agential capacity is the key to unlocking emancipation. As asserted in the FIAP, “when women and girls are given equal opportunities to succeed, they can be powerful agents of change—driving stronger economic growth, encouraging greater peace and cooperation, and improving the quality of life for their families and their communities” (Canada 2021 vii, emphasis added). The 2017 National Action Plan (NAP) on Women, Peace and Security notes that “Canada's Feminist Foreign Policy requires engaging men and boys, alongside women and girls, as agents and beneficiaries of change in peace and gender equality” (Canada 2017b). The 2024 NAP claims that “by centering the expertise and agency of diverse women and gender-diverse people, and valuing the knowledge and expertise of partners around the world…the Government of Canada aims to proactively dismantle structures that perpetuate systemic racism” (Executive Summary 2024, n.p.). Across FFP, three themes emerge that capitalize on the idea of women's agency, including (1) economic opportunities; (2) participation and inclusive governance; and (3) partnerships with civil society. These themes illustrate Canada's FFP as a form of feminist neoliberalism by instrumentalizing gender equality for economic growth (Parisi 2020). FFP is “smart economics” in governing women to create their own economic development and as subjects who are responsible for fulfilling Canada's policy goals.

Economic Opportunities

Canada's FFP highlights opportunities for women to develop new skills and access employment markets, tied to short-term projects that are consistent with new norms of development assistance. Key examples from the FIAP include an initiative in Saré Souma, Casamance, Senegal, where women were trained in beekeeping, honey harvesting, and production techniques. The policy highlights that “Besides the greater financial autonomy their business success has given them, these women have acquired a more equal social position in their families and communities” (Canada 2021, p. 41). Another initiative is the Canada-United Nations Development Programme facility (2009–2020) that installed cisterns and community ponds to gather rainwater for community gardens used by local women to grow and sell vegetables at local markets (Canada 2021, p. 46). While cautioning that “social change takes time,” as espoused in the Global Affairs Policy on Gender Equality, these examples assert that guiding women's agency to take up new market activities elevates their social value. Evidence to support this assumed outcome is not provided.

Canada's Trade Policy (2019) focuses on encouraging the entrepreneurship of women and diverse groups to advance gender equality. Specifically, economic opportunity is linked to “diversification,” defined as “making sure all regions of Canada and all members of our society can compete and succeed on international markets” (Canada 2019b, p. 2). The trade policy asserts that women's empowerment depends on “diversifying” export owners, and it champions women-led small and medium enterprises (SMSs) that export Canadian products as these rose from 7.4 percent in 2011 to 15 percent in 2017 (2019, p. 132–133). “Women-owned” and “Indigenous-owned” SMEs are thus not only central to the “diversification agenda” of the Government of Canada, but diversity is marketed as a resource of comparative advantage.

For security and defence, the focus is on improving the military's culture and competitiveness to make it a space of opportunity for women, Indigenous persons, and other marginalized groups. As DND notes, “We need a military that looks like Canada” (Canada 2019a, p. 20). To achieve this goal, they commit to “attracting, recruiting and retaining more women in the Canadian Armed Forces across all ranks and promoting women into senior leadership positions…and providing a work environment where women are welcomed, supported and respected” (p. 20–21). The policy positions the security sector is a space of economic opportunity and innovation on par with the private sector.

Participation and Inclusive Governance

Women's economic and social participation is advanced as the central driver of equality. In the FIAP, Canada purports to “passionately defend the rights of women and girls so they can participate fully in society” (Canada 2021, p. ii). As the minister asserts, “the core action area for the new policy—which will be integrated across all areas—is gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls” (Canada 2021, p. iii). The FIAP stresses that the lack of labor, property, and inheritance rights are root causes of women's economic marginalization and exclusion (Canada 2021, p. 39). Equal rights are critical and not to be dismissed. However, the bulk of attention is devoted to advising women to be more strategic. Asserting that “women are catalysts of change” it is women's leadership that can spark “reforms that benefit everyone” (Canada 2021, p. 54). It thus calls for more women to participate in politics by holding elected office and taking on positions of influence to drive reforms (Canada 2021, p. 54). While women's rights are noted, the claim is that women exercising greater leadership and ambition will elevate their social status.

The State of Trade Policy (Canada 2019b) focuses on inviting women and Indigenous entrepreneurs to participate in global trade networks. It claims Canada's international engagement “has led the way in advancing gender equality and women's empowerment” (Canada 2019b, p. 2). Canada's approach to free trade, asserts the importance of labor chapters that include “programs and policies that address the gender wage gap and barriers to the full participation of women in the workforce” (Canada 2023a, n.p.).

A similar approach is evident concerning women's participation in the security sector. For example, Canada contributes to a Columbian landmine clearance initiative that employs women and pays fair wages (Canada 2021, p. 63–64). The mine clearance program is touted as an initiative that helps “ensure gender equality is part of post-conflict reform” (Canada 2021, p. 59). The initiative provides women employment in a male-dominated security sector that was previously largely off-limits. In this respect, gender equality is sought by fair pay and removing discriminatory barriers to waged employment.

While gender equality is a small priority in Canada's defence policy, it is operationalized in terms of increasing women's participation in the defence sector. Women and diverse groups are thus enjoined in inclusive strategies of militarization. First, there is the goal of recruiting more women to the CAF to reach 25 percent by 2026 (Canada 2019a, p. 104). Increased participation of women and diverse persons will facilitate the development of a “Defence team composed of people with new perspectives and a broader range of cultural, linguistic, gender, age, and other unique attributes.” (Canada 2019a, p. 23). Second, on a “case-by-case" basis, the CAF will relax the requirement that all personnel be fit for deployment suggesting some progress on meeting standard employment accommodations provisions. This development fits with the claim that Canada's defence policy seeks to elevate the military's competitiveness on par with industry and private sector standards through improved training, education, and leadership opportunities. Third, Canada's defence review (2024b) commits to invest in housing and childcare access amounting to 395 million over 20 years. However, this figure pales in comparison to the 73 billion (over 20 years) to fund other military expenses and investments. The review commits to “exploring” adjustments to personnel policies on benefits, leaves, and human resources, without funding. The theme of inclusion is repeated in the National Action Plan on WPS calls to increase attention to the gendered dimensions of traditional and non-traditional security threats and to improve capacities within the justice and security sectors to address them, but how it will do so is not explained. It repeats the overarching defence posture of recruiting more personnel to military and security forces, seeking to “increase the full, equal, and meaningful participation of women and gender-diverse people in security and justice sectors” and to remove “barriers to their participation” (2024, n.p.).

Partnerships

Partnerships are highlighted across feminist foreign policy as key to advancing gender equality. Although most of Canada's partnerships are with other states and state-based organizations, there is a focus on developing partnerships with civil society organizations. The FIAP focuses on developing “partnerships” with civil society, pledging $150 million over 5 years to support local women's organizations to advance women's rights in developing countries (Canada 2021, p. 19). However, what partnerships will look like in terms of decision-making and funding guidelines is unclear. For example, it is unclear if aid will be tied to compliance with approved initiatives of the Canadian government or other “partnering” agents, as has often been the practice (Crawford 2003; Fowler 2000), or if organizations will be able to choose how to operationalize funding. Despite normative commitments to “empowerment” the emphasis is on vaguely outlined strategies and opaque rules on how goals will be pursued (also see Rao and Tiessen 2020). Notably, Canada has developed a Policy for Civil Society Partnerships for International Assistance—A Feminist Approach (2023) to guide these efforts for the development and security sectors. It will look to civil society organizations “to propose and adopt innovative approaches to international assistance, to deliver results more effectively and efficiently” (Ibid, 2023, n.p.). In other words, civil society actors will do the work of proposing, adopting, and delivering “results.” This approach fits with the model of governance feminism in working through strategies of responsibilization and empowerment. Women and women's organizations are assigned primary responsibility for the work of solving gender inequality.

In security and defence sectors, partnerships target advocacy organizations focused on women's rights and gender-based violence. Canada pledges to “support local women's organizations and movements that advance women's rights” and “[t]o amplify women's voices around the world, Canada will also collaborate with Canadian civil society and women's organizations at the grassroots level to find new and innovative ways to work together” (Canada 2017b, n.p.). In addition, “Canada's feminist approach involves men and boys as partners in transformative change” as they are “powerful actors in preventing gender-based violence and the marginalization of women and girls, as well as in creating opportunities for them” (Canada 2017b, n.p.). Partnerships are also proposed to address gender-based violence. The Department of National Defence (DND) pledges to partner with Military Family Resource Centres “to prevent and respond to gender-based violence” (Canada 2019a, p. 29) and develop a “Comprehensive Military Family Plan” that includes “working with federal, provincial and private sector partners to improve the coordination of services across provinces to ease the burden of moving” (Canada 2019a, p. 29). The overarching idea here is that resources to support families will, in turn, reduce gender-based violence and/or increase awareness of services for victims.

Trade partnerships are focused on states and international organizations to support private investment. In the opening message on trade, the Minister states, “Canada has led the way in advancing gender equality and women's empowerment through our international engagement” (Canada 2019b, p. 2). Key to Canada's approach are its FTA partnerships with the EU, Chile, and Israel with the assertion that bilateral trade can improve “the capacity and conditions for women—including workers, businesswomen, and entrepreneurs—to access and fully benefit from the opportunities created by trade and investment” (Canada 2023a). Other economic-focused partnerships are pursued with low- and middle-income countries through Canada's “Innovative Finance Programs” (2022), which is “piloting the use of targeted investments, through repayable funding, to support innovation and sustainable development in developing countries.”⁴ These partnerships are focused on “mobilizing private financing” where Canada improves the “enabling environment” to attract private investment in sustainable development projects in poor countries.

In summary, the rationality of governance in Canada's FFP holds that pushing the needle on gender equality is a product of women's own industriousness in curated spaces of opportunity, inclusion, and partnership. Conceived as “powerful agents of change,” women can “improve their own lives and the lives of their families, communities, and countries” (Canada 2021, p. vi). Thus, there is a strong investment in the agential capacity of women to realize Canada's feminist agenda. And yet, the promotion of feminism, agency, and gender equality, is often vague or aspirational. Why is this so? As we argue below, the reliance on women as “agents of change,” works through strategies of role equity, meaning that by changing their social roles, women can lead change largely on their own. Subjects are enjoined in employment and role initiatives to develop or optimize their skills, support their entrepreneurship, and empower them. This governance through self-reliance approach accounts for the minimal financial investment in international assistance programming and gender-based violence reduction programs. Change is to be advanced by women themselves. By taking on new roles and volunteerism, women assume responsibility for whether changes succeed or fail.

The Problem with Positioning Women As “Agents of Change”

While efforts to empower women and girls are laudable, feminism is mobilized instrumentally to make existing neoliberal and security arrangements more efficient and effective with little consideration as to how these arrangements may themselves be responsible for perpetuating gender inequality. This approach lacks a structural and intersectional approach to gender equality. Further, it places the burden of change disproportionately on women, rather than on societies, governments, and men. Specifically, FFP seeks to govern women by reshaping their “conduct in practices and institutions” (Dean 1999, p. 27). Feminism is thus exercised as a disciplinary strategy to responsibilize women to achieve equality through their own industriousness and perseverance. This manifests in three important considerations for FFP initiatives.

“Adding and Stirring Women In/To Hostile or Unwelcoming Environments”

First, FFP takes an integrationist “add and stir” approach that seeks to include women and gender-diverse persons in potentially hostile and unwelcoming environments, without requiring change in these environments from co-workers and community members who previously were implicated in excluding women's participation. It also does not guarantee that these individuals will have access to the positions or resources within previously exclusionary sectors to make widespread change. Role equity positions require only micro-level policy changes that permit access to work rather than attempting to reconstitute the workplace to make it more inclusive (McPhail 2003) of diverse realities, needs, and contributions. Thus, the downside of most role equity policies is that they cannot systemically challenge gender inequality through the dismantling of macro-level structures such as patriarchal institutional cultures that assume and privilege the lived experiences, socialization, and care responsibilities of cis, white, heterosexual, able-bodied men.

This has significance for objectives within Canada's security sectors and the desire to increase women's participation in policing, peacekeeping, and defence forces. Military and security institutions are deeply resistant to culture-shifting as there are major pressures on service members to conform to the dominant institutional identity, men and women alike (Welland 2020). Thus, the presence of women will not automatically change the culture and practices of an institution. Further, role equity approaches place the burden of change on them, rather than on the power holders within that institution (MacKenzie et al. 2020), and thus limits the effectiveness of these policies to create meaningful cultural change.

The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have been without occupational limits for female officers since 1989, but persistently low numbers of women in both institutions already suggest that role equity has not rectified gender inequality and women's participation in these sectors. Importantly, not only legal institutional barriers but also cultural environments in Canadian security institutions are a source of oppression and exclusion for women's equal participation (Lane 2017). As women may be seen as threats to male power holders and patriarchal values (MacKenzie 2015), role equity policies have likely contributed to institutional and cultural resistance within security institutions. Thus, by simply adding women, resistance is not automatically overcome and may become more entrenched, making workplace environments toxic and unsafe for women, LGBTQ2+, and racialized groups. This is particularly evident across several Western militaries with high levels of sexual assault and harassment among female service members (Gill and Febbaro 2013; Rico 2017).

The crisis of sexual misconduct in Canada's security sector is a clear indication that, although legal discrimination and exclusion have ended, sexist and misogynistic institutional culture remains unchanged and unchecked (MacKenzie 2023). In addition to allegations of sexual harassment and violence by senior CAF leadership, there are, on average, 100 complaints of work-related sexual misconduct made by CAF members each year, indicating a “long-standing and deep-seated problem of the military's workplace culture” that has not been addressed despite external reviews and recommendations (Eichler and Gagnon 2021). A misogynistic, racist, and homophobic culture, resulting in a historic sexual assault settlement, has similarly been identified within the RCMP (Bastarache 2020). Strong Secure Engaged (2019) has committed to the implementation of Operation HONOUR (104) to “deal with harassment complaints in a clear and timely manner by simplifying complaint mechanisms” (Canada 2017b, p. 108), but addressing these systemic institutional problems has been flawed in failing to ask why sexual harassment and assault occur and how institutions change (Eichler and Gagnon 2021). Thus, recruiting more women to institutions with a bonafide track record of victimizing their members, without targeted and robust mechanisms to change institutional culture, maybe at a serious cost to the women working in these institutions. It is neither evidence-based nor a robust feminist solution to combating gender-based violence.

Role Equity For Some Women

Canada's FFP benefits some women, often at the expense of others. Promoting women homogenously as “agents of change” misses how structural exclusion and systemic oppression occur along racialized, gendered, and geographical lines. Initiatives to widen the participation of women and non-cis, white, heterosexual, able-bodied people in waged economic positions may permit opportunities for a small number but may not address the broader contexts in which social limitations exist (Martin de Almagro 2018). This critique has been waged against the United Nations WPS Agenda, where emphasis on women's participation in WPS initiatives has been prioritized over increasing women's leadership roles in the Agenda (O'Reilly 2019). In addition, there is evidence that global racial hierarchies have been reproduced in decision-making and leadership positions (Haastrup and Hagen 2021; Henry 2021). Similarly, in Canada's FFP, the emphasis on role equity means that a limited number of women benefit from these initiatives, and there is little evidence that dominant configurations of power according to gender, race, age, or ability are challenged.

These issues impact how effectively Canada's FFP can contribute to women's international peace and security if access to decision-making power is only afforded to certain women, or if women become tokenized in representative initiatives (Shepherd 2016). Radhika Coomaraswamy notes that although the WPS agenda may stress women as makers and beneficiaries of peace, “the present programs put forward by the international community tend to be extremely narrow: just bring a female body to the table” (Coomaraswamy 2015, p. 40). Of course, adding women and expanding the perspectives and voices of women is important, but Canada's FFP, including the WPS NAP, assumes that existing practices and institutions require fine-tuning rather than a more radical change and recognition that these systems themselves may be responsible for perpetuating global inequalities and violence (Basu 2016; Martin de Almagro 2018). As Shepherd and Kirby note, “gender balancing” tends to reproduce an essentialist notion that the mere presence of women makes a difference in and of itself, based on underlying assumptions about the functionality of women's supposedly pacific or consensual problem-solving nature (2016, p. 376).

Empowerment, economic opportunities, and partnerships, therefore, are not uniformly afforded to all women. As Parisi argues, the “model of diversity in the FIAP is predicated on intersecting individual identity categories, which are devoid from the power structures that produce systemic discrimination in the first place” (2020, p. 6). This model is extended across the agenda suggesting that Canada's FFP does not account for multiple identities and forms of oppression. Yet, racialization, sexual orientation and gender identities, class, religion, national origin, and ability are all factors that shape access to opportunities and social roles. While this shortcoming has been identified in critiques of the FIAP (Morton et al. 2020), it applies also to the SSE and State of Trade that treat “women” and “Indigenous peoples” as homogenous categories to which broad policies can be applied absent consideration of the multiple factors that may impact empowerment, equity, and access. Adding (any) women and stirring is not a magic bullet to transform pre-existing heteronormative, ableist, neo-colonial or racist institutional cultures across development, security, and trade.

Role Equity in Paid Work, Role Inequity in Unpaid Work

Finally, role equity initiatives prioritize neo-liberal economic incentives and paid wage labor as the benchmark for success. This perpetuates gender inequality and patriarchal structures whereby care and domestic labor are devalued and reinforced as women's responsibilities. In addition, it promotes paid labor as the lynchpin for women's emancipation and avoids the critical importance of sharing care work across all genders. Canada's FFP reproduces expectations that women shoulder the burden of creating change and taking action to integrate and participate in waged economies, without even acknowledging, let alone addressing, the gendered global pattern of care work. The policies may support women who can avoid unpaid labor while reinforcing double duty for women who must perform both paid and unpaid labor to qualify as “agents of change.”

Further, role equity policies allow some women access to paid wages, but in a way that avoids challenging male power directly. In part, this is because they do not upset social norms about care labor. But it is also because the FIAP and WPS NAP are tied to women of the Global South bearing responsibility for these changes. For example, women are expected to take up new roles, as mine clearers, soldiers, and bee minders, or to expand gardening projects to push forth economic growth. Even though these opportunities may be positive and desirable to women, they focus exclusively on governing women's roles and conduct with little attention to changing men's roles or expectations. Again, this sets women up for not only overcoming the challenges of accessing new jobs or skill sets but also the additional hurdle of managing the responsibilities that they already have. In addition, adding women to previously male-dominated industries, without monitoring, has gendered effects on wage pay. Studies have shown that as the proportion of women in occupations previously held by men increases, the pay decreases, leading to “occupational feminization” (Levanon et al. 2000).

Positioning women as agents of change requires women alone to confront a huge social initiative—the alleviation of traditional gender roles—often without institutional, legal, and cultural environments to support it. This problem is underscored by the remarkable lack of attention to how men and boys need to be “agents of change” to advance gender equality Emphasis on role equity for women does little to socially facilitate increasing men's participation in traditionally feminine positions, such as child-rearing. This means role equity does not lead to gender equality across paid and unpaid labor and is unlikely to challenge cultures of machismo in traditionally male-dominated economic sectors like security and defence.

What's Wrong With Empowering Women As Agents of Change?

In trade, defence, and development initiatives in Canada's FFP, positioning women as the main “agents of change” works on the liberal logic of gender neutrality, which assumes that inequality is primarily based on a lack of opportunities for women and that if women are afforded the same opportunities as men in principle, gender inequality will disappear. However, for opportunities to make change possible, they must be accessible. The structural reality is that social expectations of, and roles for, women as caregivers often disadvantage them as they take on new opportunities, add significantly to their workloads, or may prevent them from being able to take advantage of them in the first place. An approach to gender equality that is only about expanding opportunities and roles for women, forces women into assuming responsibility for social change. Meanwhile, men are absolved of responsibility for gender equity and are not expected to “make room” for women in “their” fields or change their roles. This applies to development policies where women are given access to economic roles but also applies to defence policies where men's dominance may be marginally unsettled but certainly not overturned.

In summary, having women and diverse peoples work alongside men does not by itself counter patriarchy, and often these roles are only accessible to certain women who can partake in them due to an absence or outsourcing of care labor, are able-bodied, educated, skilled and who are willing or able to tolerate social stigmas and institutional pressures of participating in traditionally male-dominated sectors where their presence may be unwelcome. As feminist research has shown, role equity policies do not change inhospitable institutional cultures or address the structural reasons why most women are not able to participate in male-dominated sectors (Bacchi 1999; Valentine et al. 2014; MacKenzie et al. 2020). While women are, indeed, agents with the capacity and desire to shape their own futures, complex systems of oppression and exploitation cannot be solved by women alone.

Finally, some scholars have argued that the drive among Canada and other states to present themselves as “ethical” has led them to avoid attending to their “implication in sustaining colonial power relations in global politics.” To its credit, the WPS National Action Plan (2024, p. 9) does acknowledge the crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit and gender-diverse persons as outlined in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (National Inquiry…2019). Yet, it does not engage either the role of law enforcement in past and present colonial violence or with the report's recommendations. This only becomes more concerning in light of Amnesty International's indictment of Canada for its ongoing criminalization of Wet'suwet'un land defenders, including the use of violence, intimidation, and harassment against them. WPS treats colonial violence as an issue that security and government actors merely respond to rather than propagate, despite volumes of evidence to the contrary. Following Bergman Rosamond et al. (2023, 5), this “disguises and depoliticizes enduring colonial power relations,” thus rendering FFP complicit in colonial red-washing.

International Hierarchies and Militarist Priorities

Here, we move the discussion to how Canada's FFP's focus on role equity sustains existing international power balances and perpetuates post-colonial inequalities between the Majority world and Minority world. Below we outline two critiques of the politics of Canada's FFP in reproducing international hierarchies. First, the neoliberal governmentality of Canada's FFP focuses on individual action and empowerment, distracting from broader global politico-economic structures that “agents of change” confront. Second, FFP sustains global hierarchies by advancing militarism and traditional security logics. By focusing on role equity as an individual-level mechanism for gender equality, poverty eradication, and global peace and security, traditional state security priorities are sustained, including material prioritization of military power. This directly and negatively impacts women's peace, security, and rights. We discuss each in turn.

Sustaining Power Asymmetries, Obscuring Global Hierarchies

Although the burden of change is placed on women, especially in the Global South, Canada's FFP disavows the Global North's role in helping to sustain global inequality. This is because Canada's foreign policy priorities seek to gain an advantage over economies that it claims to help. As Zhukova et al. (2023) has demonstrated, FFP has materialized as a struggle for “hegemonic feminisation” wherein, rather than build solidarity, FFP states compete with each other for performance primacy, ultimately contributing to the reproduction of North-South civilizational distinctions. In this respect, FFP upholds entrenched global hierarchies that are already gendered, sexualized, racialized, and spatialized (Achilles-Sarll 2018; Nylund et al. 2023).

Instead, feminism is employed as an ethical image and to address gender inequality by focusing almost exclusively on individual action and neoliberal economic activities. Yet, as Halley et al. (2018, p. ix), notes, the “distributive consequences of the partial inclusion of feminist projects” into Canada's foreign policies require contemplating the question of “who benefits and who loses?” from these efforts. By focusing on empowering individuals, we lose sight of whose labor makes easy and inexpensive access to global food and goods possible for many Canadians (i.e., Majority world women) and fail to spotlight who is being enriched through neoliberal practices that sustain these economic relations (i.e., Minority world CEOs, billionaire white men). For example, Canada's trade policy focuses on small and medium women entrepreneurs, ignoring the much larger population of women and marginalized peoples who form the global trade matrix, of which Canada and its domestic firms, are significant actors. Women are the principal food producers in the Global South but ultimately have “less access to land, credit, training and markets” than men (Macdonald and Ibrahim 2021, p. 34). They are also typically overrepresented in low-paying, informal, and temporary work. Canada's “feminist” trade policy does nothing to try and level the playing field for such women or acknowledge how Canada's trade policies have contributed to these deep structural and gendered inequalities. If Canada genuinely wants to make trade more inclusive, as is claimed, the structural causes of inequality must be accounted for in trade policies. As Roberts (2015) argues the “business case” for gender equality made by states and many international organizations through policy development shores up corporate power while failing to address the negative impacts of trade. In these respects, Canada's trade policies contribute to much of the same “progressive neoliberalism” that fuels Canada's FIAP and overseas development agenda.

The use of FFP to alleviate global poverty through the “mechanism” of gender equality also fails to account for how many neoliberal international organizations perpetuate gendered inequality and gendered violence. Despite the discourse of making Canada's trade more inclusive and equitable, there is no commitment to creating enforceable accountability and transparency labor protections for Canadian companies and subsidiaries overseas. Women dominate the labor force in the apparel industry, often working in precarious, low-paid and dangerous conditions to produce inexpensive garments for consumers in the Minority world (Enloe 2000; Baglioni 2022). Furthermore, extractive activity such as mining in many countries in Latin America and South Asia and Africa, is linked to gender-based violence (Deonandan and Bell 2019) as well as land dispossession, environmental destruction, and deepening poverty (Deonandan and Dougherty 2016). Given that domestic state agencies “facilitate global corporate activity abroad through financing, equity ownership, political backing, and logistical support” (Macdonald and Keenan 2021, p. 18) they have a hand to play in regulating this activity and ensuring that harms are remedied.⁵ Instead, Canada's FFP focuses on individual opportunity inviting women to join industries for waged labor to advance a system of exploitative global trade. These policies do not challenge existing global disparities but rather enrich Canadian corporations and benefit Canadian consumers while disenfranchising women in global Majority countries.

We argue that feminist policies striving for equitable outcomes must acknowledge and build on the connected histories and sociologies (Bhambra 2014) that shape North-South relations and use these to guide feminist policymaking. Rather than regarding foreign policy practices as efforts to advance “our” interests and respond to problems “out there,” it would mean recognizing how “our” relations have always been entwined with what is happening “out there” and that our interests in indivisible from “theirs” (Hobson and Sajed 2017). FFP, we suggest, must begin from “the mutually constitutive nature of world politics [and] the numerous and diverse ways in which the weak and the strong are bound” (Barkawi and Laffey 2006 p. 345). Doing so would require Canada to acknowledge its complicity in global structural injustices, take responsibility for contributing to these injustices, and remake foreign policy priorities to discontinue said practices.

Perpetuating Militarism and “smart security”

A second troubling aspect of Canada's FFP is the conflation of feminist values or objectives with nationalistic and security-oriented goals of defence institutions. Specifically, women are positioned as assets to improve military effectiveness based on the assumption that they have unique skills and capabilities. Yet, there is arguably a conflict between feminism's longstanding anti-militarist ethic (Enloe 2016; Parashar et al. 2018) and robust commitments to recruitment and equipment and weapons procurement in the security and defence sectors (Vucetic 2017; Canada 2019b;Chase 2023).

Notably, the largest monetary investments in Canada's foreign policy are in military procurement and building defence partnerships. The 2024 defence review outlines 73 billion in funding over 20 years, much of which is designated for procurement of weapons, military equipment, and infrastructure. Deepening Canada's NATO commitments and allied defence posture are also key priorities.⁶ But defence commitments contradict an important concern outlined in the WPS agenda that “as the work of women's organizations goes underfunded, military expenditures are on the rise worldwide” (WPS NAP 2024, n.p.). Despite this important observation, Canada's WPS agenda is consistent with trends among other wealthy countries to increase women's representation in military and security institutions but not to ask how peace and security efforts might be demilitarized (RN-WPS 2023). Echoing Shepherd's critique, Canada's WPS objectives “mak[e] war safe for women” and reproduce “a world in which problems occur “elsewhere” but solutions can be found “here” (Shepherd 2016, 325). This contradiction leaves the impression that WPS's commitments to peace are rhetorical if not unserious.

Adjacent to these security priorities is a commitment to defending western superiority in global affairs, based on the idea that women and gender diversity can improve the effectiveness of military power and security outcomes. This approach translates the “smart economics” of feminist neoliberalism into a logic of “smart security” for war. It assumes that gendered differences lead to unique skill sets that can increase the operational effectiveness of security forces in conflict settings (von Hlatky 2022, p. 34–38). We see this in the integration of “gender advisors” and female engagement teams to improve intelligence and civilian rapport in NATO and US-led counterinsurgency and stabilization operations (McBride and Wibben 2012). Importantly, these schemes represent one of the ways that WPS has been taken up in NATO and US-led warfare. These practices instrumentalize presumed gendered differences for comparative advantage.⁷ As they are almost exclusively tied to the use of coercion and manipulation of conflict-affected communities, they are distorted avenues for seeking gendered equality (let alone justice). This approach seeks to govern women's roles to improve military outcomes, conflicting with intersectional feminist principles that would challenge the use of racialized tropes and aid-wheeling on besieged populations.

Indeed, women's rights and well-being are arguably jeopardized by militarism and state security practices rather than protected or advanced by them. As feminist and critical security scholars have widely argued, gendered inequalities are inseparable from war and militarism (Enloe 2000; Segal 2008; Cockburn 2011, 2012; Enloe 2016; Wibben 2018). Further, scholars have argued that reducing militarism should be a primary feminist goal (Stavrianakis 2019; Wegner 2021; Wegner 2023; Fröhlich and Scheyer 2023), especially in foreign policy that claims to be feminist. Global feminist movements call for disarmament commitments, including joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and ending the transfer of arms and military equipment to states that use them to commit human rights abuses (Woroniuk et al. 2021; Chase 2023; Gallagher 2024). While swelling defence budgets and weapons procurement reinforce the idea of security as defence from “outsiders” and detractors, pursuing gender equality requires the opposite: fostering mutual respect among peoples and supporting the resolution of conflicts through non-violent means.

Conclusion

In this article, we analyzed Canada's FFP as a case of governance feminism that seeks to shape women's agency in trade, development, and defence sectors. Three themes emerged from our analysis that capitalize on the idea of women's agency: economic opportunities, participation and inclusive governance, and partnerships with women's organizations and like-minded entities. Feminist objectives are pursued primarily through role equity initiatives in development, trade, and defence policies. We argued that Canada's FFP frame gender inequality as a problem that women can solve through their own industriousness and participation. The governmentalization of women's agency promotes the idea that gender equality is a liberal problem of individual action, sidelining the critical importance of intersectionality and institutional transformation in feminist arguments for alleviating gender inequality and violence. The current approach may shore up Canada's “ethical” international image abroad, but there is little evidence that Canada is pushing for systemic change in international affairs.

Our analysis shows that the vast majority of women targeted by Canada's feminist agenda are far from beneficiaries. Although some women may benefit from the opportunities and participation afforded to them in Canada's policies, the majority world is often envisioned as an untapped resource for the fulfilment of Canada's economic or reputational goals rather than as ends in themselves. Canada's approach to women as “agents of change” tends to reinforce existing global hierarchies in trade, development, and security rather than challenging them. This is because embedded within Canada's supposed solutions to gender inequality are volunteerist and often elitist strategies of economic and political governance.

Despite the shortcomings of existing policy, we recognize that feminist foreign policy does hold symbolic importance that can be built upon. As Halley et al. (2018, p. x) remind us, feminism is not only meant to be an emancipatory project but also an inspirational one. Canada's FFP is indeed an aspirational vision to reduce human suffering and increase gender justice. We hope that Canada will work to deepen and expand its commitment to gender equality and women's empowerment in international affairs so that feminist transformation becomes possible. Such transformation becomes more likely when scholars and activists critically contribute to the debates over the politics of feminist foreign policy.

Footnotes

1

These include Luxembourg (2018), Mexico (2020), France (2019), Libya (2021), Germany (2021), Chile (2022), the Netherlands (2022), Columbia (2022), and Liberia (2022), and Australia “by stealth” (Lee Koo 2020).

2

Canada has pursued gender chapters in its trade agreements with Chile, China, India, Mercosur, and Israel leading up to and following the release of its FFP agenda. Broadly, the approach is based on the idea that “improving women's access to opportunities and removing barriers in their countries enhances their participation in national and international economies,” often focusing on capacity building, skills development, and female entrepreneurship. Although these efforts have value, they are based on an elitist liberal feminism that is unlikely to make any difference to addressing the systemic roots of gender inequality. As Macdonald and Ibrahim (2019, p. 6) found, these agreements did not include consultation with feminist or labor organizations, who could have provided insight on how to make trade policies more feminist, equitable, and impactful.

3

The 2024 National Action Plan on WPS even cites Crenshaw (1989) on intersectionality but lacks evidence or details on implementation.

4

Civil society recipients include the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, the African Development Bank Group, and the ICRC and Canadian Red Cross.

5

For example, Canada's free trade agreement with Israel supports the development of settler-driven trade in the Palestinian Occupied Territories in violation of international law and a barrier to peace. This case implicates “free trade” in structural injustice and settler-colonial dispossession (Lynk 2019).

6

For example, 18.4 billion for helicopters, 9.5 billion for artillery ammunition production, and 9 billion for maintenance of military equipment. In terms of support for NATO, there are further defence spending increases, 107 million over 20 years for a NATO Innovation Fund, in addition to close to 5 billion for arctic satellite stations and hubs, maritime sensors, and cyber operations capabilities hubs (Canada, Defence Review 2024b, n.p.).

7

If evidence that gender difference matters declines, motivation to support the inclusion of women and gender-diverse persons in security and defence institutions may as well (see von Hlayky 2022).